A Throwback Thursday Post.

I share Gregory Gardner’s lament for the passing of the “idea that is America” (Obama won but nation lost,” November 17, 2012); and like Ted Vadman (November 28) I too am concerned about our nation’s future.  However, I don’t blame Barrack Obama. We’ve been a slippin’ and a slidin’ down this slope for a long time. We just haven’t recognized it, but Russia’s Pravda did: “The Communists have won in America with Obama.” (“Obama’s Soviet Mistake,” November 19, 2012).

Our founders knew two things for sure: 1) that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and 2) that men were not angels and given the opportunity we would be ruled by our lesser angels, greed, envy, and sloth; so they created a very complex system of checks and balances to protect those God given rights from being usurped.

Progressives didn't buy into that. In 1911, Wilson said we should ignore the preface of the “The Declaration of Independence.”   Our rights are not endowed by a creator, but conferred on us by a just government. Progressives believed in the essential goodness of the human race and they thought that because they lived in “enlightened times,” they would be smart enough to create government programs that would erase the ills that beset us and allow us to live happily ever after in a blissful utopia.

Publius in Federalist 6 warns us against “that far gone utopian speculation,” suggesting that although we may have made a lot of progress in many areas, at heart, nothing has changed.  We are still ruled by our passions.

But for a hundred years our federal government marched onward toward that Utopian dream.  Teddy Roosevelt gave us the “Square Deal,” FDR gave us the “New Deal,” Johnson gave us the “Great Society” and pledged “Total victory over poverty.” Nixon gave us the Environmental Protection Agency,  George H. W. Bush gave us the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Bush the younger gave us the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind. 

Adjusting for inflation, total government spending in 1900 was $100 per capita.  Today we spend $10,000 per capita attempting to achieve that utopia.  The result?   Families are crumbling, schools are failing, and our country is imploding. 

               I don’t doubt the good intentions of those early progressives.  They were honest and open about their socialist intentions, but with the Johnson administration, those lesser angels began to hold sway. Politicians began to see the real advantage of using the federal government to buy votes.  We know that Lyndon Johnson was not altogether altruistic when he boasted, “I’ll have those [slobs] voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”

               Woodrow Wilson’s dream of de-legitimizing the sovereignty of the family, of “marrying the interests of every individual to the state” has come to fruition, and the avalanche of accumulating debt and regulation has brought America to her knees. Without a miracle we will have left our children with a third world economy, but there is hope.  As Xavier Lerma points out in that Pravda article, Russia came back. “Millions suffered tyranny, torture and death for almost 75 years …but Russia survived with a new and stronger faith in God and ever growing Christian Church.”