‘To Hell With the Constitution!’

600x393In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt intervened in a strike by Pennsylvania coal miners, exceeding his Constitutional authority as president. When this was pointed out to him by Republican House whip James E. Watson, Roosevelt allegedly yelled, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!”

This outburst reflected the novel Progressive view of the Chief Executive. Instead of the Constitution’s limited powers focused on specific needs, such as national defense, beyond the capacity of the individual states or local governments to address, the President needed more expansive authority in order to serve the “people.” Over 100 years later, Barack Obama has governed on the same assumption, one that undermines the Constitution’s structure of balanced powers and limited government, and puts at risk our political freedom and autonomy.

In January of this year Obama famously asserted, much less honestly than did T.R., his willingness to shed Constitutional limits: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got phone.” And he’s been true to his belief during his nearly six years in office. He has changed his own signature legislation, Obamacare, 42 times. He has also used his “pen and phone” to change immigration laws, gun laws, labor laws, environmental policy, and many other statutes that should be the purview of the legislative branch, to which the Constitution gives the law-making power.

Other presidents, of course, have used signing statements and executive orders. But Obama has pushed this traditional prerogative far beyond the bounds that presidents in the past were usually careful to respect. But the ideas behind this expansion of power are not peculiar to Obama, and transcend any one man. They come from the Progressive worldview that rejects the Constitution’s philosophical vision of humans as driven by conflicting “passions and interests,” and eager to amass power in order to gratify both. The Progressives, on the contrary, believe that human nature can be improved, and that technocrats armed with new knowledge of human behavior and motivations can be entrusted with the concentrated power necessary for managing that improvement and solving the new problems created by industrialism, technology, and the other novelties of modernity.

In terms of the federal government, the key to this new vision is the executive branch, led by an activist president. Woodrow Wilson was quite explicit about these ideas. In 1890 he wrote of the need for a “leader of men” who has “such sympathetic and penetrative insight as shall enable him to discern quite unerringly the motives which move other men in the mass.” He knows “what it is that lies waiting to be stirred in the minds and purposes of groups and masses of men.” This sympathy is one “whose power is to command, to command by knowing its instrument,” and the leader possessing this “sympathy” cares only “for the external uses to which they [people] may be put.”

More frightening still are Wilson’s comments further expanding on this “sympathy.” “Whoever would effect a change in a modern constitutional government must first educate his fellow-citizens to want some change. That done, he must persuade them to want the particular change he wants. He must first make public opinion willing to listen and then see to it that it listens to the right things. He must stir it up to search for an opinion, and then manage to put the right opinion in its way.” Gone are the notions that free people decide their own political fate and choose representatives to serve their interests and principles, their autonomy protected by the Constitutional structure of checks and balances. Now an empowered elite presumably wiser about human nature will, like Plato’s Guardians, manipulate the people’s opinions so that they make the “right” choice. These ideas are on a continuum that at the extreme end lie Mussolini’s fascism and Lenin’s communism.

The president, then, must transcend the Constitution’s outmoded limits on government power. In 1908, for example, Wilson complained that the president was merely a “legal executive” and “guiding authority in the application of the law and the execution of policy,” which is the Constitution’s charge that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” For Wilson, this was too limited an authority, for the president could only veto bad laws, and was not “given an opportunity to make good ones.” And explicitly rejecting the Constitution’s vision of clashing “factions” driven by conflicting “passions and interests,” Wilson writes, “You cannot compound a successful government out of antagonisms.” So much for Madison’s governing principle in Federalist 51 that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The Progressive collectivist “people” possessing uniform interests must have a “President as the unifying force in our complex system.”

We see in Wilson’s writings another Progressive assumption still with us today: defining Americans as an abstract, collectivist “people.” This unitary “people” rejects the Founders’ recognition of America’s great variety of economic interests, passions such as religion, and regional folkways that characterize the citizens of the United States. Indeed, it is just this variety that threatened political freedom, for a flawed human nature is intoxicated by power, and always seeks more power in order to gratify its peculiar needs and interests by forming “factions” of the like-minded. As John Adams wrote in 1787, the “selfish passions in the generality of men” are the “strongest.” Knowing that this selfish inclination is rooted in a human nature unchanged since the days of Athens, and so cannot be improved or eliminated, the Founders sought merely to balance faction against faction so that no one faction can amass enough power to threaten the freedom of all.

