Peter Spung’s Reviews > War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism > Status Update

A new movement was afoot that was liberal, and spoke the language of ethnic diversity, class warfare, and internationalism.

"Bureaucrats, like headless nails, once pounded in were impossible to extract." Many became corporate shills instead of public servants. By the 1920s, progressivism was dead as a political party and movement. The greatest casualty was republican government and the rule of law. Culturally, expert oversight made people dependent, uncertain of themselves, and less responsible.

Ch 2 on Progressivism concludes with Laying a Wreath on Uplift. Many believed WWI had been for corporate interests. In 1920 Americans voted for Harding's "return to normalcy" and a business-friendly era. The war resulted in a new cynicism of progressivism's bureaucracy, which became a different sort of political spoils system for an educated elite who became entrenched.

Three Progressive Presidents are described next in Ch 2: Roosevelt, Taft & Wilson. Examples are used to show how businesses were subject to increased administrative rules & regulations. A central income tax and central bank were established, further asserting the polity over the economy. Examples from the FTC, ICC and WWI are included. Federal spending increased tenfold and bureaucrats doubled from 1916 to 1918.

At the state level, expert professors from universities were tapped to endorse progressive policies and make rules, in exchange for prestige and high salaries.

Ch 2 continues with The New Political Science. Progressives rejected the older republican citizenship based on natural law & rights. The state became the source of individual liberty; other sources were deemed "dangerous and ahistorical". A new positive conception of liberty by government provided for each individual's physical and mental cultivation (far beyond mere protection of life, liberty & property).

Due process rights and liberty suffered as deference was yielded to experts.

births, vaccinations, diet, clothing, housing, marriages & (inter-)breeding (eugenics), sexual acts, diseases, medical care and deaths. "The family was no longer ... viewed as a contract or a private entity within domains of kin, neighborhood, and church, but as part of a web of social institutions with evolving standards directed by a growing body of experts."

Slack continued Ch 2 describing the new conception of health and the family. Activities of bare life were shaped and ruled by experts because their vocation and training made them value-free and public spirited, and progressives did not think citizens should control their own health decisions. Department of health bureaucrats & medical officials registered or regulated womb, to tomb...

Ch 2 continues Slack's description of Progressivism with The Collapse of Faith. A new ascetic and politics emerged amid disaffection with trusts and tycoons, deplorable working conditions, inner city and immigrant tenement squalor, and democracy as vote calculations and patronage by party hacks. Society and evolution could be controlled by social science and education, and ministering and uplifting the collective.