Leftist Rights and Wrongs - or - Fixing Education is Job One in America

By Rich Kozlovich

 

Today, December 16, 2022 Allan J. Feifer posted this piece on American Thinker, The Rapidly Dissipating Art of Thinking, outlining things that should be obvious to the most casual observer, unfortunately that requires rational thought processes, something that's becoming more and more rare, especially in the media.  And especially among celebrities and those nitwits....and especially internet trolls.....who  spew out nonsensical, irrational comments and logical fallacies.  

He notes some of those irrational views, and in light of recent insane Congressional efforts, all being supported by RINO's, I think these are worth exploring. He states:

What do all of the following have in common? 

• I have a right to practice recreational oblivion (drug use). 
• I have a right to steal “stuff” from stores and not get prosecuted. 
• I have a right to believe my “facts” are equal to yours, and then I can make you live by mine. 
• I have a “right” to come to America, and then you must support me to become a citizen.
•  I have a right to wealth equal to yours, and if that means taking it from you, that’s okay. 
• I have a right to say whatever I want, but you don’t because you are irredeemably White.  
• I have a right not to work if I don’t want to because the government is obligated to support me.

They’re all modern attitudes that are totally antithetical to a structured and sound thought process!.........one dares not call out certain classes of people on their logic, sense, truth, or perception of reality for fear of being called any of several powerful, nasty, and socially irredeemable names.  Indeed, the power of the law backs up this craziness more every day as our society begins to buy into the belief in “thought crime.”

This didn't just come about overnight.  This has been under construction by the left for 125 years in America, with the goal of destroying all the foundational values and intellectual constructs that made America great, and it started with education.  The goal of the socialists who created organized education was to make sure the apple fell as far away from the tree as possible.  

[Starting with] John Dewey, leftists have been feverishly working to politically destroy the United States. Mr. Dewey and his like-minded followers understood, in order to change the United States into a lesser nation under international dominance, Americans would have to be weaned off of the principles that made her great. So, the gradual turning away from school education toward globalist-oriented indoctrination began. The evil father of the indoctrination system of government schools producing misguided fools began in earnest in the latter half of the nineteenth century.............Think about it. Today, almost half of American students hate God. They are also willing to take on the mantle of socialism, despite the horrors of it displayed in our hemisphere via Venezuela, and so many more failed countries.

The goal was to make the state the final and ultimate moral arbiter for the children, not their parents, not the churches.  The state!  We're there now, and they did it with the help of two Presidents, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom believed in two concepts:  "l'etat se moi", I am the state, and the Constitution is an impediment to human progress.  

All this is now supported by a totally corrupted education system in America. and the false history that's promoted and touted by the left is causing America to commit suicide, destroying us with out own values.  All outlined by Saul Alinsky in his Rules for Radicals.  

We know their goals and their means, now we have to have the courage and fortitude to confront them and transform education in America.  That starts with understanding education must become Job One in America.  It's been totally taken over by leftists, Marxists, socialists, communists, Democrats ..... sorry .... I'm repeating myself ..... and if America is to survive education at all levels must be totally transformed, and that has to start at the local school boards.  These school boards must be forced to realize the parents exercising their Constitutional rights are the power, and they're just hired help.  Hired help that can be thrown out of office, and that needs to start now.

And that mentality needs to be expanded to the state boards of education.  To fix this it must become an organized national effort, which is clear Trump is forcing the Republican party to adopt and promote, including the elimination of the Department of Education and any funding to universities, and taxing their endowments that are worth billions of dollars.  

Force them to become for profit institutions that have to compete without government grant money or student loans.  Then as totally private businesses, it they wish to push their leftist agenda and compete for student dollars in an open market, that's their business.  But the government must be forced to stay out of it and not force these insane diversity, inclusion and equity programs that are doing nothing more than destroying the nation. 

We must recognize and understand all the "rights" demanded by leftists are "wrongs", all promoted by losers who through the years imposed:

1. The totalitarian brutality in nations that (so far) have murdered and starved 100 million people?
2. The economic illiteracy of a system that has anywhere and everywhere produced misery and poverty?
3. The moral abomination of an ideology that assumes individuals are abjectly subservient to the state.