The proponents of centralized power, however, require a more homogeneous “people” to justify expanding government power. Such a “people” will have similar interests that only the central government can effectively identify and serve. Interests like “social justice,” “social duties,” and “social efficiency,” cannot be fulfilled by local or state governments, or by the parochial aims of civil society or the market, or by churches divided by sectarian beliefs. The federal technocrats of government agencies, more knowledgeable than the people about what they really want and need, must be given the power to trump those clashing local interests and manage polices that serve the larger “social” good––as defined not by the people in all their variety and complexity, but by federal bureaucrats and technocrats.

Go back to Obama’s “pen and phone” statement and read what follows to see this same collectivist vision at work: “And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.” The president assumes that in a country of some 330 million people, “the help they need” and their views on improving job creation, education, or job training are all the same, and thus one man can formulate policies that advance them, cutting out the several hundred representative of Congress, and state and local governments.

The obvious danger is one evident from the 20th century’s history of totalitarianism from the Bolsheviks to the Khmer Rouge. Elites convinced of their superior knowledge and insight into human behavior and the proper aims people should pursue, demand the coercive power to achieve these goods. But true to the Founders’ vision of a flawed human nature, power is “of an encroaching nature,” as Madison and Washington both warned. It intoxicates and corrupts those who possess it. Moreover, it requires weakening the autonomy and freedom of the people, whose various interests will contradict the “vision of the anointed,” as Thomas Sowell dubs them, who claim to know what’s best for everybody, and use their power to neutralize or eliminate those who resist this superior wisdom.

We need to recognize that for over a century this Progressive vision has revolutionized the federal government, which now has a size, scope, cost, and coercive power that would have horrified the Founders. The ideas underlying this vision––for example, the notion that the federal government and its agencies are better able to “solve problems” than are local and state governments, or civil society––are taken for granted as self-evident even by many Republicans. Thus focusing on the spectacular incompetence of Barack Obama can blind us to the dangers that will continue after he has left office. Obama vowed to “fundamentally transform America,” but that transformation had started long before he became president.

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  • truebearing

    “The ideas underlying this vision––for example, the notion that the federal government and its agencies are better able to “solve problems” than are local and state governments, or civil society––are taken for granted as self-evident even by many Republicans. Thus focusing on the spectacular incompetence of Barack Obama can blind us to the dangers that will continue after he has left office…”

    Great point. There were leftists before Obama, leftists put Obama in the Whitehouse, and there will still be leftists when he’s thankfully gone. If we heap all of the failure upon him, we fail to assign some of it to the Republican Party, or the American voter, and we may inadvertently shield the rest of the Left from their collective culpability. Obama is as much a symptom as a villain.

    When past revolutions have failed the Left has always rationalized that it wasn’t the ideology but the people in charge who were flawed. Obama will receive the same treatment. The Left will sacrifice Obama, like the lizard that willingly loses its tail to save its life. The leftist lizard has already started growing a new tail. We can’t assign all of the evil done during Obama’s presidency strictly to Obama. He will be gone, but the reptilian leftist braintrust will remain the same.

    • Otis

      Nice analogies, truebearing.

      • truebearing

        Thanks. As you can see, I don’t trust or like the lizard people.

  • I_Am_Me

    This is one of the most powerful polemical essays I’ve ever read. The root sin of the Left has always been and will always be arrogance. Arrogance used in furtherance of control over fellow human beings, free will be damned.

    Thank you Bruce Thornton.

    • truebearing

      The core arrogance of the Left is the assumption that they are automatically the superior intellects — the philosopher kings. Their arrogance is made baseless by the indisputable historical record of the abject failures of all previous leftist regimes. They have zero evidence to support their deluded belief that they are somehow the enlightened ones who posess the answers for mankind. Quite the opposite, they have proven they are profoundly incapable of doing anything but make things worse. The Left is criminally deluded.

