Do American Progressives Have Historical Amnesia?

The signing of the U.S. Constitution,
one of the latest fruits of the Age of Enlightenment
Current Location: East Stairway, House of Representatives Wing, U.S. Capitol
Wikimedia Commons / Howard Chandler Christy (1873-1952)

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana

I have often complained in these posts  of the cavalier and dismissive attitude of American progressives toward the United States Constitution. It is as if they have lost the historical memory of why the separation of powers and the Bill of Rights enshrined within it are absolutely necessary if we are to retain our freedoms.

The Case for Why the Progressives Have Lost Their Historical Memory

It would be fallacious to claim that only progressives have problems with their historical memory, but they have been particularly afflicted by this malady. And the consequences of this historical Alzheimer’s have become very dangerous to the republic. The long record of history, should we choose to heed it, provides us with object lessons on what works and what does not in human governance. If we lose those object lessons by not remembering them, then as George Santayana warned us, we are condemned to relearn them all over again through repetition.

Historical memory is that knowledge we have from the past that we get from teachers and reading books. I would suspect the majority of progressives have a historical memory that stretches back approximately six decades (the time since the adoption of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s War on Poverty). For some, that memory may reach back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administrations in the 1930s and 1940s.  For a very few it might even extend back a century to that milestone of progressive history that was the Woodrow Wilson administration.

Wilson’s administration (1913-1921) marks the time at which progressives began to become increasingly hostile to the U.S. Constitution. Chafing at the barriers to change provided by the checks and balances required by the Constitution, progressives believed that the nation needed to move on beyond the principles of the founding fathers. While campaigning for the presidency in 1912, Wilson stated his desires for a revolutionary change in how we viewed Constitutional constraints. In his view of reality, both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence had out-lived their usefulness. Instead of the old view of the Constitution limiting the powers of government with a separation of powers between the branches of government, he wanted Americans to take the Constitution as a “living”, evolving document. Instead of a Constitution guaranteeing ironclad rights for individuals, Wilson wanted a Constitution constantly evolving the relationship between government and its citizens. Instead of a separation of powers between government’s branches, Wilson believed society’s needs required cooperation between the branches.

Ever since Woodrow Wilson progressives have promoted the idea of the Constitution as a “living, evolving” thing. What this meant in practice was that the document was mutable in meaning without going through the arduous process of ratifying amendments. By comparing current social conditions with what they thought the founders required through the Constitution, progressive federal judges and justices of the Supreme Court would find implied constitutional “penumbras” and “emanations”, effectively modifying the Constitution on the cheap and without the consent of the people.

Once the the original court precedents allowing such informal “constitutional amendments” were decided, nothing could be done short of an actual constitutional amendment to “repeal” the court fashioned amendments. Where were the so-called conservatives (i.e. the neoliberals or classical liberals) while all of this was happening? They were out of power, and since a constitutional amendment according to the procedures set down by the Constitution is so difficult, they were never able to turn the clock back.

One of the consequences of this new attitude toward the Constitution was that Congress was allowed to delegate much of its legislative power to departments of the executive branch, and to independent government agencies, such as the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). With many of these independent agencies, including the three just cited, the federal judiciary has actually acquiesced to the Congress granting limited judicial power as well, effectively erasing all separation of powers in the domain of the independent agency! This growing phenomenon of autocratic rule by bureaucratic technocrats was discussed in the posts How a Democracy Evolves Into Fascism, The Dodd-Frank Act: A Giant Stride Along the Road to Serfdom, and The Progressives’ War On the Separation of Powers.

By enabling these erasures of  power barriers, progressives have destroyed many of the safeguards provided by the checks and balances of the original Constitution. To have created this dangerous situation, they must have totally forgotten why the Constitution was constructed this way in the first place. However, to appreciate why the separation of governmental powers into different independent branches is so necessary, why we need these safeguards to ensure individual rights and liberty, progressives’ historical memory would have to go back more than three centuries to the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment. In fact, we should go back around four centuries to consider a precursor of the Age of Enlightenment: the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

The Political Fruits of the Age of Enlightenment 

Thomas Hobbes (5 April 1588-4 December 1679) is best known for his monumental book Leviathan, published in 1651. Writing Leviathan during the English Civil War (1642-1651), Hobbes was probably influenced to some degree by the misery of that civil conflict. He postulated the natural condition of human beings in a state of nature was one of constant strife against his fellows, “a war of all against all.” Hobbes then presupposes that to protect themselves, men

voluntarily combined together to form a government to protect themselves from each other; this new commonwealth is the Leviathan. Hobbes sees the Leviathan as voluntary, rational, and absolutely required for the self-preservation of humanity. Because of the violent nature of humanity, Hobbes concludes the most powerful government possible is best, and advocates a monarchy where the sovereign has unlimited power to rule.

