The View From 1776

Barton Bennett alerted me to Angelo M. Codevilla’s essay in the American Spectator.

Professor Codevilla describes the philosophical transformation from American individualism of the founding era into the bureaucratic paradigm of the present day.  What now besets the nation is the basic liberal-progressive faith that our original political and social structures were malformed, that they must be reconstituted, and that only the ruling class (liberal-progressive Democrat/Socialists and the big-spending faction of the Republican Party) possess the knowledge to perform this act of secular salvation.

Ruling class mindset was expressed by Thomas Corcoran, a principal speech writer and advisor for Franklin Roosevelt in his 1936 re-election campaign;

“You have no idea what a good thing it is for your soul to have to address yourself to a big radio audience.  You’ve got to clarify your meaning, make things simple, reduce them to their ultimate essentials if you want to get them over to a big audience, because human beings in the mass are a hell of a lot stupider than you would ever think.” (see Raymond Moley’s After Seven Years, 1939)

This ruling class mythology, politically dominant only since the 1930s’ New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, has roots dating to the inception of the socialist religion in the first decades of the 19th century.  Both Henri de Saint-Simon and his collaborator Auguste Comte envisioned political governance and business management by councils of experts as the essential element for socialistic restructuring of society.

The same view was the core of Herbert Croly’s immensely influential 1909 The Promise of American Life and Walter Lippmann’s 1913 A Preface to Politics.  Croly and Lippmann, then a young liberal-socialist, were founding editors in 1914 of The New Republic, the flagship journal of liberal-progressivism through mid-20th century.