  • Docs357

    He get there first

  • Gee

    So much for a “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.” It has perished and is long gone

    • Wolfie

      I may open up a can of worms, here, but when Abraham Lincoln spoke these words … his most memorable words … he had already violated them, in more ways than one. His invasion of the Southern states (which had merely exercised their power to determine their own future), the illegal and un-Constitutional detainment of dissidents in the the North, without arrest warrants or charges … these and many more actions signaled an end to government by the people, and for the people.

      The “imperial presidency” commenced when Mr. Lincoln took office, and has never ended.

      Something tells me that Mr. Obama sees himself as the rightful inheritor of Lincoln’s imperial powers, and he’s determined to use them.

      • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

        This is basically Libertarian historical revisionism, and frankly, we’ve heard it all before. The entire North (not simply Lincoln) attacked and conquered the South not because they were exercising “their power to determine their own future” (i.e. practice slavery) but because they were determined to expand slavery all over the western territories. It was not a war to free the southern slaves, but take note that such a war would have been justified (at least with volunteer troops) because the south did not have any “right” to practice slavery. Seceding to expand slavery across the west is not the same thing as seceding from a central government that is exceeding its Constitutional authority and has become a deadly threat to individual liberty, as is the case today. Free states today are morally entitled to secede; the slave states of the south were not.

        As for Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, remember that the Constitution allows that the writ may be suspended in times of invasion or rebellion. Technically, its suspension is probably beyond Presidential competence and requires an act of Congress, which Lincoln could presumably have obtained. Does that fix it for you? Or read Lincoln’s defense, “Shall all the laws but one be executed?”.

        So: the loss of American freedom has been going on for a long time, but the Civil War was not the beginning nor the end, and in fact was responsible for increasing the amount of freedom in this country (unless you think holding black slaves was a good idea). What ails us now is the Progressivism described by Thornton, not the politics of Lincoln.

        • Wolfie

          Well, this is the first time I’ve ever been accused of “libertarian” anything!

          It is important that, to me, that you know that I live in Illinois, and don’t want anyone to held in slavery, whether it was the type practiced in the Old South (or the Old North, for that matter), or the slavery of the welfare state.

          Having lived in both north and south, I’ve been able to see the issues involved in our first civil war from two perspectives. The first time I went south, I remember stopping at a gas station in Georgia, circa 1967. The attendant came out, and I asked him to fill it up. He looked at my license plate, said, “Land of Lincoln, huh?”, and proceeded to spit on it, before moving on with his duties.

          However, it cannot be denied that the result of Lincoln’s absolute determination to bring the South back into the Union has resulted in a massive loss of freedom, ever since. What was a voluntary union of states became something else, entirely.

          • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

            Yes, it can be denied, and I’m denying it! The loss of freedom really dates from the post-Civil War era, when it because more and more accepted that the government should regulate businesses, apparently without limit. It wasn’t Lincoln who massively expanded the Federal leviathan (of course at the expense of the states and the individual), who instituted the welfare state or the progressive income tax – it was progressives. Lincoln’s views on the economy would be termed “Conservative” by modern standards.

          • I_Am_Me

            What’s your take on the Civil Rights Act?

          • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

            The one in 1866? Look, it’s a little late to go over all that – and Lincoln was dead by then anyway! But it certainly didn’t end freedom in the country, and as for the 1965 CRA, that was a long time after Lincoln.

          • I_Am_Me

            1965. Specifically the Constitutional underpinnings of anti-discrimination laws.

          • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

            I think it went too far and should have been confined to government agencies.

          • I_Am_Me

            I think it went too far as well, and as far as I can tell, it and abuses of the 14th by judicial activists are the end of the experiment known as America. I simply do not see a political way to save the country now from an eventual fracture.

      • hrwolfe

        Further the South upon succession was not occupied but home to Federal Arsenals and Forts that were seized or fired upon, that is not an invasion, could be more akin to treason. Can we move about 150 years forward?

        • Wolfie

          So, states secede from the Union … which was voluntary, up to then … and they’re supposed to leave Union arsenals and forts intact upon their territory? Especially when the leader of the “other” nation is raising an army to exercise his will on these same states, by force?

          This was a military decision, on the part of the southern states. No doubt, it felt good to fire upon the installations in question. But there is also no denying that leaving these forts and arsenals intact, behind the borders of the new nation, would have be militarily … shall we say? … unsound.

