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Constitution 101: The Progressive Rejection of the Founding
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Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
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And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with Constitution 101, the meaning and history of the Constitution. Lecture number eight. Today, the progressive rejection of the founding.
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We have Dr. R.J. pastrito talking about the progressives, and there's really no one better in the country to explain this view. You mentioned the philosophy of the progressives in brief in a previous introduction. They believe that history is always improving. The past is worse than the future, which will always be better. We get a little bit of a view into the roots of that intellectual
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position and we're going to start seeing why it's so destructive for American culture, for American government. And it's been something that has been prevailing ever since, over the, you know, more than 100 years now.
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In this lecture you will hear the progressive view of citizenship, which is quite different from the Founders view of citizenship and probably different from what you think of as citizenship. Start with the founders. They thought all men are created equal. Government should protect their life, liberty and property, and it should operate on the principle of consent. If it's operating on the principle of consent, that means the citizen has to understand their rights, has to be virtuous, and then has to participate, has to have a say in the laws that govern them. Progressives thought, no, modern life is very complicated. We have the Internet and iPhones. They didn't have that back then. They had trains and they thought that was pretty advanced. They have all this advanced technology and life is too complicated for the average citizen, or translated, life is too complicated for uneducated, uncredentialed idiots like you. You need someone with a PhD from Johns Hopkins to tell you what is best for yourself. And that's going to be keeping categorized in discrete disciplines. You will have someone who knows what's best for the environment. You'll have someone who knows what's best for the economy. You'll have someone who knows what's best for health and for education. And all of these experts are going to direct your life so that it can be done with the maximum amount of efficiency and order. And you don't really get a say in that. You don't get to know who these experts are. You don't vote for them. They don't pass laws. They're just going to issue regulations and guidance that have the force of law. And we'll show you what you need to do. Then you can just sit on the couch and watch TV after you work your shift, and everything will be taken care of. Does this sound familiar?
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Yeah, yeah, that's a perfect description of the transition from the rule of citizens to the rule of the bureaucrat.
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And on one hand, I shouldn't be too harsh on the progressives. They were Americans, they were fellow citizens, they were looking at some real problems that were occurring and. But we don't like their solutions. And now we have the benefit of hindsight. We're 100 years plus into the regime of the progressives and we see the so called experts, the credentialed class, they don't really know what's best. They don't know what's best for us. And in fact, dividing human knowledge and its political implications into tight categories results in a lot of confusion and chaos. I mean, everyone who's listening to this lived through 2020. We saw what the experts did for us and, and it turned out they really don't deserve the title of experts. We probably want to go back to the idea that each citizen seeks to be educated, seeks to understand what's going around in the world. And to the extent that they can make some decisions about the way they should be governed.
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Yeah, I wonder if 2020 will be seen by future generations as the end of the rule of the bureaucracy. One can only hope that at least one thing came out of that and it's the acknowledgement that no bureaucrats don't know what's best for me. I can decide that for myself and those around me.
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That's certainly something to be hoped for and something toward which the two of us and you, dear listener, can work towards. If you'd like to take a step in becoming more educated about the progressive regime, learn better how to counter its arguments and reassert citizen rule. I would recommend that you listen to Kevin Slack's American Left course. You can listen to that podcast on the same service you're using to listen to this podcast. So if you're on Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using, look for the American Left course on the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. Look for the American Left course right in the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. Stream and learn about the progressive regime.
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And now let's turn to lecture eight of Constitution 101, the progressive rejection of the founding.
