Scary Progressives/Socialists: In Their Own Words, Part 2

“Progressivism” is a reform movement that began in the 1890’s and has remained active to this day. At times it has had a lower profile but it has been an active force in American politics for over 100 years.

So what is my beef with “Progressives” ? In part 1, I gave you the history of the movement and the names of some of its’ current members. For the second part of the answer I offer you a compilation of the Progressives in their own words:

Early Progressives/Socialists:

NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, ITALIAN PHILOSOPHER & FATHER OF MODERN POLITICS:

“Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.”

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, NOBEL PRIZE WINNER & PLAYWRIGHT:

“The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it … If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?”

“I don’t want to punish anybody. (But there are) an extraordinary number of people whom I want to kill. I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly-appointed board, just as they might come before the income tax commissioner, and say every five years, or every seven years, just put them there, and say, “Sir, or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence?”

If you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the big organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.

JOHN DEWY, AMERICAN PHILOSPHER, PSYCHOLOGIST & EDUCATIONAL REFORMER:

“Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.”

SIR FRANCIS GALTON, ANTHROPOLOGIST & EUGENICIST (He invented the term Eugenics):

“It has now become a serious necessity to better the breed of the human race. The average citizen is too base for the everyday work of modern civilization.”

“(Eugenics) must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claim to become an orthodox religious tenet for the future, for Eugenics co-operates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What Nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man must do providently, quickly and kindly.”

WOODROW WILSON, 28th U.S. PRESIDENT:

“The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution … but only because the President has the nation behind him and Congress has not.”

“Government does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.”

“All that progressives ask or desire is permission–in an era when development, evolution, is a scientific word–to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”

STUART CHASE, AMERICAN ECONOMIST & ENGINEER (Credited with coining the term The New Deal used by FDR):

“The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.”

“Why should the Russians have all the fun remaking a world.”

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, 19th CENTURY GERMAN PHILOSPHER:

“There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.”

“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, 32nd U.S. PRESIDENT

“Throughout the nation men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the Government, look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth… I pledge you, I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people… This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms.”

“A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.”

“Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.”

“If I went to work in a factory the first thing I’d do is join a union.”

“As new commander in chief under the oath to which you are still bound, I reserve the right to command you in any phase of the situation which now confronts us.”

MARGARET SANGER, AMERICAN FOUNDER OF THE BIRTH CONTROL MOVEMENT:

“We are failing to segregate morons who are increasingly multiplying … a dead weight of human waste… an ever-increasing spawning class of human beings who should never have been born at all.”

OTHERS:

“I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.”

“The case for government by elites is irrefutable.” – Senator William Fulbright

Modern/Current Progressives:

FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK, AUSTRIAN BORN ECONOMIST & PHILOSOPHER:

“Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rates higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for.”

“Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.”

LYNDON JOHNSON, U.S. PRESIDENT:

“I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.”

“There is but one way for a president to deal with the Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it’s really going to work, the relationship between the president and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous.”

“No member of our generation who wasn’t a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.”

“It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.”

JIMMY CARTER, 39th U.S. PRESIDENT:

“Republicans are men of narrow vision, who are afraid of the future.”

“What has happened at Guantanamo Bay… does not represent the will of the American people. I’m embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. I think it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use the despicable means to hurt innocent people.”

MICHELLE OBAMA, U.S. FIRST LADY:

“The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”

BARACK OBAMA, 44th U.S. PRESIDENT:

“It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure everybody who is behind you, that they have got a chance at success, too. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

“We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don’t want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize their full potential.”

“It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

“But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. … one of the, I think the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”

BILL FLETCHER, JR., SENIOR SCHOLAR – INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES’:

In this sense, comrades, I am here to not only speak to you about the subject of this panel, but to put before you a challenge. Too many of us on the Left act as if we have all the time in the world to make changes. If it does not happen in our lifetimes, too many of us think, it will inevitably happen in the next. No! History demonstrates exactly the opposite. There are no guarantees.

“DSA is needed as a major force to transform the Left and compel the entire Left to recognize that ours must be a struggle for power; a struggle for a progressive politics; a struggle to create a national-popular bloc capable of truly altering the priorities of this country…and this necessitates theory and it necessitates organization.

Remember the words of A. Philip Randolph that I think are so applicable to this moment:

“At the banquet table of nature there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything; and if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization.” What more needs to be said!

MANY OTHERS:

“Two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa.” – Anita Dunn, former Obama White House Communications Director

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” – Rahm Emanuel, Obama White House Chief of Staff

“[A]lmost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine. And if the Court is right, then fundamentalism does not justify the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. ” – Cass Sunstein, Obama Regulatory Czar

“ In Venezuela, with Chavez, really an incredible revolution — a Democratic revolution — to begin to put in place saying that we’re going to have impact on the people of Venezuela…” – Mark Lloyd, FCC Diversity Officer

“Capitalism is a stupid system, a backward system.” Stokely Carmichael, African American Activist

“Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy.” – David Korten, Member of the Club of Rome

“Capitalism works better from every perspective when the economic decision makers are forced to share power with those who will be affected by those decisions.” – Barney Frank, Rep. U.S. House of Representatives, (MA)

“Generally speaking we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money because they are convinced that there is a free lunch. We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults only, no limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun.” – Ron Bloom, Obama’s Manufacturing Czar

“I think ultimately the rate of growth of material consumption is going to have to come down and there’s going to have to be a degree of redistribution of how much we consume in terms of energy and material resources in order to leave room for people who are poor to become more prosperous.” – John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar

There is a consistent set of themes running through their comments:

• more government
• individual freedoms are secondary
• the government knows best
• use of what ever means necessary
• the Constitution is outdated
• capitalism is bad
• “social justice”
• redistribution of wealth
• global government

So this is where it starts – the question is where would it end? These people are radicals who want to reengineer our society and our nation. Open your eyes America, the Constitution and the American way of life are under attack! You must fight back, the threat is real. There are “progressives” in our government who want to “fundamentally transform America”. This transformation is underway. Will you help stop it?