That's history and that history is incontestable, and that's the history that needs to be taught and it needs to be taught now, and as I've stated, Trump is forcing the Republican Party to embrace that concept, and vigorously promote it, because parents in America are now being awakened to the tyranny and corruption at the school board level.  All it takes is some leadership to create a national agenda and definitive corrective action, and I believe that would expand into all aspects of American life. 

The base has been awakened!  Will the leadership act?  We'll see.

What Progressives Wrought

A concise new volume will help Americans make sense of the stark divisions that confront us. 

Mike Sabo September 16, 2021 @ City Journal

America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism, by Ronald J. Pestritto (Encounter Books, 288 pp., $28.99)

It is no secret that American public life is fracturing. The fissures can be seen in our gladiatorial-like Supreme Court nomination hearings, the collapse of confidence in our institutions, and the mounting sense that many have that elections won’t change the country’s fundamental trajectory. These disputes are merely symptoms, however, of a broader problem, the roots of which extend back decades.

As Ronald J. Pestritto, graduate dean and professor of politics at Hillsdale College, argues in America Transformed, our present-day clashes reflect a fundamental “divide over first principles,” which he traces to the rise of the Progressive Movement in the late nineteenth century. Pestritto makes a convincing case that the Progressives—including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, and John Dewey—sought to “revolutionize both the theory and practice of American government.”

The Progressives had their differences and factions: consider the fierce 1912 presidential campaign between Wilson and Roosevelt. Yet they adhered to a “coherent set of principles, with a common purpose.” They unleashed a “direct assault on the core ideas of the American founding,” openly rejecting the natural rights teachings of the Declaration of Independence. Wilson once told an audience that “if you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface”—the same preface that contains the most concise articulation of the Founders’ political theory.

Pestritto argues that, for progressives like education reformer Dewey, the Founders’ “great sin” was to think that principles such as a natural human equality in rights and government by consent transcended “the particular circumstances of that day.” Influenced by Hegel’s philosophical idealism, they argued that historical progress had shown that what the Founders thought were universal truths were in fact simply ideas of their time. In fact, the principles of the American Founding, and the Constitution built to reflect them, actively prevented government from taking the swift action that the public now demanded.

Pestritto suggests that “native influences” had already compromised the American immune system by the time the Progressive Movement emerged. A toxic mix of Social Darwinism, pragmatism, and the rejection of social compact theory in New England and the antebellum South prepared American intellectuals and politicians to accept an alternative account of politics that seemed better able to meet the challenges of modern society. The Progressives claimed that historical progress necessitated a dynamic and perfectible human nature, an idea that the Founders rejected. James Madison’s claim in Federalist 10 that the prevention of majority tyranny would always be a problem in political life was simply false, they believed. Thus Woodrow Wilson and political scientist Frank Goodnow sharply criticized the Constitution’s separation of powers and the slow, methodical lawmaking process the Framers had put in place, which they saw as hopelessly out of step with the public will and too often stymied by a combination of political machines, big business, and other special interests.

Pestritto maintains that the progressives worked toward “democratizing and unifying national political institutions,” though they sometimes differed on the means to achieve this end. Ever the radical, Theodore Roosevelt proposed policies such as overturning judicial decisions and the recall of recalcitrant judges who resisted heavy regulation of business. Herbert Croly, a cofounder of The New Republic, wanted to eliminate political parties altogether.

To make politics fully democratic, the Progressives insisted that political leaders accountable to the people needed to find means of breaking the constitutional logjam—think of Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit.” Roosevelt and Wilson frequently enlisted (and refashioned) the memory of American statesmen such as Abraham Lincoln, John Marshall, and Daniel Webster, men who, in their rendering, had supposedly discerned history’s centralizing trends.