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Welcome to the eighth lecture here in our Constitution 101 course. This is a lecture on the progressive rejection of the founding. And let me first say something about the main points I want to make in this lecture. The first thing I want to talk about is why progressivism is actually relevant. Or important why you'd have a course on the US Constitution and be talking about the Progressive Era. So that'd be point number one. Point number two, once we've established the importance of the question, to just talk about what it is. Who were the Progressives and what is Progressivism? What are its core ideas? Third point, I want to talk specifically about how the Progressives critiqued the American founding. And that's one of the main reasons why we've got this topic in a course on the Constitution is that progressives are among the main Critics of the U.S. constitution in American history. So we want to talk about what was their criticism. Fourth point, take you through the main principles of Progressive thought, some of the highlights. Fifth point, then I want to point to the sources of Progressive thought. Where did this come from? Who were they? Who did they study with? How did these ideas get here? And then we'll sum up and try to make some transition points to get you on to the subsequent lectures. So why are we talking about American Progressivism? Why is it relevant in a course on the Constitution? Well, we're studying the Constitution because we're students of American politics and history. We're citizens. And if we want to understand the principles of our country, not only what they once were, but what they have become today, and how it got to be this way, I think there may be no more important an era to study in American history than the Progressive Era. Now, regardless of whether one happens to think it's a good development or a bad development, we know if we look around us, that American government today does not resemble, in many, many important respects, the design and the intention of our Constitution's framers. Therefore, if we want to figure out what happened, if we look at the welfare state politics of both the 20th and now the 21st century, we can see that they are in many important ways built on a direct rejection and a very conscious rejection of the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that so far you've been talking about in this course. Now, when did this happen? You might say one of the most obvious answers would be to look at the New Deal, Franklin roosevelt in the 1930s. And that's certainly a good place to start. But if you examine the New Deal more closely, what you can see is that the policies and the institutional changes that come in the New Deal are often predicated on principles that preceded it. And no less of an authority than Franklin Roosevelt himself points back to America's progressives, the turn of the century Progressives to Theodore Roosevelt, and in Particular to Woodrow Wilson. And so if you take a look, for example, at Franklin Roosevelt's major campaign address, his campaign address on progressive government from 1932, he points back to the ideas of Wilson and Roosevelt and says, these are the foundation for what we are proposing to do in the New Deal. So if progressivism plays that important a role in American political development and the story of how we got from the government we had under the Constitution to the government that we have today, then what is it? What is progress? Progressivism. And we're going to be filling out that understanding in the remainder of the lecture, obviously. But just to start with the basics, kind of a general point at first, I like to think of it as an argument to progress or to move beyond the principles of the American founding and the original structure of American government. And it's an argument to enlarge, to really to greatly enlarge the scope of our national government for the purpose. The Progressives argued for the purpose of responding to a set of circumstances, of historical developments that could not have been envisioned by the Framers. The Framers came up with a set of principles and a set of institutions that responded to particular circumstances. Those circumstances are no longer with us. Therefore we don't need the principles of government that were constituted to deal with those circumstances. Now, the Founders, as we learned earlier in the course, they had a sort of permanent understanding of just government. When they talk about just government and the Declaration of Independence, what Jefferson means by that is, is not just government. Right then and there, he's talking about an understanding of government that transcends time. This basic government of securing natural rights, of being based on consent of the governed. That's not just government for the North Americans in the late 18th century. That's just government for all human beings by virtue of their, their human nature and their God given rights. So they've got this permanent understanding. The Progressives, by contrast, want to say that the ends of government, the scope of government, that's going to change, that's contingent, that's relative, that's going to depend upon the new circumstances of new times. And so they've got this perspective of what I like to call historical contingency. Meaning if you ask the question what should government be? The answer to that question is contingent on the circumstances. You're going to get a different answer in 1787 than you'd get in 1900. So they take this idea of historical contingency and they couple it with a deep faith that they had in historical progress. And what that means is they thought that there had been evolution in history, there had been constant improvement in history, and therefore that government was becoming less and less of a danger to the governed and more and more capable of achieving those things that the people wanted to achieve, of solving the great problems of human history. Remember the framers kind of limited government? They carefully checked it, balanced it, because they thought there are these kind of permanent parts of human nature that could be factious. Madison says in number 10, the latent causes of faction are shown in the nature of man. From the point of view of the Progressives, that might once have been true about human nature. It might once have been factious. Therefore, at one time, we might have needed these limitations. But now history has brought about improvement. We've evolved. And so those earlier restrictions which might have been necessary for the Founders, they were really worried about the tyranny of government. Those aren't the major problems in our time. Historically, the ideas of the Progressives formed a kind of common thread among the most important political figures and the most important intellectuals, going back certainly to the 1880s and well into the 1920s and beyond. And they manifested