in World News The Progressives’ Long March
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Targeting the Constitution’s guardrails against tyranny.
The “long march through the institutions” is the name given to the left’s turn towards Cultural Marxism as the means for taking control of the political order and shifting it to the left. For many conservatives, this movement in the Sixties accounts for the subsequent changes in political ideology, government policies, sexual mores, culture high and low, history, and revisions of school curricula from kindergarten to universities.
That narrative is accurate to a point, but it often suggests that before the Sixties our culture and politics were still firmly grounded in the Constitutional order, and Western culture defined by its Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian civilizational origins. But the way for the left’s “long march” was prepared by the Progressives’ “march” that began over a century ago. The Democrats’ policy platform unveiled during their convention and endorsed by Kamala Harris is a good starting point for seeing Progressivism’s continuity with the Marxist march to the modern center-left Democrat Party that has been taken over by their expanding and hardening leftist caucus.
The platform obviously endorses the Dems’ technocratic, hypertrophied Federal Government, and the greater centralization of power necessary for their utopian ambitions. As the Wall Street Journal puts it, “the platform is also a peek into an economic worldview in which the government is the answer, almost no matter the question. While private businesses are always ‘gouging’ or adding ‘junk fees,’ or otherwise trying to rip somebody off, Washington’s wise men are capable of providing for the American people, if only they have the power to pass the laws and regulations.”
Here is an item from the platform predicated on a Progressive idea more than a century old: “Health care should be a right in America, not a privilege,” the platform asserts. “We’ll never quit fighting to protect and expand the Affordable Care Act.” The ultimate goal is to completely nationalize healthcare, which will no doubt make doctors unionized public employees, and lead to worse outcomes costing trillions of taxpayer dollar––as Britain’s National Health Service and Obamacare serially demonstrate.
And, as the Journal points out, Kamala Harris is not kidding about this scheme: “In her debut speech as the presumptive nominee, she said she wants a country where ‘every person has affordable healthcare, affordable child care, and paid family leave.’’ We all know that “affordable” usually turns out to means “free” or heavily subsidized by taxpayers and employers.
The clearest link to the early Progressives is the statement that “health care should be a right.” This belief militates against the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and their concept of “unalienable rights” created and bestowed not by flawed human beings, but by “Nature and Nature’s God,” as the Deist Thomas Jefferson put it. This idea is an important bulwark of our political freedom, and a check on nascent tyranny that creates new “rights” by means of political power controlled by imperfect, limited human beings vulnerable to corruption by power.