Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the US at the turn of the twentieth century was floating along pretty good, but the progressives scuttled it. The US was founded as a high trust, moral and ethical society. Franklin himself said the Constitution was suitable for a moral and religious people only. In a high trust moral and ethical society there need be few laws, and those only to stop the insane and soulless. Such places are characterized by high prosperity, low crime, and limited government. The limited government part didn’t suit the central planners of the time… the progressives. So they set themselves to perverting our high trust society into a low trust legalistic one instead. That was because a low trust, low moral and unethical society is characterized by poverty, crime, and their goal… unlimited government.
Alexis de Tocqueville toured the US during the early 1800’s. He was amazed at what he found. A high trust society that was prosperous, safe, and the government wasn’t in the way. That was a total paradigm change from France at the time. It was utterly corrupt. The state had been reduced to “constitutional monarchy” because the king was so corrupt. That corruption had drifted down to the aristocracy and to the equivalent of the “people’s tribunes.” In France the government was always in the way, poverty was growing fast, and crime was growing faster. The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. He saw first hand the difference between a high and low trust society and favored the high trust one. In his book, Democracy in America, he said, “Liberty cannot be established without morality…”
The War Between the States was the first attempt of central planning’s legalism to usurp the role of morality. Regardless of the reasons for the war, good or bad, it effectively nullified the Tenth Amendment. The canceling of the Tenth Amendment eliminated a fundamental check on federal power. Today it’s become meaningless words on paper. That’s because it’s not enforced. A law or constitutional limitation that is not enforced doesn’t count. It is a shadow reflected on Plato’s cave wall. Once the war was over, as well as the atrocities of brother on brother, the US went through an asshole phase, then settled down. By the Twentieth Century the progressives had grown utterly disenchanted by the free market and limited government. There were new ideas with great promise, like Marxism.
Looking at a factory the progressives stood amazed at the efficiency of them. A factory could marshal men such that they became parts of a machine instead of individuals. The output of those machines in the form of goods was astonishing. They thought to themselves, “If only I could marshal the whole economy like that. Imagine the efficiency!” The problem, however, was that a high trust society has limited need of laws. What progressives needed was a low trust society that needed ever more laws to control the ever more corrupt people. The progressives needed to replace America’s high trust moral society with a low trust legalist one. In their minds, the ends justify the means, if the ends will be universal prosperity. What they failed to understand is that they were making a category error.
By Woodrow Wilson’s time, progressivism had infiltrated the universities and had started perverting the minds of the youth. Coolidge stepped back from federal central planning and the economy flourished. Later, once the central planners took over and crashed the economy, even Coolidge was convinced the prosperity his policies created caused the crash, once they had ended… and not progressive policies at the time of the crash. After WWII, the US stepped back again but held to the idea of legalism. The idea that all problems can be solved with law. This has led to our nation and indeed the West becoming low trust, high crime, and impoverished… but with unlimited government. The limitations are mere shadows on a wall, while the despotism is made of iron.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