themselves in the writings and speeches of the likes of prominent national figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Robert La Follette, Less known figures like Herbert Crowley, though he was a very important intellectual. These are the major figures of this time. So we've talked about why Progressivism is important. We've talked in a very basic or general way about what it is. Let's talk more specifically about what its view of the Constitution was. What did it think about the principles of the Founding? Remember, we said that at the core of Progressivism, the idea is to get beyond those principles, to lay those things aside as appropriate for. For a past time. So what was insufficient about them? Why are they inadequate? We have to remember that the Progressive Era was really the first period in American history to feature as its dominant characteristic a criticism of the Constitution. Now, criticism of the Constitution can obviously be found at any period in American history, including during the period of the Founding itself. But the Progressive Era is different in that this is a view that belonged to the most important intellectuals and politicians, the people who were dominating both the ideas and the political reforms. These were all ideas that came, in a way, as a reaction against the old system. The idea was that the Constitution is old, that it was written to deal with circumstances that are now well in the past, and it needs to be replaced so that we can deal with a new set of economic and social problems. The Progressives were well Educated men and women. And they understood the Constitution very well. They understood its intention. They understood its structure. They knew that the idea of the Constitution structure was to limit government, was to channel consent, was to be careful in how quickly and how immediately public opinion could be translated into actual policy. They knew, therefore, that these checks and restraints on national government would also be major obstacles to the desired policies of the Progressives. They wanted to do a lot of new things in government, and the Constitution limited their ability to do those things. They had a variety of legislative programs in view, and they wanted to use these legislative programs to redistribute wealth, to regulate in ways that had not been done before, to intervene in the. In private economic matters and matters of property in ways that had not been done before. And they understood that the Constitution, if it was to be interpreted and applied faithfully, stood very much in the way of that legislative agenda. That was their view of the Constitution. They also knew that the Constitution itself was only a means to an end. It was only a structure that aimed at something higher and something more fundamental. They knew, as we ourselves have learned in this course, that the Constitution was drafted and was adopted for the sake of achieving the natural rights principles of the Declaration of Independence. And so the progressives understood, if they were to make an effective criticism, an effective argument for moving beyond the Founding, they had to look at and critique not only the structure of the Constitution, but also those deeper, those more fundamental principles that the Constitution was founded upon. They had to go at the Declaration of Independence. And that's why in a lot of the major progressive intellectual works that you might look at, and many of those that we have in the Constitution reader, you will see that they very often begin with a kind of restatement of the theory of the Declaration of the Independence and a restatement of the principles of the Founding, because they know that they have to start there if they're going to make a case that the government based on those principles has to change. They have to show you why those principles should no longer apply in contemporary circumstances. Now, what were those original principles? Well, the founders themselves talk about this idea of social compact. And while they certainly did not subscribe to some of the more radical theories of social compact, they believed in the social compact after the fashion of political thinkers like the English Whig John Locke. And the idea was that men, as individuals, have certain rights. And they have these rights not because government gives them rights, but long before the creation of government, because God created them with these rights, that they're inherent in human nature. And therefore that when human beings consent to government, they will only consent if these rights are protected. From the point of view of the Progressives, the they knew that if government remained fixed on securing the so called natural rights, that government would always be inherently limited. And so they had to go at this natural rights theory, this social compact theory of the Declaration of Independence, because the regulatory aims of progressivism, the redistributive aims of progressivism were on a collision course with the political theory of the Declaration and therefore of the Constitution. That basic fact, that basic realization of the Progressives makes understandable an admonition that was made by Woodrow Wilson, one of the most important, not only progressive intellectuals, but progressive politicians. This is in an address that he gave, kind of ostensibly honoring Thomas Jefferson on the occasion of the Fourth of July, Wilson said the following. If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface. Do not repeat the preface. Well, what's in the preface to the Declaration of Independence? You might not have known that it had a preface. What Wilson means there is simply those early paragraphs of the Declaration, the parts that most people would identify as the heart of the Declaration. All men are created equal. Government comes only from their consent. The purpose of government is to secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's what Wilson means by the preface. So if you're going to understand it, Wilson says, don't emphasize that part of it. Okay, well, if we take Wilson's advice there, what's left? What's left in the Declaration? Well, most of the rest of it's left. What's in most of the rest of it? It's the list of grievances against the British, against George iii. It's the particulars. In other words, it's the specific things that George III has either done or not done that are creating this reaction by the Americans. And if we think that through, we can see the significance. Is George III around anymore? Is he doing these bad things to us any longer? Well, no. So the kind of government that the Americans framed that was needed to respond to those particular things also needs to be changed. And that's at the heart of Wilson's argument about the Declaration. He says in many of his works, it's a practical document. Don't mind the theoretical or the principled things that are said. Understand it in its historical cont.
