Progressivism

The Ken Burns' documentary "The Roosevelt's" has spent considerable time on Teddy Roosevelt's progressive reforms (trust busting, pure food and drugs, civil service hiring, land conservation, etc.) ... most of which are universally lauded today.  And T.R. has had his likeness carved on Mount Rushmore as a consequence.

This has got me musing ... there is one fundamental flaw with the progressive agenda ... and that is ... after the most obvious beneficial reforms have been enacted, many "progressives" think that any change is still necessarily good. Thus change becomes an objective in and of itself … with little thought to the possible consequences. If the progressive movement was right in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, then it must still be the bright path to lasting political fame.

Once most or all of the low-hanging progressive fruit has been plucked, then progressives find sillier and sillier things that must be reformed ... many of which begin to erode the very fabric of our society. Many of these inane progressive fixes have more to do with changing social norms rather than fixing structural economic problems. Here are a few:

- Poverty is a primary target of the progressive movement … with transfer payments of all types now totaling hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The result? This country now has a huge indolent class which is now totally dependent on these government handouts … and unwilling to seek gainful employment. Yet they are still indigent because “poverty” keeps being defined upwards and most of those transfer payment are not included in such measurements. And this growing unproductive population then requires millions of immigrants to take their places at an additional economic and socially-disruptive cost. And this is called progress …

- Progressives have now determined that the government cannot now intrude into the bedroom to define deviant and often destructive moral conduct ... yet it can and must intercede to pay for the consequences of such questionable morality ... contraceptives, an AIDs cure, abortions, redefining marriage, sex-change operations, etc. So far pedophilia, bestiality, incest, and polygamy have escaped such social "progress" but, if such progressive trends continue ...

- Progressives have also decided, on very dubious “scientific" evidence, that carbon dioxide, a gas that is the basis of all life on earth, is a pollutant and must be regulated with punitive economic policies. This would be the equivalent to Teddy Roosevelt, because of the then unsanitary slaughterhouse practices, outlawing meat.

- Gender and sexual-orientation equality has morphed in the progressive mind to gender and sexual-orientation equivalence. Women are now encouraged to serve in military combat roles. Men who think of themselves as women must be allowed to intermingle with women in all their erstwhile segregated places ... and visa versa. Did Teddy, the archetypical progressive have women serving with him in the Rough Riders?

Has ‘progressivism” now devolved into something bad instead of something good? To me it has …

The Roosevelts

Like many, I have been watching Ken Burns' documentary about the Roosevelt's on PBS. So far it has included many interesting facts about Teddy Roosevelt of which I was unaware ... for instance, his actual derring-do (which I had understood to be manufactured) ... his many interactions with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt ... and his early cowboy life in the western United States. The preponderance of the story has so far has concentrated on Teddy, but I am looking forward to more on FDR and Eleanor ... whose lives somewhat intersected mine.

In particular I have two recollections of this pair ... one, somewhat shabby and the other, somewhat poignant. First the shabby one ... even as a young child I can still hear the animosity that many in this country felt toward the Roosevelt's ... as exhibited by this joke I recall hearing (even with the inflections mimicking FDR's patrician way of speaking.) It goes thusly:

FDR -- We have a new weapon that will destroy all armies ... We have a new weapon that will destroy all navies ... We have a new weapon that will destroy all nations ... Eleanor, show them your teeth. (Sorry, not very kind ... but for the sake of an historic perspective, I repeat it.)

The other story involves me, at the age of six and a small playmate, Eliot. We were playing below our house in an alleyway when my father came home from work and called out to greet us. Eliot shouted up to my father that Roosevelt had died. To my lasting surprise, my father started crying. I say surprise because I thought my father, a Republican, didn't care much for FDR. But apparently the stress of the war and his understanding of how FDR had carried us (almost) through it, brought out this stronger emotion. My father himself died a few months later.

I look forward to the remaining episodes of this well-researched and carefully-produced documentary.