The march of progress moves like a two cylinder tractor.
When you drive a two cylinder tractor you move from one side to the other almost as much as you move forward. The side by side pistons are so powerful that they knock the tractor to one side every time the piston on that side fires. However alarming the effect on the driver, however, this is the way it was designed to move. In fact, if the two pistons aren’t performing properly, if one of the pistons is stilled, the tractor is more likely to move in a vast circle than to get you where you want to go.
Progress operates the same way. The forward movement is the march of time and the betterment of mankind, but the side by side movement is equally important. Progress requires that you lurch to the right, toward enhanced freedom, unloosing the genius of humankind, which has a remarkable ability to solve the problems humans have created for themselves. And progress requires that you lurch to the left in reaction, towards smoothing out the rough bumps caused by total freedom, helping the poor and regulating the successful.
Essentially, American culture is eccentric. We don’t have an aristocracy, but we have a lot of people who THINK they are aristocracy. An ideology takes hold and, since this is America, the ideology claims to be working for the greater good for the most people. For a time it serves its purpose, until the ruling elite who have risen to the top by milking the ideology confuses the public good for its own. At some point, the elite betrays its own ideology by using it to enrich itself at the expense of the rest of society, pulling up the ladder for anyone who would follow and confusing personal good with society’s good.
So you began with the Founding Fathers, the brightest and most influential of which were slave owners, but they preached an ideology of all men having been created equal. Of all the slave owning Founders, only George Washington was honest enough to see the hypocrisy in this and at great cost to his family fortune, freed his slaves and provided for their education (as he was obligated to do so under Virginia law).
As for the rest of the Founders and the ruling elites which followed in their footsteps, slavery became an accepted way of life, so much so that abolitionists were vilified. Slavery became paternalism gone wild, with plantation owners weeping for the fate of their slaves if “massa” wasn’t there to take care of them. But the real motive for the hypocritical rhetoric was the nest feathering of the richest and most powerful members of society. The South was the wealthiest section of the country (hard to believe today, but in 1860, the two richest states in the Union were Alabama and Mississippi). By 1857, with the Dred Scott Decision in the Supreme Court ruling that any attempt by Congress to control slavery was unconstitutional, the law itself was suborned to the power of the slave states.
Lincoln only received 2% of the vote in the South in 1860 and was only elected President because the Democratic Party split and offered up three candidates. But once the Slave states left the Union and the Republicans had control of Congress, they pushed through a legislative agenda more ambitious than the New Deal. Unleashing sixty years of pent up Whig and Federalist demand for an infrastructure that would make the U.S. an industrial powerhouse, the Republican-dominated Congress passed, and Lincoln signed into law, a national banking system, currency reform, a transcontinental railroad, a state university system and many more reforms.
Well, the rich got richer and the poor got richer too, but by the Turn of the Century, progressives in both parties began to pull the ladder up to prevent others from following and they did this with the encouragement of the entrenched powers. Regulations had the effect of favoring the established order, the Robber Barons who feared competition more than they feared government power. As Gabriel Kolko demonstrates, the Food and Drug Administration, for instance, imposed a host of regulations which didn’t bother the big corporations – they could just hire a lawyer to file the paper work – but created a barrier to entry for even the most scrupulous of start ups.
By the end of the Twenties, all of the rhetoric about free enterprise was for public consumption, but it was a system designed to maintain the established order. Then came the Great Depression, caused, in large part, by those very reforms the progressives and the large corporations had pushed through. This wasn’t intentional, but the Federal Reserve had a set of tools it did not understand and managed to turn a recession into a disaster.
Enter FDR stage right. A common title given to Franklin Delano Roosevelt was that he was a “traitor to his class.” Only those historians who are blind to the dynamics of the American upper class would believe such a thing. FDR was an aristocrat, but because of that, he was appalled by the Robber Barons: ignorant men – why, they hadn’t even gone to college for the most part, let alone the Ivy League! – who came from nowhere to eclipse what he thought were the true Upper Classes, the slave owning Southern plantation owners and their Northern merchant enablers, people like the Roosevelts and the Delanos. FDR was lifelong friends with the Astors and other bluebloods, but kept his distance from his neighbors the upstart Vanderbilts (and, during World War II, he confiscated the Vanderbilt mansion to use it as a barracks for Army officers, a rather bizarre use since it was miles from nowhere; the Astor mansion was not confiscated).
