Can you keep up with the news as it pertains to government policy? If you answer yes, I’m skeptical. There is just too much happening in public affairs. It’s overwhelming, so much so that those of us tasked with covering and interpreting can hardly scratch the surface. History is being made daily these days, with reform on fast forward even as public confidence in government the world over is in a constant state of collapse.
Adding to the problems: The mainstream news just is not covering what matters most, which means that we lack perspective in interpreting events.
In the same week, the Trump administration repealed the “endangerment finding” of 2009 that demonized normal environmental gases as a fundamental threat to human life. That old finding had kicked off totalitarian-level regulation centered on deindustrializing the United States while many other nations in the West followed suit, even as China and its allies proceeded ahead with economic development.
The repeal sets in motion the largest deregulation of industry in history.
In the entire history of government, nothing like this has been available to regular citizens in this way. What will be the effect of these efforts to open up what has been previously hidden? It’s surely not to increase confidence in government and its associated enterprises. More likely, it will confirm the worst-possible conspiracy theories about how things really work in the centers of power.
Let’s look at one additional data point concerning childhood immunizations. Without much warning, the Department of Health and Human Services has pulled a number of shots from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s schedule that is followed by medical institutions all over the country. This might expose the makers to liabilities for harms; that’s up to the courts.
This, of course, is in response to the shocking failure of the COVID-19 shot, the most dangerous inoculation pushed and often mandated by government in modern history. The public revolt against vaccine mandates is in full swing.
Take a step back. Do you see what’s happening here? We can call it the great unraveling. An entire paradigm of public life is falling apart, one that has dominated the management of government, economic life, and even culture for the better part of a century.
The ideology that took hold of American life at the turn of the 20th century was called progressivism. The essence of it came down to a belief structure. An elite would use science and modern management skills to remold society toward the betterment of society. The ideology was an outgrowth of the progress made over the previous several decades that included rising prosperity, the building of infrastructure in cities, and astounding advances in transportation, machinery, communications, sound reproduction, electric power generation, and munitions.
The educated elites looked at this progress and asked what caused it all to happen. They concluded that the answer came down to science, engineering, and technology made possible by highly educated elites. If that was true, it only made sense that these people should be in charge of much more and maybe everything.
The idea of freedom that was the ideal a century earlier took a back seat to the belief that the right people with plenty of resources and power could achieve amazing things.
And just by the way, the term technology did not come into common usage until the Progressive Era. Before, we used terms such as “practical arts,” “mechanical arts,” and “industrial arts.” But the word “arts” didn’t sound scientific enough for what they wanted, which is why the word technology (from the Greek word for systematic skill) came to replace the older terms.
The belief that experts with high training and expertise should be the commanders of society swept up an entire generation with very few dissenters. They began their construction project, without regard to tradition, religion, democracy, and constitutional restraints. A good sample of this ideology comes from the early writings of the future president Woodrow Wilson. He posited a society administered by the likes of himself, deploying a permanent structure of rulers.
The efforts began slowly, state by state, with the rise of public schooling as an effort to forge a civic culture with a militarized set of messaging. It moved gradually to constructing welfare programs designed for the government to support populations that were falling through the cracks.
In taking on both these sectors, progressivism was mainly targeting religious institutions: the religious orders that ran schools, orphanages, and hospitals, under the conviction that credentialed professionals can do a much better job than people with motivations tracing to faith.
Soon after, the legal reforms began. We got a high inheritance tax early on during the Spanish–American War, which then triggered states to impose estate taxes. The rise of antitrust efforts came next. Both worked gradually to break down the wealth, continuity, and influence of private pockets of authority that made possible the funding of philanthropy, religion, arts, and libraries. The entire agenda here was to replace a natural elite with a new artificial elite connected to the government and new industry.
The year 1913 was a time of tremendous celebration for progressive ideology. That year, banking and financial elites put in place the Federal Reserve System, so named to avoid the term central bank. Its job was to bring science and engineering to the management of the nation’s money to mitigate against banking crises and inflation. Its real purpose was to create a cartel that worked closely with Washington in a symbiotic relationship.
Next was the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which permitted the taxation of income. It started small but over time came to apply to everyone. The money you made was no longer yours entirely but was subject to confiscation by the federal government. It also amounted to a massive invasion of privacy. You had to report all your business to the government.
Then came the 17th Amendment, which fundamentally upset the bicameral system of Congress. It changed only one word in the Constitution, but it was a hugely important one. The Founders wanted the House of Representatives to be voted on by the people while the Senate was to be appointed by the state legislatures. This way, the United States would have a Congress much like Britain had a Parliament, with a House of Commons and a House of Lords. This old structure also meant that states themselves would have representation in Washington.
The new Senate elected by the people would end up being entirely dominated by big city interests with the largest populations. This action effectively disenfranchised most territory in the United States, centering all political representation in state capitals and urban centers. Incredibly, the amendment passed without much in the way of debate. The bicameral system of the Founders was thereby destroyed, smashing an essential pillar of federalism and removing a major check on central government power.
Next came the Great War as a test of government’s power to conscript the population, try out new munitions, and dramatically expand the reach and power of the new elite. Censorship became the norm. It was also handy that the United States now had a central bank that could backstop the financing of this grand war. The effort resulted in brutal killing fields, the demoralization of the population, and the redrawing of the map of Europe in ways that guaranteed another future conflict.
After the war, the progressives were still at it, this time prohibiting the production and sale of alcohol in the whole of the United States. This was not the result of teetotalers’ taking control of the reins of government. It was strongly urged by all the scientific elites in their journals. They had discerned that most of the problems of poverty, family dysfunction, and crime traced to alcohol. The simple answer: get rid of it.
Progressivism stayed on the march with the imposition of compulsory schooling and the abolition of young labor in 1936, then the creation of ever more social welfare programs from the 1940s through the 1990s. They built a huge network of universities, erected giant bureaucracies that were unfazed by elections, and funded a huge scientific enterprise designed to generate cures for everything.
Every bit of these efforts was premised on one core belief that elites working in government and major industry, embedded in a media echo chamber and working through civil society, could manage humanity much better than common people in their daily lives.
What if this was never true to begin with? I don’t believe it ever was. We’ve been waiting for decades, if not more than 100 years, for the truth to be revealed. The apotheosis of progressive ideology came with the most preposterous promises ever made: 1) they would take control of the global climate to improve it, 2) they would use the pathogen first spread in 2019 to take control of the entire microbial kingdom, and 3) they would scramble and transcend biological sex with use of pharmaceuticals, surgery, and propaganda.
These three overreaches have turned out to be unmitigated disasters, of which a vast swath of people have become aware. It’s my own theory that these three attempts have led to the undoing of the basic presumption that has been hiding in plain sight for a century. Trust in their vision has been all but lost.
The new transparency coming about in President Donald Trump’s second term could actually lead to the final undoing of progressivism’s hegemonic power of society and history. It is falling every day the same as the empire of the Soviet Union did in 1989. The logic of collapse has come to us at last, and not a moment too soon.
This is the big picture hiding behind the headlines: the repeal of a century of folly.
