{"id":7316,"date":"2015-03-09T07:15:32","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T07:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/03\/09\/why-progressives-mislead\/"},"modified":"2015-03-09T07:15:32","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T07:15:32","slug":"why-progressives-mislead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/03\/09\/why-progressives-mislead\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Progressives Mislead"},"content":{"rendered":"

I prefer the more muscular 'lie.'  Excerpts from a piece<\/a> by John O. McGinnis:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Progressivism\u2019s vision of the role of the state conflicts with the system of government envisioned by America\u2019s Founders. The Founders wanted citizens to be free to pursue their affairs individually and in voluntary association; the powers of the federal state were to be tightly constrained. In contrast, the greatest political theorist of American progressivism, Herbert Croly, said that the nation\u2019s \u201cdemocracy should be focused on an equal sharing of wealth and responsibilities\u201d\u2014an enterprise that demands a larger and more intrusive federal state to enforce. Obama spoke from this tradition on the campaign trail in 2008\u2014most famously, when he told Joe the Plumber that it was \u201cgood to spread the wealth around.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n

Faced with these constraints, today\u2019s progressives must resort to more misleading and sometimes coercive measures, as they seek to bring about equality through collective responsibility; they must rally support by looking beyond economics, to cultural and social identifications, in a bid to maintain the support of voters with little need for government intervention. They also want to limit the voices of citizens at election time, and thereby magnify the influence of the press and academia, which lean sharply in the progressive direction.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nothing shows the progressive dependence on subterfuge more starkly than Obamacare, which, by imposing a personal mandate to buy insurance in an effort to bring health care to all, will restructure one-sixth of the American economy.<\/span><\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n

From its inception, progressivism has posed a threat to constitutional government. It has sought to replace limited and decentralized governance with dynamic, centralized authority in order to force some arrangement of equality on the nation. Because the world has a way of upsetting abstract designs, progressivism depends on empowering administrators to impose its frameworks while disempowering citizens from resisting these coercions. The Obama administration\u2019s push for unilateral presidential authority to disregard the law is thus the logical extension of the progressive program. Opposition to this program requires nothing less than a rededication to our Founding ideals: our nation must be governed by the rule of law, not the rule of an elected monarch or of a legally privileged aristocracy.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I prefer the more muscular 'lie.'  Excerpts from a piece by John O. McGinnis: Progressivism\u2019s vision of the role of the state conflicts with the system of government envisioned by America\u2019s Founders. The Founders wanted citizens to be free to pursue their affairs individually and in voluntary association; the powers of the federal state were … Continue reading “Why Progressives Mislead”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[163],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leftism-and-political-correctness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}