Written by Charles Burris   

Political ideas do not exist in a vacuum. Many commenters and observers on RSN and Godot who describe themselves as Progressives totally neglect the crucial background history of how Progressivism and the Welfare State arose. It is a history virtually unknown to the general public today.

The history of the Welfare State is the history of the State's savage war of aggrandizement and seizure of authority against civil society. Whether in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Canada, in Scandinavia, or in the United States, the coercive State systematically destroyed the "voluntary sector" of civil society and those intermediary institutions that protected the individual from the direct contact and control by the State [much as the Church did for nearly all of the previous two millennia]. Within the short space of two or three decades the protective sphere covered by workingmen's social and other fraternal duties had been stripped to nothing more than drinking associations, with all other matters taken over by the State apparatus. Henceforth, the workingman and much of the middle class reported directly to the bureaucracy of the State's intrusive regime. Everything they did was in some way or another regulated, regimented and overseen by the State. The dire effects of this calculated collectivism was malevolence not benevolence, aggression not altruism, genocide not generosity.

The Progressive Era was particularly a crucial watershed in American history. Scholars as divergent as Murray N. Rothbard and G. William Domhoff have documented the impact of thousands of key academics such as Richard T. Ely, Herbert Baxter Adams, and John W. Burgess who received their Ph.D. graduate training in Germany during this period, dominated by the rise of Bismarck's Welfare-Warfare State. They returned home imbued with these ideas, which their apt pupils such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson transformed into hard reality.

Rothbard, in particular, provides the Rosetta Stone to understanding the origins of Progressivism and the Welfare State in America: the role of post-millennial Protestant pietistic intellectuals and evangelical activists born in the crucial decade surrounding the events of the Civil War who, because of the seductive influence of the evolutionary naturalism of Darwinism, came of age increasingly secularized, but who did not forsake their faith in statism and elitist social control.

This worship of the newly-discovered wonders of statism, combined with the influx of Darwinian evolutionary naturalism,"social imperialism," Fabian socialism imported from Great Britain, the increasing secularization of postmillennial evangelical pietism, all provided the intellectual breeding ground for the incubus that emerged as Progressivism – complete with its elite notions of centralized political/economic planning, aggressive nationalism and war, eugenics and the idea of "race suicide."

Princeton scholar Thomas C. Leonard has brilliantly summarized this little-known history in his widely-praised new volume, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, & American Economics in the Progressive Era.

Ideas truly have consequences, the long-term consequences of endless statism, endless futile wars and dependency we all see every day in the decline and decay of our society.