Pestritto argues that as the Progressives seemingly brought politics closer to the people, they simultaneously moved “policymaking power away from popular institutions,” handing it to “educated elites.” They essentially established a fourth branch of government, a vast bureaucracy that wields legislative, executive, and judicial powers—what Madison considered the very definition of tyranny—that would fully bloom during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. What we know today as the administrative state (a phrase coined by the political scientist Dwight Waldo in the 1950s) had its genesis in the Supreme Court’s ruling in J.W. Hampton v. United States, which granted broad powers to supposedly nonideological experts insulated from the corrupting effects of electoral politics.

Pestritto notes that this new conception of government—the sharp split between politics and administration—originated in the “laboratories of democracy” of state and local governments. There, Progressive governors such as California’s Hiram Johnson and Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette pushed direct democracy: the ballot initiative, recall, referendum, the direct election of senators, and electoral primaries. Through the establishment of government by unelected commission and the rise of nonpartisan city managers, the notion of expert administration permeated state governments in Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, and Illinois, as well as cities such as Galveston, Cincinnati, Des Moines, and Cleveland.

The Progressives’ strong belief in the notion of historical progress also guided their foreign policy. History had demonstrated that modern democracy was the “permanent and most advanced form of government,” Wilson once wrote. To make the world safe for democracy, the Progressives’ idealistic foreign policy necessitated an aggressive series of interventions in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Cuba, Mexico, and the Philippines.

History had chosen the United States to lead the “children” (as Wilson described other sovereign nations) so that they could someday reach the heights of democratic governance. And should certain “barbaric races” fail to do what they were told, Progressive historian Charles Merriam wrote in a particularly appalling passage, they “may be swept away.”

Some Progressives saw historical progress as the will of God Himself. Marshaling rhetoric that today would be regarded as extreme Christian nationalism, Roosevelt told the Progressive Party convention in 1912, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

Adherents of the Social Gospel, the Progressive Movement’s religious wing, were liberal Protestants who worked to reconcile life “on earth as it is in heaven.” They turned away from concerns over individual salvation and other orthodox theological concerns and instead inculcated a social ethic that sought to use the modern state to equalize economic conditions. Pestritto observes that in one of his more moderate moments Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch called for the “public ownership of essential industries.” By following God’s unfolding plan, which history was revealing to mankind, human beings would someday experience the Eden that our ancestors had failed to maintain.

Pestritto concludes America Transformed by noting that, thanks to the Progressives’ handiwork, “citizens of two different regimes [are] occupying the same country.” The regime that today opposes that of the Founders is far different from what the original Progressives intended, but by uncoupling America from its natural rights foundations, they can justly be credited (or rather, blamed) for inaugurating our current crisis. Pestritto’s concise volume, the best available overview of progressive political thought and practice, will help Americans make sense of the stark divisions that confront us.

Mike Sabo is the editor of RealClear’s American Civics portal.

Photo: Lingbeek/iStock

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529).

 

What Progressives Wrought

A concise new volume will help Americans make sense of the stark divisions that confront us.

Mike Sabo September 16, 2021 @ City Journal 

America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism, by Ronald J. Pestritto (Encounter Books, 288 pp., $28.99)

It is no secret that American public life is fracturing. The fissures can be seen in our gladiatorial-like Supreme Court nomination hearings, the collapse of confidence in our institutions, and the mounting sense that many have that elections won’t change the country’s fundamental trajectory. These disputes are merely symptoms, however, of a broader problem, the roots of which extend back decades.

As Ronald J. Pestritto, graduate dean and professor of politics at Hillsdale College, argues in America Transformed, our present-day clashes reflect a fundamental “divide over first principles,” which he traces to the rise of the Progressive Movement in the late nineteenth century. Pestritto makes a convincing case that the Progressives—including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, and John Dewey—sought to “revolutionize both the theory and practice of American government.”

The Progressives had their differences and factions: consider the fierce 1912 presidential campaign between Wilson and Roosevelt. Yet they adhered to a “coherent set of principles, with a common purpose.” They unleashed a “direct assault on the core ideas of the American founding,” openly rejecting the natural rights teachings of the Declaration of Independence. Wilson once told an audience that “if you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface”—the same preface that contains the most concise articulation of the Founders’ political theory.