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Hi there, it's Bill Gray from Hillsdale College. Before you skip ahead, can I ask you a question or two? If you could teach 50 million Americans one thing, what would it be? Would you teach our great American story that this nation is unique, founded on self government and individual liberty? Maybe you would teach the truth about free enterprise, how hard work and opportunity allow anyone to rise. Or would you teach the gospel and the Christian faith that helps us live good and meaningful lives? At Hillsdale College, we're doing exactly that. Teaching the best that's been thought and said. Through our free online courses, K12 programs, Imprimis, podcasts and more, we reach and teach millions every year with the principles of liberty that make America free. And with your help, we can reach even more. Your tax deductible gift today will help us teach millions more people to pursue truth and defend liberty. Just text the word give to 7 1844. You'll get a secure link to make your donation in seconds. That's give to 718 44. Thank you for standing with us. Now back to the show.
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Like Woodrow Wilson, there was another progressive academic. This is an academic by the name of Frank Goodnow who's a less well known in terms of a national figure, but a very, very important progressive. And if you're a political scientist like me, he's the first president of the American Political Science Association. We have a reading in our Constitution reader from Goodnow which does a very nice job of contrasting the theory of the Declaration of Independence and the principles of the Declaration of Independence the way it underst with the new theory that the progressives want to adopt, the one that they think the circumstances of history justify. And that's a theory that's very current in Europe, Goode now says, and he's sort of lamenting that we in America are kind of stuck behind we're sticking to our old ideas, whereas in Europe they have kind of moved to adopt these new ideas more appropriate for circumstances today. So let's look to Goodenow's piece. It's a little piece called the American Conception of Liberty. In Goodenow's Essay on the American Conception of Liberty. It's an essay that contrasts the way the founders thought about rights with the way that progressives now wanted to think about rights. And there's nothing really novel in Goodnow's essay. It's written in 1916, and he's not saying anything here that progressives hadn't been saying for decades by then. But it's a nice encapsulation of it, beginning on page 629 of your reader. And he says the following. This is about the old theory. The end of the 18th century was marked by the formulation and general acceptance by thinking men in Europe of a political philosophy which laid great emphasis on individual private rights. Man was, by this philosophy, conceived of as endowed at the time of his birth with certain inalienable rights. And then he goes on to talk about how Rousseau thought this. And Goodenow doesn't understand Rousseau very well, but that's sort of beside the point. He talks about man primarily as an individual and only secondarily as a member of human society. At the time of making a social compact, individuals were deemed to have reserved certain rights spoken of as natural rights. These rights could neither be taken away nor be limited without the consent of the individual affected. And so he says, that's the old idea, right. That your rights that you have from God and from nature come first. And government is only legitimate if it respects those rights. And that's a permanent limit on government. He said, that's the theory of the founding, basically right about that. Now he says, that's not the view in Europe right now. In Europe, they've gotten beyond this, and we here in America need to get beyond it. That's the implication. So his contrast begins down at the bottom of page 630. He says, in a word, man is regarded now throughout Europe as primarily a member of society and secondarily as an individual. The rights which he possesses are, it is believed, conferred upon him not by his creator, but rather by the society to which he belongs. What they are, in other words, what your rights are, is to be determined by the legislative authority in view of the needs of that society. Social expediency, rather than natural right, is thus to determine the sphere of individual freedom of action. So now that we have new circumstances which are calling out for greater action by government which would impinge more on the natural rights of the citizens, we need to adjust our principles. We need to think about the society as a whole first and the individual second. Now, from the point of view of Goodenow and other Progressives, the problem with the Founding was not so much its principles per se, but rather that they assumed that their principles were ought to apply not just to them, not just to their own time, but for everybody at all times. That was the problem with the doctrine of natural rights. Now, if you think about the lectures you've had on Abraham Lincoln, you know that it's this very feature of the Founding that Lincoln recognized and celebrated. So when he's making his great speeches about the expansion of slavery, he's always referring back to the Declaration, and he's always trying to recall those principles, right, that these are rights which we talked about during our founding and the rights which ought still to be the center of our system today. That was Lincoln. And there's a great letter of his from 1859 when he's talking about the Declaration of Independence and about its author, Thomas Jefferson. And Lincoln says the following in that letter, all honor to Jefferson, to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times. So for Lincoln, that was the great virtue of the Declaration, not just the principles that it laid out, because Lincoln recognized to a certain extent those principles of equality were still not fully realized at the time. So not just then and there, but that