John McGinnis devotes a City Journal column to the perplexing questions of progressives’ perennially poor relationship with the truth.
Progressivism’s vision of the role of the state conflicts with the system of government envisioned by America’s Founders. The Founders wanted citizens to be free to pursue their affairs individually and in voluntary association; the powers of the federal state were to be tightly constrained. In contrast, the greatest political theorist of American progressivism, Herbert Croly, said that the nation’s “democracy should be focused on an equal sharing of wealth and responsibilities”—an enterprise that demands a larger and more intrusive federal state to enforce. Obama spoke from this tradition on the campaign trail in 2008—most famously, when he told Joe the Plumber that it was “good to spread the wealth around.”
But Obama and his supporters face a more challenging political landscape than did their progressive forebears. In the early twentieth century, progressives introduced new entitlements against the backdrop of low federal spending and a much smaller federal government. At the beginning of the Progressive Era, federal government spending represented only about 4 percent of GDP; it reached 11 percent when FDR introduced Social Security. (Even that figure was artificially high because the Depression had dramatically reduced GDP.) And progressivism in its early years enjoyed support among the legions of poor, who had little to lose from the rearrangement of rights by government programs.
Today, the federal government spends more than five times as much, as a percentage of GDP, than it did at the beginning of the last century, and twice as much as when Social Security was introduced. That amount will continue to grow, driven by the rising cost of entitlements for an aging population. The future consequences of past decisions thus constrain the present capacity of the state, even as progressivism’s reach becomes more ambitious: reorganizing health care, as the Obama administration has begun to do with the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, touches everyone’s life in ways that, say, the regulation of railroads did not. Such massive programs are more likely to be complex and to generate popular resistance, as Obamacare has done.
On top of these structural difficulties, the progressive coalition has also become harder to maintain. Over the course of the twentieth century, free-market capitalism created unprecedented mass affluence. The average income of Americans grew by more than four times in the last century, making the United States the wealthiest nation of any substantial size. Citizens now have more to lose from interventions in the free market, because they are better off. It’s hard to imagine that a progressive party could maintain control of both the House and Senate for 20 consecutive years and the House for 40 years, as did the Democrats earlier in the twentieth century.
Faced with these constraints, today’s progressives must resort to more misleading and sometimes coercive measures, as they seek to bring about equality through collective responsibility; they must rally support by looking beyond economics, to cultural and social identifications, in a bid to maintain the support of voters with little need for government intervention. They also want to limit the voices of citizens at election time, and thereby magnify the influence of the press and academia, which lean sharply in the progressive direction.
Had he been more familiar with N.C. politics, McGinnis could have invoked Pearce’s Law.
