PROGRESSIVES: Be afraid; very afraid

Tom Hearn’s letter of March 7, 2010, presents the argument that progressive policies are good for our country. He cites several presidents and their policies with apparent approval.

With regard to progressivism in general he has a small point. At the start of the last century, as our country was transitioning from an agrarian economy and culture to a dominantly industrial one, regulatory mechanisms (and political will) were inadequate. Industrial cartels had so much power and influence that they almost controlled the government. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and others pursued policies which changed the power structure and thereby led to improvements in pay, working conditions and safety for the labor force. This was a good and necessary thing at the time.

To make a long and complicated story short, most of our presidents for the last 100 years have been more or less progressive (or at least accepting of progressive ideas). Now the pendulum has swung to the point that a cabal of major unions and so-called professional associations (NEA, Trial Lawyers, SEIU, UAW, etc.) teamed with progressive politicians has acquired at least the level of power that the industrial cartels had a century ago. This is even more evil and dangerous than the situation in the early 20th century. Here’s why: A much more learned historian than I has concluded that the end points of communism and progressivism are the same. The difference, he explained, is that communism pursues its goal through revolution, while progressivism gets there through evolution.

We have had 100 years of this evolution. While some progressive policies have theoretical value, an objective observer can’t help but notice they have been poorly run by a metastasizing federal bureaucracy and are always much more expensive than initially described. Now we are well down the road to becoming a decadent, Western European style, socialist state with all that implies regarding loss of freedom, loss of opportunity, reduction of productivity, loss of wealth, etc. That’s why an aggressive progressive in the White House today is indeed a threat to our republic. On the plus side, Obama’s lack of experience and governing incompetence, together with his insufferable arrogance, has (so far) thwarted most of his anti-American agenda.

In his recent “open letter to President Obama” Lou Pritchett, a retired Proctor and Gamble executive, stated, “You are the 13th president under whom I have lived and unlike any others, you truly scare me … you scare me because you lack humility and ‘class,’ always blaming others.” I couldn’t say it any better.                             

LARRY L. MORRISON

Coeur d’Alene