those principles were laid down as the permanent principles of the American regime. So think of that argument of Lincoln's. Contrast it to Wilson's comments about the Declaration. What does Wilson say? Disregard those very things that Lincoln points out as the most important part. That stuff about natural rights, that stuff about the permanent purposes of government, that's bygone. Lincoln says those are the most important. The other great contrast here is to the great progressive philosopher, John Dewey, probably the most important public philosopher in America in the first half of the 20th century. And John Dewey, like Woodrow Wilson, complained very much about just that kind of thinking, the kind of thinking in the Founding about the permanence of natural rights, the kind of thinking that we see in Lincoln's letter. And we have an excerpt from John Dewey's work, Liberalism and Social Action, in the Constitution Reader. And he says that way of thinking, thinking that your principles apply not just to your time, that they're not just contingent on circumstance, but that they transcend time. That way of thinking is part of the older liberalism. And that older liberalism. We're in a crisis now because we're stuck in it. And liberalism is progressing well beyond this in other places. But we are stuck. Let's take a look at an excerpt from Dewey, from Liberalism and Social Action, from your Constitution reader. He says the earlier liberals lacked historic sense and interest. And by the earlier liberals, he means the Framers. They lacked historic sense and interest. They had a disregard of history. He says it blinded the eyes of liberals to the fact that their own special interpretations of liberty, individuality and intelligence were themselves historically conditioned and were relevant only to their own time. They put forward their ideas as immutable truths, good at all times and places. They had no idea of historic relativity, either in general or in its application to themselves. So this is the great progressive criticism of the Framers, that they had no appreciation that their principles of government were limited only to their own historical circumstances. So you have an important historical criticism that's made by the progressives of the Framers. Where did this come from? Where did it come from, this coupling of historical contingency with the doctrine of progress? It was shared by all progressives to one degree or another. It helps us to see how the Progressive movement became the means by which a lot of principles that had grown up in Europe took root in the United States, and in particular, principles that were part of the German understanding of politics and the German state and the German understanding of history. And the influence of German thought and German education is evident not only from looking at the ideas of the Progressives, but also just looking at the historical connections and at the pedigree of a lot of the most important progressive thinkers. Almost all of them were either educated in Germany or had as teachers those who had been educated in Germany. And this requires us to realize the real sea change that had taken place in higher education in the United states between, say, 1860 and 1900. This was at a time when most Americans who wanted a higher education, a graduate level education, went to Europe to get it and often went to Germany to get it. And thus, by 1900, the faculties of American colleges and universities were populated with people who had been educated in Europe and by and large, in the German tradition. One example would be, take a place like Johns Hopkins University. This was actually founded in 1876 with the explicit purpose of bringing the German educational model to the United States. And Hopkins was a place, not coincidentally, where some of the most important American progressives were educated. People like Woodrow Wilson, people like John Dewey and Frederick Jackson Turner, just to name a few. Among a lot of things that the Americans took from the Germans, they got this idea or this language of the living constitution. And this is language you've probably heard in debates about how the Constitution ought to be interpreted today. And it comes from this time, this idea of a living, or what the Germans called an organic idea of the Constitution. And this is a concept that Woodrow Wilson, when he was reflecting on what it meant to be a progressive. This is a concept he used when he referred to the Constitution as a living thing, a living thing that had to be understood according to the theory of organic life. And there's a great speech that he gives, which we have a copy of in your Constitution reader called what Is Progress? And this is a speech he gave. It's an edited version of a speech that he gave on the campaign trail in 1912 when he was running, successfully running for president. Let's take a look at it. This is on page 640. And Wilson is contrasting the theory of the founding to this new living idea of government and organic idea of the Constitution. He's using the language of Newton and Darwin to make the contrast between a kind of fixed idea of constitutionalism and a flexible or organic idea of the Constitution. So he says the Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian theory. You have only to read the papers of the Federalists to see that fact written on every page. They speak of the checks and balances of the Constitution. And so it's very mechanistic is what he means. He goes on to say that the makers of our federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way, the best way of their age, those fathers of the nation. They constructed a government as they would have constructed an orrery to display the laws of nature. Politics, in their thought, was a variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of check checks and balances. So that's the old fixed, mechanistic view of the Constitution. Permanent limits, permanent checks. That's not the way it really is. Wilson says the trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks and live. So government has