Ashley Cruseturner: A Fair-Minded View of the Progressive Impulse
[Ashley Cruseturner teaches American history at McLennan Community College in Waco, Texas.]
We live in a moment of intense political polarization in which self-serving characterizations of the opposition are as ubiquitous as they are nugatory.
Michael Barone, ordinarily an astute and measured political observer, recently offered the following historical absurdity: “the Founders stood for the expansion of liberty and the Progressives for the expansion of government.”
Which Founders? The formulation suggests a cohesive systematic philosophy under-girding the founding moment. In truth, during a tumultuous period of conflict and uncertainty, myriad disparate political ideas competed for primacy. Through a series of uneasy, frequently unsatisfying, and often contradictory compromises, the first generation of American statesmen hammered out a framework outlining the role and scope of government....
Moreover, framing the Progressives as a movement solely bent on expanding government at the expense of liberty offers another fundamentally misleading characterization. The primary motivation of the Progressive Impulse was not to grow government; rather, the movement sought to employ government as an agent to improve the lives of people and extend freedom more broadly defined. Contending with an emergent culture of unrestrained capitalism and outsized corporations unforeseen by the Founders, the Progressive reformers of the early twentieth century imagined a reinvigorated, reinforced, and inevitably enlarged federal government as the only remedy to a potentially lethal hazard.
Modern conservatism, on the other hand, came of age as a reaction to Progressivism. Certain that the Progressives recklessly misunderstood the capacity of government for amelioration, conservatives articulated a series of practical objections....
Read entire article at InsiderIowa.com
We live in a moment of intense political polarization in which self-serving characterizations of the opposition are as ubiquitous as they are nugatory.
Michael Barone, ordinarily an astute and measured political observer, recently offered the following historical absurdity: “the Founders stood for the expansion of liberty and the Progressives for the expansion of government.”
Which Founders? The formulation suggests a cohesive systematic philosophy under-girding the founding moment. In truth, during a tumultuous period of conflict and uncertainty, myriad disparate political ideas competed for primacy. Through a series of uneasy, frequently unsatisfying, and often contradictory compromises, the first generation of American statesmen hammered out a framework outlining the role and scope of government....
Moreover, framing the Progressives as a movement solely bent on expanding government at the expense of liberty offers another fundamentally misleading characterization. The primary motivation of the Progressive Impulse was not to grow government; rather, the movement sought to employ government as an agent to improve the lives of people and extend freedom more broadly defined. Contending with an emergent culture of unrestrained capitalism and outsized corporations unforeseen by the Founders, the Progressive reformers of the early twentieth century imagined a reinvigorated, reinforced, and inevitably enlarged federal government as the only remedy to a potentially lethal hazard.
Modern conservatism, on the other hand, came of age as a reaction to Progressivism. Certain that the Progressives recklessly misunderstood the capacity of government for amelioration, conservatives articulated a series of practical objections....