The Progressives explicitly repudiated the Founders’ vision of limited government. They argued that government needed to redistribute property, to take money from one group of citizens to help others, and to regulate economic activity in ways previously considered unconstitutional. The Constitution, they said, was a “horse and buggy” document, suited perhaps to the simpler society of the 18th century, but dangerously out of date in a complex industrial society which could not expect ordinary citizens to make their way without government guidance and assistance. They were acting, they said, in the interests of the people. Their critics said they were acting out of hunger for power.
The Progressives argued that economic freedoms were unimportant because ordinary people, lacking property, didn’t really have much economic freedom anyway. As such, property rights must be subordinated to human rights. It was better to guarantee people education, healthcare, food, housing—the domestic programs that Franklin Roosevelt advanced as victory in World War II neared in 1944 and 1945. Economic growth was a secondary concern at best. Roosevelt seems to have believed, as many Americans did at the time, that the era of economic growth was over and that the postwar years would see a return to economic depression. In any case, he was clearly focused on economic redistribution rather than growth.
But the fact is that we are once again, as in the days of the early republic and not in the heyday of the Progressives and the New Dealers, a republic of property owners. Most Americans have accumulated—or will, during the course of their working years, accumulate— significant amounts of wealth. And that is why, I believe, American voters seem to be rejecting the policies of the Obama Democrats. Those policies, rooted in the Progressive and New Deal tradition, are designed to encourage a culture of dependence. It is the “soft despotism” of which Tocqueville warned us 175 years ago. The American people, the property-owning majority, even in this time of economic distress, seem to be embracing instead a culture of independence, a culture as old as the republic itself.
The major political development of the last 17 months has been an inrush of hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans into political activity, an inrush symbolized by but not limited to the tea party movement. It is fascinating to me that the tea partiers have adopted the language and in some cases even the costumes of the Founders. While the Progressives’ descriptions of a “horse and buggy” Constitution and their sense that giant auto factories and steel mills were the harbinger of the future seem tinny and out of date, the language of the Founders continues to resonate with the clear timbre of a silver spoon tapping a crystal glass. The majority of the American people seem to firmly agree with the Founders’ insistence that no one should be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. And so we can take satisfaction that most of our fellow citizens in our freeholders’ republic still hold these truths to be self-evident.
