As I mentioned in a previous post, Woodrow Wilson was the first President to speak bad about the Constitution. However, he was not the first President to decide he knew better than what the Constitution allowed.
Johan Goldberg in "Liberal Fascism" wrote that Theodor Roosevelt believed states rights were more important than state or individual sovereignty as protected by the 10th amendment. Likewise, Roosevelt "regularly exceeded the bounds of his traditional legal powers, doing his will first and waiting (or not) for the courts and the legislature to catch up.
FDR did, and Obama does, the same thing. Heck, many republicans, like Teddy Roosevelt, also did the same. So, as you can see, the progressive movement, to fully evolve, to fully evolve the Constitution that they believed was a living organism, or Darwinian, believe they have to ignore the Constitution to obtain their goals. That's the only way.
Classical liberals of the past, and Conservatives of today, believe the opposite. They want to do whatever they can to stop progressives from changing the Constitution at the expense of individual rights.
Actually, as Goldberg notes, "Wilson wrote treaties explaining why Americans should abandon their 'blind devotion' to the Constitution, Teddy was rough-riding all over the document, doing what he pleased and giving bellicose speeches about how the courts had sided against 'popular rights' and were 'lagging behind' the new realities."
As you can see, this is one of the reasons why progressivism lost favor with the people, who believed some changes was good, but progressives were going overboard. That is why, by 1936 when FDR ran for president, the word progressive was changed to liberal.
Then, by the 1980s, the word liberalism lost favor. Today liberals are using the word progressive more and more, considering many who learned to hate progressivism have since passed. Although it's hard to fool Americans who love tradition America and love the Constitution.
No comments:
Post a Comment