Pestritto argues that, for progressives like education reformer Dewey, the Founders’ “great sin” was to think that principles such as a natural human equality in rights and government by consent transcended “the particular circumstances of that day.” Influenced by Hegel’s philosophical idealism, they argued that historical progress had shown that what the Founders thought were universal truths were in fact simply ideas of their time. In fact, the principles of the American Founding, and the Constitution built to reflect them, actively prevented government from taking the swift action that the public now demanded.

Pestritto suggests that “native influences” had already compromised the American immune system by the time the Progressive Movement emerged. A toxic mix of Social Darwinism, pragmatism, and the rejection of social compact theory in New England and the antebellum South prepared American intellectuals and politicians to accept an alternative account of politics that seemed better able to meet the challenges of modern society. The Progressives claimed that historical progress necessitated a dynamic and perfectible human nature, an idea that the Founders rejected. James Madison’s claim in Federalist 10 that the prevention of majority tyranny would always be a problem in political life was simply false, they believed. Thus Woodrow Wilson and political scientist Frank Goodnow sharply criticized the Constitution’s separation of powers and the slow, methodical lawmaking process the Framers had put in place, which they saw as hopelessly out of step with the public will and too often stymied by a combination of political machines, big business, and other special interests.

Pestritto maintains that the progressives worked toward “democratizing and unifying national political institutions,” though they sometimes differed on the means to achieve this end. Ever the radical, Theodore Roosevelt proposed policies such as overturning judicial decisions and the recall of recalcitrant judges who resisted heavy regulation of business. Herbert Croly, a cofounder of The New Republic, wanted to eliminate political parties altogether.

To make politics fully democratic, the Progressives insisted that political leaders accountable to the people needed to find means of breaking the constitutional logjam—think of Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit.” Roosevelt and Wilson frequently enlisted (and refashioned) the memory of American statesmen such as Abraham Lincoln, John Marshall, and Daniel Webster, men who, in their rendering, had supposedly discerned history’s centralizing trends.

Pestritto argues that as the Progressives seemingly brought politics closer to the people, they simultaneously moved “policymaking power away from popular institutions,” handing it to “educated elites.” They essentially established a fourth branch of government, a vast bureaucracy that wields legislative, executive, and judicial powers—what Madison considered the very definition of tyranny—that would fully bloom during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. What we know today as the administrative state (a phrase coined by the political scientist Dwight Waldo in the 1950s) had its genesis in the Supreme Court’s ruling in J.W. Hampton v. United States, which granted broad powers to supposedly nonideological experts insulated from the corrupting effects of electoral politics.

Pestritto notes that this new conception of government—the sharp split between politics and administration—originated in the “laboratories of democracy” of state and local governments. There, Progressive governors such as California’s Hiram Johnson and Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette pushed direct democracy: the ballot initiative, recall, referendum, the direct election of senators, and electoral primaries. Through the establishment of government by unelected commission and the rise of nonpartisan city managers, the notion of expert administration permeated state governments in Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, and Illinois, as well as cities such as Galveston, Cincinnati, Des Moines, and Cleveland.

The Progressives’ strong belief in the notion of historical progress also guided their foreign policy. History had demonstrated that modern democracy was the “permanent and most advanced form of government,” Wilson once wrote. To make the world safe for democracy, the Progressives’ idealistic foreign policy necessitated an aggressive series of interventions in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Cuba, Mexico, and the Philippines.

History had chosen the United States to lead the “children” (as Wilson described other sovereign nations) so that they could someday reach the heights of democratic governance. And should certain “barbaric races” fail to do what they were told, Progressive historian Charles Merriam wrote in a particularly appalling passage, they “may be swept away.”

