A History of Aiding and Abetting “The Edarkenment”

Mike Soja points to a National Review (NR) piece written by Tiffany Jones Miller.  The piece is titled The Progressives’ Legacy of Bankruptcy.

Mike notes that the NR piece is subtitled “The roots of our current crisis,” and states,

That’s a keeper.

And indeed it is, and this brings to mind the strike the root quote from Thoreau.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

The NR piece should be read in its entirety, as it lays out the history of “The Endarkenment” of America quite clearly, and it also plainly articulates the progressive ideology which still, today, is turning individuals into mindless automatons of the State.

What follows, particularly those words in bold lettering, is the mantra of the State, whether the tail being worn is a donkey’s, or an elephant’s.

In a 1903 survey of the “recent tendencies” in American political thinking, Charles Merriam — founding father of the American Political Science Association and future head of FDR’s National Resources Planning Board — well captured the destructive aspect: “The individualistic ideas of the ‘natural right’ school of political theory, indorsed in the Revolution,” he wrote, “are discredited and repudiated. . . . In the refusal to accept the contract theory as the basis for government, practically all the political scientists agree. The old explanation no longer seems sufficient, and is with practical unanimity discarded. The doctrines of natural law and natural rights have met a similar fate.” Merriam’s conclusions, which are striking in their directness, were by no means unique. “Across the range of Progressive writings, and throughout this entire period,” as political theorist Eldon Eisenach observes, “one finds a persistent attack on rights and individualism as worthy foundations for American national democracy. . . . The rejection of natural rights as a foundation for moral or political reasoning was not even considered to require a defense.”

As Mike at Cold Fury notes in his post after reading the NR piece.

The noxious weed of Progressivism that is currently strangling our nation has deep roots indeed. It’ll take more than just a little pruning to disentangle ourselves from it.

Indeed, though more individuals are now awakening to the danger posed by the State to individual freedom, the alarm has been going off for over 100 years.

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