          When the Feds com after my guns, by the way, I fully expect to die not in an act of treason, but in defense of my rights … and yours.

          OK, we can now move 150 years forward. Our government, today, is much more dangerous to we, the people, than Mr. Lincoln’s ever dreamed of being …

          • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

            You should be able to see the difference between 1860 and today. The south seceded for insufficient cause, its purpose being to expand slavery. A state or preferably a group of states could secede today with justification, but only if their purpose was to establish freedom, not if they simply wanted a new kind of dictatorship. In other words, if 10 states today said we’re going to secede to guarantee gun rights and end income redistribution, they would have the right to do it. But if NY, CT, and MA were to secede so that they could annul the 1st and 2nd Amendments and confiscate their citizens’ guns, they would not have the right to do it.

  • http://www.clarespark.com/ Clare Spark

    TR and Wilson are well known as early Progressives, but they were not identical. Wilson was more localist than Roosevelt. On why the Progressives are still in the saddle see http://clarespark.com/2014/09/03/solidarity-on-the-left-vs-disunity-on-the-right/. “Solidarity on the Left vs. Disunity on the Right.”

    • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

      The fact that there were differences between TR and Wilson was not disputed by Bruce Thornton, nor is it particularly relevant to an understanding of the nature of Progressivism, which is Thornton’s concern here.

      I took at a look at your blog, and I think you make distinctions where none are warranted (as between social democrats and “hard-core” leftists as though there were some sort of fundamental disagreement between them) and misunderstand the nature of both the Left and Right today. Your point of view seems to be a kind of partially-intellectualized Republican Establishmentarianism, for want of a handier description. Like so many other “moderates” (i.e. moderate statists), you blame social conservatives and accuse them of being theocrats (“abandoning the separation of church and state”) which is the kind of propaganda we usually hear from the Left. The only Republican I can think of who fits that description is Rick Santorum, and careful analysis demonstrates he’s more of a crypto-fascist than a conservative – he is in no way emblematic of the Conservative or even the social-conservative movement.

      And no, this is not the time for “solidarity” between the Establishment and Conservatives, it’s time for Conservatives to take over the GOP or destroy it, for only a Conservative party can defeat the progressive Left. Having guys like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie lead the Republican Party for the past 50 years is how we got to where we are today – the brink of destruction.

  • Virgil Hilts

    From The Article:”The Progressives, on the contrary, believe that human nature can be improved…”. The fact that that so many rapacious and down-right criminal politicians and their minions have flooded Washington, in order to line their pockets, is prima facie evidence that, first, human nature cannot be improved, and secondly…if it could be ‘improved’…they are not, in their ethically-challenged world, in any manner the right people to attempt to achieve such a noble-sounding endeavor.

  • USARetired

    Why is congress allowing an illegal immigrant to destroy this Nation??

    • NJK

      Because they’ve never read the constitution and are either bought off or ignorant of their responsibilities. Have you ever seen as big a misfit as John Boehner and his friends in the House? Absolute ignorant misfits.

  • Demo P. Seal; PouponMarks

    John No Shame But Lame McCain has repeatedly stated that Titty Roosevelt was his favorite President.

  • Canadianpatriot

    This all comes down to one thing: the American people are not educated about the Constitution, the structure of the Republican government, and the reasons for that structure. It must be taught in schools not so much in a factual sense, but in an analytical sense, much as this essay is structured. Were the public educated in these matters they would not elect saboteurs of the Republic who masquerade as public benefactors.

    • NJK

      This is why we need a constitutional amendment that allows only tax payers to vote. Those with “no skin in the game,” don’t deserve that right.

  • http://shugartpoliticalaction.shugartmedia.com/uncommonsense/ Chris Shugart

    In 1933 the German parliament passed the Enabling Act as an
    emergency measure “to Remedy the Distress of the People and the State.” It
    allowed the govt to pass laws without parliamentary consent. Obama is doing the
    same thing, but in a more kind and gentle way: one law at a time via executive
    actions all purported to help the country. But make no mistake, the result will
    be the same.

    • NJK

      These EO, aren’t law. The people have to ignore them. They aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, and I predict the person who vow’s to eliminate them with his pen and trash can, will win in a landslide. Ted Cruz is that man.

