Roman-Style versus Barbarian-Style Progressivism

Today's American ideology is Progressivism, the belief that the state knows and does best, and that the average person is capable of assessing only so much as the state allows. People are not able to decide how to save for retirement or how take care of their own health care. Nor are they able to choose what kind of physician to hire or the quality of the butcher from whom they wish to purchase meat. They cannot decide how much school to attend or whether they would like to support a government program to study martians or the regulation of energy. All of these and many, many more decisions must be made by their "betters", by bureaucrats and officials educated in state-run schools and taught the catechism of the state religion--that the STATE IS GOD; that GOVERNMENT KNOWS ALL; and that BARACK OBAMA IS OUR SAVIOR.

But within America's secular faith, the faith in the omnipotent state, there is a serious competition between two schools of Progressives. One school of Progressives descends directly from the Roman dictatorship of Augustus Caesar, and so is the more reactionary of the two. The other descends from the manorial rule of the Barbarian savages who invaded the Roman Empire in the late first millenium.

The Roman Progressives hold that the plebeians must be given their due. They must be provided with bread and circus. They must be told that they are most important. The Roman Progressives know that no matter how much money they transfer to themselves, to Wall Street and to the Ochs Sulzbergers' friends, the plebeians will support them so long as they say it is done in their name and so long as they have their free bread to prove it. The Roman-style Progressives are of course the Democrats.

The Barbarian Progressives agree with their forebears, Clovis and Charlemagne, that the plebes need not be taken into account at all. They believe with Aristotle that some were meant to be masters and others meant to be slaves. They, like the Roman Progressives, understand that the public is simply too simple minded to understand that the policies that they advocate, beginning with the Federal Reserve Bank, are harmful to them. Instead of relying on bread-and-circus, the Barbarian Progressives motivate their simple minded followers with anger about the Roman-style Progressives. The Barbarian-style Progressives are of course the Rockefeller Republicans.

The term Progressivism refers to the progressive looting of those who work on behalf of those who do not; the looting of those who buy milk and bread on behalf of those who run hedge funds and the New York Times.

Progressivism rode to power on the promise that more democracy would "solve problems". Since its ascendancy in 1900 or so, it has caused involvement in at least five foreign wars; it has doused the fiery innovation and productivity growth of the 19th century; it has left Americans with a stagnant real wage; it has caused the Depression of the 1930s; the stagflation of the 1970s and the bailout of 2009; it has caused increasing wealth inequality as the Progressives oversee the massive transfer of America's wealth to the super-rich via the Federal Reserve Bank; and it has seen the crippling of cities as destructive government programs dominate their landscapes.