to respond if it's going to live, if it's going to survive. It has to respond to the stimuli that are out there in the environment and adapt and evolve you can't have this rigid or fixed mechanism, which is how he characterizes the Constitution. So early American conceptions of national government had carefully circumscribed its power. Why concern for natural rights? Concern that the government might overstep its boundaries? From the point of view of the Progressives, history solves that problem. Faction might have been a problem during the Founding. History has helped us overcome that. Human beings are different than they used to be. And so we've got all these new social ills, all these new economic ills that we need to take care of. And we now have a nature. We now have a higher capacity to actually do something about these problems in ways that aren't going to undermine our liberty. Since, according to the Progressives, government was no longer a danger to the liberties of the citizens, then you could increase the scope of government. That's the essential argument. All of the Progressive politicians argued for this. I think there may be no greater example than Theodore Roosevelt. And in particular point to a speech that Theodore Roosevelt gave in 1910. This is his new nationalism speech. It's a speech which then became the foundation for his attempt to regain the presidency later in 1912. And in that speech, Roosevelt called for the state to take a much more active role in affecting economic equality. And here he doesn't mean only economic equality of rights or opportunity, but he says equality of material circumstance, a kind of material equality that really had not been a part of the equation in the American tradition before then. This would require superintending the use of private property, perhaps redistributing private property. And Roosevelt, in his new national speech, is very, very upfront about that. Private property rights had been serving as a break on some of the more aggressive progressive policy proposals. That had to change. We had to, in the words of Roosevelt, come to have a social view of property and a social view of our property relations. This was justified by new circumstances. It necessitated a new conception of government. And natural rights could no longer be understood as a kind of break against this power of the government. Woodrow Wilson had outlined a similar view of the power of the government and a similar view of the relationship between the government and the individual in a concise but very revealing essay from the 1880s called Socialism and Democracy. And that's an essay that we have provided in the Constitution Reader. And I want you to take a look at that, because you can see how Wilson admits in that essay that socialist conceptions of the power of government, that society is more important than the individual, that the whole is more important than the individual that is very consistent with the progressive understanding of democracy. And so the first thing he does in the essay, and let's turn to it, this is an essay that begins, or the part of it that's relevant to us, begins on page 646 in your reader. Let's talk about what socialism is. How does socialism view the relationship between the individual and the state? He says socialism proposes that all idea of a limitation of public authority by individual rights be put out of view and that the state consider itself bound to stop only at what is unwise or futile in its universal superintendence alike of individual and of public interest. The thesis of the state socialist is that no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the state may not cross at will. So the power of the state trumps the rights of the individual. And Wilson says, now that's pretty close to how we progressives view democracy. He says in fundamental theory, socialism and democracy are almost, if not quite one and the same. Well, why are they one and the same? They're one and the same. Wilson says, because our theory of democracy, we progressives, we think that democracy is not limited by individual rights. Remember, that was the great conundrum for the Founders. How do they balance democracy and the protection of rights? You don't want to have so much consent that the majority can consent to something that abuses the liberty of the minority. That's a different conception of democracy than the one that the progressives have. Wilson says about democracy and socialism, that they both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals. Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control. There may be limits of principle. There are, upon strict analysis, none. So the only limit on government from the point of view of the progressives, according to their view of democracy, is sure, there might be things that government can't do very well, that wouldn't work out very well, that are impractical, but those aren't principled limits. They're not principled limits, say, in the way that the founders would understand natural rights to be a principled limit on the authority of government. So let's think about this new progressive conception of democracy. We've talked about the broad principles of progressivism. We've talked about how that is very much in tension with the original principles of the American Constitution. Many concrete changes in American government, changes to institutions, changes to laws came out of these broad principles. Some, like the 17th Amendment, for instance, which affected the national government, but many, many others were done at the state and local level, where progressivism had a very profound influence on its structure and on its operation. It's beyond our time here in this lecture to get into these concrete changes, though. In our upcoming lectures, our faculty will talk about some of the reforms that were undertaken on the basis of progressive principles and how they looked going in the New Deal, in the Great society of the 1960s, and beyond that. But that's a topic for a future lecture.
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