Our country is as divided today as at any time since the Civil War. Many people fault colleges and universities for today’s political acrimony and worry that those divisions are making a second Civil War inevitable.
West Virginia University research professor Jeffrey E. Paul asserts that universities are culpable for much of today’s societal schisms and explains why in his cogent book “Winning America’s Second Civil War: Progressivism’s Authoritarian Threat, Where It Came From and How to Defeat It.”
Natural Rights: Exclusively American
Before the Civil War, the belief in inalienable natural rights outlined in the United States’ founding documents was standard fare taught in schools. The country fought two wars establishing those rights: the American Revolution and the Civil War. The United States stood alone in the world community establishing a government built around the principles articulated by Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke.Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, the United States’ third president and the founder and first rector of the University of Virginia, had a resolution passed that required all law school students to read Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government.” It was the contradiction between personal liberty and slavery that caused the United States to wage an internal war in the 1860s defending those principles articulated in the founding documents.
Liberty, a Privilege, Not a Right?
German schools were state-owned, state-funded and state-controlled. Professors were considered state officials and governed by a code applicable to all civil servants. Most notably, German educators did not believe in the concept of natural rights but rather believed that liberty derived from the state. This was in direct opposition to the United States’ founding principles.Many American graduate students absorbed this German teaching during their university training, including Charles Edward Merriam—the founder of the political science department at the University of Chicago and a major proponent of what the Germans called “progressivism.” By 1895–1896, historian Laurence R. Veysey counted 517 Americans officially matriculated at German institutions, Mr. Paul writes. The author notes that those graduate students trained in Germany or by American professors who attended German graduate schools achieved remarkable accomplishments in the natural sciences, engineering, and medicine in the last quarter of the 19th century.
The author says that problems in U.S. higher education began when graduate students awarded doctorates in social sciences such as history, economics, political science, and sociology and claimed the same stature as doctorates in the empirical sciences. He writes that in order to be treated equally in repute to their natural science counterparts, the social science professors portrayed themselves as objective, empirical scientists “while propagating their moral convictions.”
“Their assessments were profoundly at odds with those that animated the American Founding,” Mr. Paul writes. “And so, ironically, the moral debates that had originated in antebellum America were settled twice. First, in favor of natural human rights by military triumph in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and second, against those rights, by accidentally awarding to the Germany academy a lock on the moral opinions of America’s first generation of PhDs.”
The U.S. Counterrevolution
Throughout his book, Mr. Paul identifies progressive professor luminaries by name, in addition to the aforementioned Charles Edward Merriam. John William Burgess established the country’s first doctoral programs in political science, history and economics; John Dewey was an educational reformer who supported progressive taxation on lower- and middle-income earners; Reinhold Niebuhr was a theologian who was a staunch critic of capitalism and advocate of socialism; and Henry Simons was a University of Chicago economist and law professor who argued for government interventionist controls.The counterrevolution of anti-U.S. propaganda didn’t stop with higher education, Mr. Paul notes. Over decades, journalism, law, and politics have undermined the country’s historic relationship between the individual and the state, prompting for more calls for government intervention, interaction, and involvement. Today, government is a burgeoning behemoth more involved in citizens’ day-to-day activities than ever before, partly thanks to overblown concerns about climate change, social justice, and green energy initiatives.
Mr. Paul also demonstrates how the current tax system on income provides the pretext for more government social programs. As more income earners need government assistance because of the money paid out in taxes, dependence on government programs expands and government power grows exponentially. The author offers a unique solution in an appendix to help break that cycle: a universal sales tax (UST) of 1.13 percent.
A UST on the sales of goods, services, and financial assets would replace federal taxes, personal and corporate income taxes, payroll taxes, and gift and estate taxes. Using pre-COVID-19 2019 budget numbers, Mr. Paul demonstrates how the proposed UST would have covered that year’s government spending, including expenditures on Social Security and Medicare, with enough money left over to apply toward 2019’s deficit.
“Winning America’s Second Civil War” is a sober and pensive deep dive detailing the origins of progressivism in academia, its insidious growth over decades, and why it is counterproductive to the ideals encapsulated in our founding documents.