Having justified an autocratic government, how is Hobbes connected with the political theorists of the Age of Enlightenment? The answer is that Hobbes was one of the earliest advocates of social contract theory, as well as the most prominent of his time. Because of the grim battle for life in a state of nature, Hobbes believed men either came together voluntarily to place themselves under a monarch, or they were added by conquest. Either way they remain voluntarily for as long as the monarch can offer protection and conditions allowing sustenance and survival. He also believed in the natural equality of all men; that whatever political order was created was artificial, a creation by man; that all legitimate political power must in some sense be “representative”; and that the government could rule only with the consent of the governed. Finally, whatever the law did not explicitly prohibit was allowable to the people.

The Age of Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was a period of European history that roughly spanned the last half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. During this age, ideas were developed about reason being the primary source of intellectual and moral authority, as opposed to ecclesiastical or monarchal authority. The primary political ideals advanced by the

Age of Enlightenment were individual liberty, progress, religious and political tolerance, the brotherhood of mankind, constitutional government, and the separation of church and state.

René Descartes (1596-1650) is often given credit for laying the foundation of enlightenment philosophy with his method of doubt.  Cartesian doubt is the methodological application of reason to all possible explanations of a phenomenon to separate what is true from what is false, a method as applicable to sociological, political, and theological questions as to scientific ones.

Enlightenment political philosophers, with the exception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, generally accepted Thomas Hobbes’ belief that man in a state of nature was caught in a conflict with his fellows at least to some degree. People entered into a social contract, forming a government to protect themselves and their property from each other.  The father of classical liberalism, the Englishman John Locke, had a somewhat more hopeful view of human nature than Hobbes,

believing that in a state of nature, men had rights to life and property under natural law, Nevertheless, without a society with a government, Locke believed the enforcement of those rights to be extremely difficult.  He therefore argued the social contract between the rulers and the ruled was conditional upon the government protecting both the persons and the property of the ruled. if this contract were violated, the ruled were justified in overthrowing and replacing the sovereign. Needless to say, the writers of the American Declaration of Independence from Great Britain’s King George III made full and explicit use of John Locke’s arguments.

By the time of the eighteenth century and the flowering of the Age of Enlightenment and Reason, European societies had had a lot of historical experience with arbitrary and tyrannical government with all the power of government centralized in an all powerful, autocratic sovereign. Also by then, England had gone through the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when King James II was deposed and replaced by his daughter, Queen Mary II and her husband William III, prince of Orange and stadtholder of the Netherlands. As a result the Coronation Oath Act of 1688 required a new coronation oath for a succeeding British monarch, taken by both the new King William and Queen Mary, whereby the monarch swore to “solemnly promise and swear to govern the people of this kingdom of England, and the dominions thereunto belonging, according to the statutes in parliament agreed on, and the laws and customs of the same”.  The power to legislate had successfully been extracted from the executive branch of England (the King or Queen and the monarch’s officers) and isolated in the legislative branch (the Parliament).

One consequence of this historical experience was that the political philosophers of the Enlightenment began to realize the necessity for factoring out the executive, legislative, and judicial functions of the government, then giving each power

to a different, independent branch of government. Then all government powers could act together only if the independent branches all consented and agreed to a course of action. Any act of tyranny could only become effective if those three separate powers acted together. If the powers were separated, the probability of tyrannical government was greatly reduced. The first expression of this idea of the separation of all three powers came from Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, usually referred to as Montesquieu, in his classic book The Spirit of the Laws (De l’Esprit des Loix).

The U.S. Constitution was one of the last fruits borne by the Age of Enlightenment. Acutely aware of the possibilities for tyranny from their recent experience of King George III, the writers of the U.S. Constitution (primarily James Madison of Virginia, later fourth President of the United States) made sure executive powers were isolated in the President and the departments he supervised, legislative powers in the Congress, and judicial powers in the federal judiciary headed by the Supreme Court.

All of this Western historical experience from the past 400 years is what progressives have apparently (and conveniently) forgotten. If they are not forcibly reminded of it, preferably by being removed from power, we will be forced to re-experience all the trauma experienced by Europe from the English Civil War starting in 1642 onwards. Four hundred years of shared historical experience forgotten is a terrible waste.

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