Progress Then and Now

What was progress then is retrograde now

The Progressive Era did bring real progress to America -- it made it difficult for greedy employers to take advantage of middle class labor, it granted women voting rights, and upgraded rural schools to put them on par with urban schools.

Then, before anyone noticed, the world view resulting from Progressive Era gave way to regressive decades that continue today.

These decades were characterized by the vast expansion of the entitlement state.  

And it was assumed that the economic and moral success of past progressive reforms would translate to the same societal success in creating safety nets for workers.

Without the advantage of hindsight, nor the sophisticated economic analysis of Austrian economists, Progressives failed to recognize the limits of their plans.  They didn’t recognize that the use of government wouldn’t always create social and economic progress as it once did in the past.

These latent problems rose to the surface in the 21st century as unions, women’s suffrage, and support for public schooling were transformed into costly progressive orthodoxies that gave rise to the regressive entitlement state.

Labor unions, for instance, gradually became unnecessary as the United States shifted from an agricultural economy to a service based one.  Meanwhile union leaders began to exploit laborers for political gain as unions less of a safeguard for workers’ rights and more of a proxy for left wing dogma.

So too would women’s suffrage be taken to a needless extreme.

Instead being about allowing women to vote -- under the influence of Marx and his other less talented imitators -- women’s suffrage would be transformed to using gender, or genders, to undermine capitalism and the middle class.  

Public schooling, which initially help to reduce the disparity between the quality of rural and urban schools, was transformed from being about education into a jobs program for the otherwise unambitious.  Accordingly more teachers would disguise their incompetence by mastering seemingly sophisticated statist propaganda they could then rehearse to parents and children.  

All of this brought neither liberty nor economic freedom to the middle class.  Progress then was real -- now not so much. What once was about liberating people from poverty, exploitation, or their inability to vote became about enslavement to a big government ideology.  Now the only way to see progress is to undo this ideology that no longer meets the needs of our time.

Zigmund Reichenbach holds a M.A. in Philosophy from West Chester University.  You can find him commenting on news stories of national and state interest at his Facebook page Zigmund Reichenbach -- Commentator or you can follow him on Twitter @zreichenbach1.  Additionally you can find episodes of the weekly Sunday podcast (4PM) that airs via Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter at this link here. 

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