The View From 1776

The Progressives:  Modern and Postmodern
By Robert Curry

The Modern Progressives

[N]o doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle…
Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson, the very model of the modern Progressive, utterly rejected the Founders’ natural rights philosophy.  Wilson and the modern Progressives saw the Constitution itself as anachronism that America had progressed beyond.  According to the modern Progressives, the Constitutional limits on the power of government hobbled government, preventing it from using its powers to advance progress.

Wilson grounded his rejection of the Founders and the Constitution in the philosophy of the 19th century German G. W. F. Hegel, writing:

[T]he philosophy of any time is, as Hegel says, ‘nothing but the spirit of that time expressed in abstract thought.’

Professor Ronald Pestritto states Wilson’s and Hegel’s position succinctly:

Historical contingency makes it impossible to ground politics on an abstract principle.

For Hegel and therefore for Wilson, history advances as each age replaces the preceding age through a dialectical process.  History had simply moved on and the Constitution had outlived its time and its usefulness.  Marx, of course, also took his notion of history advancing dialectically from Hegel.

During the second half of the 19th century German scholarship was in fashion, and Wilson’s teachers at Johns Hopkins University were all educated in Germany.  Wilson championed his version of Hegelianism in academia, and then went on to champion modern Progressivism in politics. 

Many Americans know enough about the events leading up to the Civil War to have a sense of just how much Congressional debate once centered on what was and what was not constitutional, on what the Constitution allowed Congress to do.  As the result of a series of successful campaigns by the modern Progressives, that began to change.  The Constitution was rewritten by the courts and (except for very recently with the rise of the Tea Party) largely ignored by Congress.  The long decline in the standing of the Constitution shows just how successful the modern Progressives have been.

However, it is a new time and the spirit of the new time has brought forth a new generation of Progressives.

The Postmodern Progressives

That depends on what your definition of “is” is.
William Jefferson Clinton

The Democratic Party claims Thomas Jefferson as the first President of their party, yet it is clear that there is a big difference in the thinking of Thomas Jefferson and the recent President with “Jefferson” in his name—and even a big difference between the thinking of Woodrow Wilson and that recent President.  Jefferson believed that there are truths that are self-evident; Wilson believed that any doctrine is merely contingent on the spirit of its historical period; Clinton’s statement invokes a challenge to the very possibility of truth.

Clinton was rightly seen as attempting to squirm his way out the trouble he was in, but what went generally uncommented on was that he was relying on a particular epistemology to do so.  If you had not been keeping up with the latest developments in the world of intellectual fashion, you might not have recognized that Clinton’s challenge to common sense was rooted in the doctrines of postmodernism.

The postmodernists go far beyond Hegel’s rejectionism to deny even the meaningfulness of claims to truth. The French postmodernist Michel Foucault puts their position this way:

It is meaningless to speak in the name of—or against—Reason, Truth or Knowledge.

Richard Rorty, the best known of the American postmodernists, makes the same point with greater apparent philosophical rigor:

To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth.  It is to say that our purposes would be served best by ceasing to see truth… as a topic of philosophical interest, or ‘true’ as a term which repays ‘analysis’.

For the postmodernist, language only connects with more language; language never connects with reality.  According to the postmodernists, the meaning of “is” –and everything else--is up for grabs. 

The invasion of the postmodernists came in the second half of the twentieth century, about a century after the Hegelian tide.  As you may have heard, the postmodernists have captured the commanding heights of academia.  Once again, as with the Hegelians, they first successfully invaded academia, and then reached out to change American society and government through the Democratic Party. 

While the modern Progressives were primarily opposed to the U.S. Constitution, the postmodern Progressives have a much more radical and far-reaching agenda.  This difference makes the two versions of Progressivism fairly easy to distinguish.  Modern Progressivism, rejecting the Constitutional safeguards of the rights of the individual in favor of the government’s ability to bring about progress, favors, for example, government provided health care.  In contrast, postmodern Progressivism, rejecting Western culture itself, reflexively favors third world peoples and supports policies that are aimed at hobbling first world economies to reduce the living standards of their populations.

In his excellent book Explaining Postmodernism, Professor Stephen Hicks presents a list of claims of postmodern discourse: 

• On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.

• Values are subjective—but sexism and racism are really evil.

• Technology is bad and destructive—and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.

• Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.

Professor Hicks presents the list primarily to make the philosophical point that these claims are self-contradictory.  I quote them for a different purpose.  I ask you: Do these ideas seem familiar?  Have encountered them in the current public discourse? 

Clearly these claims are very different from the self-evident truths of Jefferson and the Founders, and not even ideas that would have made any sense to Woodrow Wilson, but the question for our purposes is this: how far have the postmodernists gotten in their campaign to set the direction for Progressivism? 

I invite you to be the judge of that.