In my last post I wrote about the progressive's disdain for people, like Mike Pence, who try, with varying degrees of effort, and success, to live up to a moral code, a code that is objective and exists outside the person's own leanings, prejudices and enthusiasms. They mock Pence's determination to avoid temptations that might damage his marriage by adopting and adhering to certain rules regarding social interactions in the absence of his wife. These critics are arrogant enough to claim that Pence's code of conduct is antiquated and strange, that it betrays a hostility towards women and/or a tendency to perversion that must be controlled with draconian medieval rules of behavior. Whereas the critics themselves are too sophisticated and well-adjusted to have to worry about such things.
As I was writing this it occurred to me that this attitude among progressives is not limited to the marital arena. It is of a piece with their contempt for constitutional government.
Progressives believe that all the ills of the world, as well as the anti-social behaviors and attitudes of people, can be cured if we just put the right people into government and give them all the power they feel necessary to enable them to re-engineer society. Woodrow Wilson, one of the earliest leading lights of the progressive movement, was openly contemptuous of the Constitution, even as he swore to preserve, protect, and defend it. Put the right hands on the levers of power and they could remake society.
The framers of the Constitution had a more jaundiced, and I would say clear-eyed, view of human nature. They knew that all men were fallen and susceptible to temptation and that, when men are given power over their fellow citizens, they are apt to abuse it if allowed to do so.
So they designed a government for the United States that would frustrate the natural tendency of men to amass and abuse power. The framers held no illusions that any men, even themselves, could be trusted with unchecked power. So if they couldn't eliminate man's drive to seek power, they would harness it. In James Madison's famous formulation, "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."
Someone once wrote that the Constitution was designed with sinful man in mind. The powers of government are fractured and distributed. They are divided between the central government and the states. And within the federal government the legislative, executive, and judicial functions are established in three separate but equal branches; each branch possessing certain powers that enable it to resist encroachment by the other two. The purpose is not to facilitate the smooth and efficient administration of government, but rather to frustrate it and keep it contained.
But the scheme only works if we honor it and internalize it. As the Constitutional Convention was disbanding, its delegates returning to their home states, a woman famously asked Benjamin Franklin what sort of government they had devised for the United States: "A republic, if you can keep it," was his reply.
Sadly, we have done a poor job preserving the founders' vision. Congress and the president found the legislative process to cumbersome so they created the administrative agency, combining the legislative, executive, and judicial functions within one organization. The federal government was dissatisfied with the limited powers granted it so all three branches colluded in rewriting the Constitution to grant virtually unlimited authority to the central government. And all this was done with the enthusiastic support of the voters.
Just as progressives see no legitimate purpose to Mike Pence's personal rules of conduct, they hold the structural constraints of the Constitution in utter contempt. They see themselves as fundamentally good people, capable of identifying the best interests of a country of 330 million people and of advancing those interests if only they are given the power to do so without any silly reservations about liberty and stuff like that.
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