Constitutionalism—Part 1: The Progressives

1. The conference at BYU on OUR CONSTITUTION IN CRISIS provoked all sorts of thought, even in ME. Let me begin by thinking a bit about the Progressive view of the Constitution.

2. One view, as we’ve said, is that our original Constitution has been largely displaced by the PROGRESSIVE one. The core of that change, of course, is from understanding who we are as individuals with inalienable rights to beings changing for the better over time in some pseudo-Darwinian or Hegelian Historical sense. The original view is that individual rights stand as permanent limits on government; each of us is by nature free, and government exists only to secure each of our rights. The Progressive view is that our understanding of ourselves and government has evolved for the better, and so we can trust BIG GOVERNMENT to do more for us as social or even somewhat organic beings. The individualistic, mechanistic understanding of psychology we can now see as flawed; our freedom is more socially or politically or Historically conditioned than our Founders thought. And the individualistic erosion of local community now makes necessary and possible a NATIONAL COMMUNITY and a secularized common or civic faith. The national community will be better than the old, local communities because it will be directed by enlightened experts, who will keep us flourishing on the cutting edge of the conscious and volitional or Historical evolution that has displaced the impersonal and accidental natural evolution that the natural scientists describe. Social Darwinism on both the Left and Right both suggested that we, so to speak, are the species that has taken charge of its own destiny, and the flourishing of particular members of our species can and should take place within the context of our common project. We are the first species that can consciously fend off its own demise, subordinating NATURE to our distinctively HISTORICAL will to prevail. We are somehow both the FITTEST and the MOST VULNERABLE of the species, and we can’t allow our pity for the most vulnerable members of our species undermine our collective fitness. No other species, after all, can be undermined in that way.

3. The historian Paul Rahe pointed out that the anti-individualism of our Progressives produced racism, eugenics, and other monstrous scheme to subordinate the weak and the marginalized to the will of the dominant members of our of our species—the enlightened makers of History. So our Progressives, or some of them, can justly be called FASCISTS—or in favor of sacrificing particular individuals as merely expendable parts of some Historical whole. Opposing our Progressive racist collectivists were old-fashioned Republicans such Taft, Coolidge, and (even the underrated) Harding, who invoked the creationist egalitarian individualism of the Declaration of Independence. I might add that there were old-fashioned Catholic opponents too, such as the relentlessly anti-eugenic Chesterton, who had an even more insistently creationist or personally egalitarian appreciation of the Declaration as our national creed. I would also give a place of honor here to the Calvinist anti-evolutionist Bryan, who saw clearly enough the nihilism in Darrow’s brand of Darwinianism. Our belief in the equal significance of every human person, from the beginning, owed something to our Puritans and something to our Lockeans, and one part of that mixture can’t truthfully be subordinated to the other in our national self-understanding at its best.

4. But it’s surely misleading, finally, to discredit Progressivism by simply identifying it with Woodrow Wilson’s neo-Confederate (BIRTH OF A NATION!) racism or Justice Holmes’ evolutionary deference to politicized eugenics (how many generation of idiots can one species be expected to stand!). The Marxists of the 1930s onward also called themselves Progressives, and they can be praised (let’s face it) for being on the forefront on the Civil Rights movement—for liberating African Americans to be equal parts of the united workers of the world. That liberationism, of course, was also in the service of homogeneous, materialistic, atheistic collectivism, and so it is, of course, in its own way even more opposed to individual or personal freedom. People alive today, in fact, can be ruthlessly sacrificed for the coming communism at History’s end. But it’s the liberation of a particular people from bondage, Rogers Smith reminded us at BYU, that inspires our president in his confidence in Big Government, and that liberation was given a pseudo-Marxist theological spin in his version (Rev. Wright’s) of Christianity. We can’t agree with Glenn Beck that the phrase “social justice” is simply used by evildoers in the service of evil. One source of our bigger government is the Civil Rights movement, and it has served real justice. That aspect of our bigger government can be defended by the traditional view of our Declaration of Independence as expressed, say, by Coolidge or Chesterton or Lincoln. But the truth is the Civil Rights Movement was not led by the mainstream Republican party.

5. We also have to admit that Roosevelt’s new and allegedly improved listing of rights in 1944, however misguided in terms of proper and even plausible responsibilities for government, was directed toward alleviating the vulnerability of the unfortunate. This new, “social justice” interpretation of the Constitution was that it should be understood to command redistribution and guarantee personal economic security. It is politicized pity run amok, but it’s not about racism or eugenics or some other brand of Fascism.

My thought will turn next, of course, to the relevance of this Progressive understanding of the Constitution for understanding our constitutional crisis today. I will begin with the thought that Roosevelt’s list of rights never caught on, the Court abandoned its tentative forays into a jurisprudence of redistribution in the late Sixties, and that our crisis today might be, instead, our individuals’ inability to understand themselves as parts of any whole greater than themselves these days.