Some Progressives saw historical progress as the will of God Himself. Marshaling rhetoric that today would be regarded as extreme Christian nationalism, Roosevelt told the Progressive Party convention in 1912, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

Adherents of the Social Gospel, the Progressive Movement’s religious wing, were liberal Protestants who worked to reconcile life “on earth as it is in heaven.” They turned away from concerns over individual salvation and other orthodox theological concerns and instead inculcated a social ethic that sought to use the modern state to equalize economic conditions. Pestritto observes that in one of his more moderate moments Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch called for the “public ownership of essential industries.” By following God’s unfolding plan, which history was revealing to mankind, human beings would someday experience the Eden that our ancestors had failed to maintain.

Pestritto concludes America Transformed by noting that, thanks to the Progressives’ handiwork, “citizens of two different regimes [are] occupying the same country.” The regime that today opposes that of the Founders is far different from what the original Progressives intended, but by uncoupling America from its natural rights foundations, they can justly be credited (or rather, blamed) for inaugurating our current crisis. Pestritto’s concise volume, the best available overview of progressive political thought and practice, will help Americans make sense of the stark divisions that confront us.

Mike Sabo is the editor of RealClear’s American Civics portal.

Photo: Lingbeek/iStock

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). DONATE

 

COVID-19 Thoughts Part 105: What James A. Haught calls nine decades of progress, is really nine decades of pagan decline

03/08/2021  Don McCullen IntellectualConservative

 

James Haught quote on John Dewey by N/A is licensed under AZquotes.com N/A

When the journalists come out and tell you what their worldview is, there should be no argument that these people who report the news, also used their positions to push an ideological worldview.  You know that John Dewey is the father of progressive education.  Well “The Great One” a.k.a. Mark Levin in his recent book UnFreedom of the Press, also points out that Dewey is the father of modern journalism if not ONE of them.  Thanks to Dewey, he helped created a modern-day press that thinks it exists to make the make the world “better” regardless if we like what the remedies are or not.  More often than not these remedies advance bigger government, higher taxes, challenging God and his Holy Law, challenging the autonomy of the traditional family if not attempting to destroy it completely and replacing the family unit with a supernanny state, a decline in common sense morality, and making certain forms of Murder legal…regardless if its sold as a right to choose/woman’s autonomy or death with dignity.

The likes of Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Sam Donaldson, eventually admitted to your face that they are liberal if not leftists.  The cable news outlets these days admit their bias and/or have it right up on display for everyone to see and hear.  Before Saul Alinsky wrote his Rules For Radicals, Dewey called for liberalism to become more radical.  The left is so passionate in making its changes, for they must prove they not only need God and his Law, but they can become God, and declare themselves to be Good without God.  The old school journalists were no different in the worldview of leftist progressivism/humanism.  With few exceptions, humanism and leftist progressivism are really one in the same. ............To Read More.....

 

The Government School Cabal Must Pay The Piper

By Ron Edwards, Columnist, Talk Show Host| 2019-10-17T08:35:50-04:00October 17th, 2019|

Ever since the forlorn days of John Dewey, leftists have been feverishly working to politically destroy the United States. Mr. Dewey and his like-minded followers understood, in order to change the United States into a lesser nation under international dominance, Americans would have to be weened off of the principles that made her great. So, the gradual turning away from school education toward globalist-oriented indoctrination began. The evil father of the indoctrination system of government schools producing misguided fools began in earnest in the later half of the nineteenth century.  

One has to ask, did Dewey and his fellow haters of God and liberty have the right to engage in their dastardly mission to destroy our exceptional nation way of life. Personally, I don’t think so, but they were most certainly allowed to have their merry way to seriously infect American education with a litany of practices to harm our republic. Think about it. Today, almost half of American students hate God. They are also willing to take on the mantle of socialism, despite the horrors of it displayed in our hemisphere via Venezuela, and so many more failed countries.  

Dewey and his friends wanted to rid America of the God inspired concept of rugged individualism. It emphasized you and I being free to reach our greatest potential through personal achievement. Because of the original underpinnings of such Godly principles as charity, thrift, diligence and faith, America became the number one place on earth, where anyone, no matter their station in life had a good shot at securing success and leaving a great legacy and an inheritance for their children and grandchildren.............To Read More.....