Basics

They need to be brought up from time to time, lest the Republicrats stampede us into forgetting them altogether.

Progressive presidents use martial language as a way of encouraging Americans to confuse civilian politics with military exertions, thereby circumventing an impediment to progressive aspirations — the Constitution and the patience it demands. As a young professor, Woodrow Wilson had lamented that America’s political parties “are like armies without officers.” The most theoretically inclined of progressive politicians, Wilson was the first president to criticize America’s founding. This he did thoroughly, rejecting the Madisonian system of checks and balances — the separation of powers, a crucial component of limited government — because it makes a government that cannot be wielded efficiently by a strong executive.

Franklin Roosevelt agreed. He complained about “the three-horse team of the American system”: “If one horse lies down in the traces or plunges off in another direction, the field will not be plowed.” And progressive plowing takes precedence over constitutional equipoise among the three branches of government. Hence FDR’s attempt to break the Supreme Court to his will by enlarging it.

In his first inaugural address, FDR demanded “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” He said Americans must “move as a trained and loyal army” with “a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.” The next day, addressing the American Legion, Roosevelt said it was “a mistake to assume that the virtues of war differ essentially from the virtues of peace.” In such a time, dissent is disloyalty.

Yearnings for a command society were common and respectable then. Commonweal, a magazine for liberal Catholics, said that Roosevelt should have “the powers of a virtual dictatorship to reorganize the government.” Walter Lippmann, then America’s preeminent columnist, said: “A mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead.” The New York Daily News, then the nation’s largest-circulation newspaper, cheerfully editorialized: “A lot of us have been asking for a dictator. Now we have one…It is Roosevelt…Dictatorship in crises was ancient Rome’s best era.” The New York Herald Tribune titled an editorial “For Dictatorship if Necessary.”

Ahh, but the core impulse and intent are as old as Progressivism itself. A lot older, in fact; a lot. They’re just being a bit sneakier about it for the nonce.

But the iron fist reveals itself every day, in a thousand ways both large and small, all over the country: from security lines at airports; to groups of smokers shivering outside bars; to kids enduring Green indoctrination in government “schools”; to people being told by the Ministry of Environmental Correctness they can’t build a home on their own property because it’s a protected “wetland,” even though it’s clearly no such thing; to companies being fined millions for not using an Imperium-approved biofuel that has the small disadvantage of not even existing yet; to people who tell themselves they’re still “free” wrapping themselves and their kids in bubble wrap, strapping on their spaceman helmets, and lashing themselves uncomfortably into cars made not out of metal but plastic to satisfy Imperially mandated standards for gas mileage that can’t be met in the real world by the internal combustion engine–standards designed whimsically, with the ultimate intent to do away with internal combustion engines entirely.

Just the fact that nobody reading the above paragraph will be the least bit surprised by any of it says one hell of a lot about just where we are, and what kind of government we really have. Jeff, too, is considering the broader view:

The fact remains that Obama’s attempts at “fundamental transformation” have succeeded only in enriching his friends, allies, and cronies, while institutionalizing the expanded power of an administrative state run by a bureaucratic apparatus that is increasingly beyond the reach of voters.

Obama has failed to revitalize the economy. But he has succeeded in expanding the role of the State, and as such, has waged a successful assault on the individual liberties and individual sovereignty that are bulwarks against the democratic socialist system he and his progressive pals envision in their Utopian end game.

I hoped he’d fail. Too bad so many others on the right elevated their own sanctimony over a reality that was there for all to see. Because so much of the left’s power relies on precisely that kind of shaming, and until we refuse to play under their rules, we’ll always lose the game — however incrementally.

Losing more slowly, in other words.

Which, for Republicrats and Charlie Sheen and just about nobody else, means…winning!