FDR was a reactionary and everything in his career points to his determination to restore what he believed to be the true ruling class to their rightful place at the head of the class. In the Twenties, he tried and failed to be a Robber Baron himself, with schemes to create a zeppelin airline with regularly scheduled service between New York and Chicago and to become a power in the vending machine industry.
His schemes having failed, he concluded that if you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em. The New Deal was Progressivism on steroids, shifting the center of power from America’s industrial heartland to Wall Street and Washington.
At its best, FDR’s version of liberalism represented a sense of noblesse oblige, a patrician concern for the “lower orders.” Of course, at its worst, it accepted the idea that there were lower orders in the first place, people clinging to their guns and their God who had no business trying to rise above their station. The American ideal of upward mobility was anathema to modern liberalism, which is why the signature philanthropy of laissez faire was Andrew Carnegie’s library in every town while the signature philanthropy of the welfare state is food stamps. Among the elites, the trade-off for liberalism was a frozen social class, one where upstarts weren’t likely to storm the palace gates.
But in the longer term, liberalism has had the effect of freezing innovation and weakening America’s industrial strength. Since World War II, there has never been a successful new automaker to challenge the Big Four, despite the attempts of such talented individuals as Preston Tucker, Henry Kaiser and John Delorean. Freed from competition, American industrialists were willing to go along with the new arrangement, giving in to the demands of labor unions because the new system had become a closed shop with no competitors. But the Big Four became the Big Three and then the Big Two and their bigness started to become shaky. Stifled American innovation encouraged competition from Japan and Germany.
Modern liberalism has clearly passed its sell by date. Recent legislation doesn’t even pretend to accomplish what it sets out to do. The health care waivers which the President is handing out to Democratic contributors have changed the slogan of the endeavor from “equal access to healthcare” to “equal access to healthcare, unless your boss is a Democrat, in which case, you’re out of luck, pal.” Even as biased a source as The New York Times admits that two of the biggest villains in the current economic troubles were Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, the Senator and Congressman from Countrywide Mortgage, respectively. So what do the Democrats do? They pass a bill they didn’t read authored by Dodd and Frank (and their lobbyist friends) which will do nothing to stop the next collapse but will enrich lawyers in the meantime.
It is time for another lurch to the right before we can move forward. Until then, we are just turning in circles. Liberalism has ceased to be a benevolent force and has become a system of corruption which counts on a gullible public to stay in power. Counting on the gullibility of the people requires that you bamboozle the media first. That may not last. The current head of the DNC has been making such blatant lies about Republican opponents that even the Associated Press has taken note (will The New York Times be next?). Legislation has become a fund raising tool or a means to freeze the social classes. The frustrations of the left and the right will only grow until common sense returns.
None of this is to suggest that there is a conspiracy, an organized movement or anything of the kind. It is merely the age-old human condition of confusing self interest for the public interest combined with an arrogance that believes that anyone who disagrees with you is wrong at best and evil at worst. Liberalism’s ability to correct its deficiencies is crippled by the incompetence of the natural watchdogs of society: the media and academia. It will take the left a long stint in the wilderness to enable its decent members to clean up their colleagues’ act.
Anyone who has never been behind the wheel of a Series 70 John Deere tractor or other two cylinder tractor may find my metaphor somewhat obscure, but if you have ever ridden an elephant at the zoo, the sensation is identical. The elephant is a mighty creature: steadfast, sure footed, able to overcome any barriers in its way, it bounces from side to side as it gets you to where you want to go. By contrast, the jackass is stubborn and stupid, only understanding carrots and sticks and when you do get it moving, it is likely to walk you off a cliff.
Interesting how the symbols of the two political parties reflect their ideologies.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
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