Community and Progressivism

Progressivism expressed the moral impulse of social Gospel Christianity and Populism as well as the social democratic ideas that late nineteenth century American university students brought home from the University of Berlin and other German universities. But the intent of morality is not the same as its execution. We can try to improve a bridge, but if the new bridge does not stand, then we have not helped. Moral action requires efficacy.

Progressivism emphasized large scale. In urban redevelopment, Robert Moses built roads, beaches, highways and public housing, but disregarded the effects on neighborhoods and personal networks within them. Jane Jacobs dissected his work on the Cross Bronx Expressway and New York City's public housing projects in her book Death and Life of Great American Cities. Progressivism aimed to improve efficiency and quality by increasing scale and applying a regularized pattern. But large scale often does not work. It is inflexible and difficult to change.

Robert Putnam has written an excellent book, Bowling Alone, about the decline of community. But the last thirty years has increasingly seen the failure of Progressivism, so it is not surprising that many Americans have chosen to shift from what Daniel Elazar calls the moralistic to the individualistic political pattern. Not only neighborhoods but the individual's relationship to the state, to his family, his employer and his economic future have been modified by the centralizing tendency of Progressivism, resulting in increasing distance from decisions and processes that modify his life. The classic example of this transformation is the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was the first major failure of Progressivism. Caused by a combination of inappropriate central bank tightening (Milton Friedman) or by President Hoover's mistaken attempt to cajole major employers into refusing to cut wages (Murray Rothbard), the Depression followed the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank by less than twenty years and the implementation of Wilson's World War I economy (in which Hoover played a crucial role as Food Administrator) by less than ten.

Increasingly, government has been centralized and inflexible and incapable bureaucracies have been established. The Progressives claimed that "experts" could solve problems, so a hierarchy of expertise was established, and citizens' opinions became less important. Americans allowed themselves to be convinced that experts knew better. The news media also centralized, in part in response to growing labor costs facilitated by the National Labor Relations Act and the advent of television. The centralized news media became an advocate for government by expertise, the wisdom of Keynesian economics and bureaucracy.

The Progressive policies of urban redevelopment led to near-extinction of urban centers and the subsidization of suburbs, which in turn led to increasing commutes. As well, since the abolition of the international gold standard in 1971, declining hourly real wages have led to increasing hours of work as Americans have struggled to keep up with the declining economic opportunity that central planning has caused. The pure exhaustion of multiple jobs coupled with the distraction of television and the need to decompress has increasingly alienated Americans from their communities.

Moreover, a sense of apathy has set in because the centralized, unresponsive firms and government bureaucracies that Progressivim has established seem to be beyond the efforts of most Americans. As a result, a society that is increasingly stratified between those who benefit from Federal Reserve and governmental subsidies and those who do not has been accomplished in the rhetoric of moralistic, Progressive reform. The dissonance created by the discrepancy between the ideology of Progressivism and its assault on human dignity and living standards leads inexorably to loss of community and economic decline.

John McCain Ad

Mairi just forwarded a link to a John McCain ad here. Mairi writes:

"The Very Best Ad For John McCain - Ever!
... and to my knowledge, the McCain camp didn't have anything to do with it (and if they did, they did a fantastic job).
The audio clips of the Obamas in this video - their own words, are stunning; the video itself vividly demonstrates the profound differences between the two candidates for president.

"Don't Tread On Me, Obama," by Miradena. Watch, and enjoy, every second of it."

Chris Matthews' Hard Ball's Soft Brains

I do not normally watch MS-NBC but I was flicking the channel and heard Matthews and one of his colleagues crowing about Obama's vice presidential choice of Joe Biden. Matthews or his colleague was saying that the Republicans would be worried about Obama's pick. What a laugh. MS-NBC doesn't know what the news is. Matthews is to television reporting what Dan Nakaso of the Honolulu Advertiser is to newspaper reporting. The Republicans aren't worried about Biden. They're jubilant. Biden is on tape calling Obama inexperienced. Does anyone actually watch MS-NBC? Maybe Matthews calls his show "Hard Ball" because he's trying to compensate for his soft brain.

American Thinker on the Obama-Ayers Relationship

American Thinker's Thomas Lifson has a great blog on the relationship between radical Bill Ayers and Barack Obama in the failed educational experiment, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (h/t Bob Robbins):

"William Ayers, unrepentant terrorist and education professor, is once again being tied to Barack Obama in the public mind. Controversy builds over the withholding of the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an expensive failed school reform effort headed by Obama and effectively run by Ayers, held by the library of the University of Illinois Chicago. Researchers who have gained access to a few documents recording the history of the project have found strong evidence of a very important working relationship between the two men on the project, Obama's sole claim to executive experience.

"Oddly enough, even though the project produced no measurable improvement in student performance according to its own final report, educators and administrators -- participants and grantees of the CAC -- were reported by outside monitors to be often "ebullient" about the activities. For insiders, it was an excellent adventure. For the pupils stuck in the failing public schools of Chicago, an ongoing, unrelieved disaster...

"Obama and his campaign long have gone out of their way to downplay, in fact distort, the long and evidently deep relationship between Ayers and Obama..."

Read it all here