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It was precisely the wide overlap in assumptions shared by Progressivism and its subsequent historians which blinded so many of them to Progressivism’s most fundamental premise, and turned histories of Progressivism into yet another strange case of the dog in the night (who does not bark because he sees no one strange enough to make him bark). Understand, Watson warns us at the outset, that “[t]he progressive idea, simply put, is that the principled American constitutionalism of fixed natural rights and limited and dispersed powers must be overturned and replaced by an organic, evolutionary model of the Constitution that facilitates the authority of experts dedicated to the expansion of the public sphere and political control, especially at the national level.” This fundamental “idea” opened into five major applications: 1) that “there are no fixed or eternal principles that govern,” 2) that “the state and its component parts are organic” and “involved in a struggle for never-ending growth,” 3) that “democratic openness and experimentalism…are the fertilizer of the organic state,” 4) that “the state and its components exist only in History,” and 5) that “some individuals stand outside this process…an elite class, possessed of intelligence as a method” who provide the messianic leadership needed to move the process smoothly along.
That these corollaries flew straight into the face of the American Founders hardly needs explanation. The Declaration appealed to certain “self-evident truths” about human nature and human rights which were the fixed points to which all political construction had to adhere. The Fairfax Resolves of 1774 announced that the claims of “the British Crown” are “totally incompatible with the Privileges of a free People, and the natural rights of mankind,” and the Virginia Declaration of Rights proclaimed that “[a]ll men…have certain inherent natural Rights.” These rights were claimed (said Jefferson) not “under the charters of kings or legislators, but under the King of kings.” And this, argues Watson, was the touchstone of American political thinking straight up through Abraham Lincoln, for whom “the task of great political actors…was to look backward as much as—perhaps more than—forward.”
But after the Civil War, the impact of disillusion, Darwin, and pragmatism tumbled confidence in any such fixed points. In the hands of Progressives, American society became the product either of the frontier experience (as in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” which argued that the American character was shaped, not by natural law, but in its struggle with the American environment) or the economic motivations of the founders (as in Charles Beard, who reduced American statesmanship to “interest group politics and financial incentives”). By the time historians began writing about Progressivism itself, any sense that the Progressive mentality might have begun with a philosophical rejection of the founders and their Constitution had evaporated, and the historians of Progressivism described its emergence as if it, too, was some evolution out of a rudderless historical flux.