    • kikorikid

      NEXT- We will get the Equivalent of the 1936 “Nuremburg Laws” that
      disenfranchised the Jews from every aspect of “Life” in German Society.
      This time it will be “Diversity Laws” that ,in a de jure manner, disenfranchise
      Whites from American Society. It is already being done, in a de facto manner, as Whites are prevented from employment in the name of Diversity.

  • tagalog

    How will one of OUR leaders have “sympathetic and penetrative insight” so as to see what the masses want, when our leaders come from among the privileged, are taught all their lives that they are not like others, and go to the schools that pander to elitism, then carefully keep themselves aloof from the hoi polloi all their lives? Woodrow Wilson of Princeton was an idiot if he thought that America would produce philosopher kings.

  • NJK

    So, this must end. We’re going to have to kill this “progressive,” monster with a rock solid constitutionalist, one agency after another.

  • CDM

    The Progressives, on the contrary, believe that human nature can be improved, and that technocrats armed with new knowledge of human behavior and motivations can be entrusted with the concentrated power necessary for managing that improvement and solving the new problems created by industrialism, technology, and the other novelties of modernity.

    Didn’t the people who ran the Soviet Union believe the exact same thing? Isn’t that the essence of Marxist-Leninism?

    I confess, my friends, that I truly fear what might happen in the next two years. I have the suspicion that when January 20th, 2017 rolls around, the current occupiers of the White House, President Jarrett and her minions, might decide, regardless of who gets elected, that they don’t want to leave. People of that ilk, once they get a taste of power, do not give it up easily.

  • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

    Thornton nails the Progressive Left here in a manner worthy of David Horowitz, even though he did not have the advantage of being a part of the early Progressive movement a century ago as Horowitz did in being part of the New Left a half-century ago. It is an ideological dissection of the movement’s sinister goals and should be required reading for anyone who wishes to run for office as a Republican.

  • Immigrant_from_Socialism7

    A SOCIALIST DOESN’T CARE WHAT YOU WANT…THEY WANT YOU TO DO THEIR BIDDING…SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS….BUT THEY WILL NEVER HAVE TO LIVE AS THEY EXPECT YOU TO.
    MARGINALISING RELIGION,MOCKING RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND INSIDIOUSLY UNDERMINING YOUR BELIEFS.
    THAT is How THEY CONTROL YOU AND YOUR FAMILY….And AS THE “STATE” IS ALL KNOWING AND WILL USE FORCE (LAWS,POLICE,AUDITS ETC.) You BECOME a WARD Of the STATE….And You And YOUR FAMILY ARE LOST…BECAUSE LIFE LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS…IS No LONGER A CONSTITUTIONAL GUARANTEE…But A WHIM OF AN APPARATCHIK,And AS ALL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES ARE UNIONISED (THE PUREST FORM OF SOCIALISM) THE SOCIALIST PARTY…Or AS WE IMMIGRANTS SAY..The ANTI AMERICA PARTY..HOLD SWAY AS LONG AS YOU NATIVE BORN AMERICANS LET THEM…And It WON’T Get BETTER…UNLESS YOU VOTE FOR AMERICA,AMERICANS, And HOLD the U.S.CONSTITUTION in the SAME HIGH REGARD AS WE IMMIGRANTS DO.

    PLEASE don’t be PASSIVE…LIBERTY ONCE LOST…IS VERY DIFFICULT TO GET BACK.

  • Christopher Riddle

    Teddy Roosevelt WAS the first”PROGRESSIVE”!He was followed by Wilson,Hoover and FDR!!This is what”PROGRESSIVES”are ALL ABOUT!!!!!!!!!!

  • hrwolfe

    As much as I agree with this column I am currently trying to gain more incite of TR. I am bending toward his version of Progressive is diametrically opposed to Wilson’s view. Further I think Teddy truly loathed Wilson so far my research is not lending TR to what we currently think when we think Progressive.

  • andrewwhitehead

    Let’s not forget the so-called “Republicans” in the congress who have aided and abetted The Once(TM). They deserve just as much blame, if not more, because they see what is happening and all they do is talk about it.
    Talk is cheap and Obama(PBUH) knows that better than Republican.