@ Zoltan Newberry:

Priceless, Zolt', pricelesss! Incidentally, Krugman, I learn from my local, er, newspaper, lives on St. Croix a good deal of the time now. Right in my neighborhood, too. Fortunately, the article alerted me to where he likes to hang out. An high-end internet cafe, natch.

I wonder if he posts his bilge from here. Course he'd never talk to a Brown man.

Colin, I am not a Wilson hater - and I'm not implying that you implied I am. Hatred of W. Wilson is a multi-ideological sport. The libertarians hate him for the income tax and Reds hate him for the Palmer raids.

I've always thought him, well, a little pitiable and more than a little obnoxious. My understanding, and you are possibly in a position to instruct me, is that his origins are in the gentry of Old Virginny (wasn't he related to the Wilson of Revolutionary times?), but his upbringing was Deep South, Savannah, I think, and somewhat preacherly. From the latter, I've always thought, he acquired a Massa in de Big House mien. We must take care of them Darkies seems to me to be a constant theme among the pezza novanti Dim presidents, starting with Jefferson, continuing through Jackson, Wilson, FDR, Kennedy, and, in their own special ways, Johnson, who was born dirt poor bur married money and developed a planter's mentality, and Jimmeh Carter, who actually was a planter. Paternalism is the Democrat way. It was quite obvious in ante-bellum days, and returned as a species of noblesse oblige with Roosevelt and from there on to the liberal foundations of today, Hollywood, and liberal Jewry. It's always been very comfortable with people who know who their betters are. Woodrow Wilson, President of Princeton, fit right in.

@ CK MacLeod:

He was overwhelmed! All the Secretaries visited yearly and voluminous complaints about ridiculous under-staffing on Congress, who took not much notice.

One of Nevins' more salient points was just how little influence the Executive branch had on Congress, and that particularly included the Chief Executive, who was respected in a ceremonial way but more often than not ignored.

ADDITION AFTER CK'S LAST POST: "Promote" is really a rather tepid verb, isn't it? It really can't carry the burden you're insinuating it should. Perhaps they - the Founders - chose it with that in mind.

A week ago I reread Allan Nevins' Ordeal of the Union, volume I ("Fruits of manifest destiny"), and discovered again some facts of interest. They certainly interest me.

In his chapter titled "The Lineaments of a Young Republic," Nevins goes into some detail on the size and extent of the Federal government in 1856. Yes, 1856! It was a long time ago, true, but, well, listen and ponder . . . .

The Department of State in Washington had 18 employees! That included the secretary, Assistant secretary, and a dozen clerks.

The War Department and the Navy employed about 30 people apiece.

The behemoth was Treasury: census 450, which included non-Washington collectors in the ports.

The staffing at Agriculture was exceptionally amazing, if you'll forgive the expression: the Secretary, his assistants, andOne clerk! This department is also of interest because, in 1856, the industrial output of the country was growing quickly but still comparatively secondary in importance, whereas four out of five Americans were engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry. The entire sum contributed by the Federal government to furtherance of agriculture since the founding was $29,000. Not a penny had been disbursed before 1839. Yet American agriculture was already a world powerhouse, and Americans had invented the mechanical reaper, the combine, and the cotton gin.

The population, at 29 million, was about a tenth of today's. And of course the government today is at most 10 times bigger. Total federal employment was under 20,000, and that included every village postmaster and his clerks.

Federal expenditures were about $60,000,000, income slightly less (somethings never change). I believe that converts to a couple of billion nowadays. The government managed to snag about one dollar in 200 of the earned income of Americans, not the one in seven it receives today.

Please remember that by 1856, the entire nation, now comprising the lower 48, had been assembled except for a tiny strip in southern Arizona acquired a few years later by the Gadsden Purchase. This was after the Mexican War, after the US had become a global trader of significant interest to foreign investors.

To blame it on the progressives is in that sense to suggest that progressivism had by then become the effective American consensus. There may be some truth to that.

That is too coy. Blame it on the facts of the first income tax: 7% on incomes above half-a-million dollars, affecting about 2% of the population. So I am suggesting, not that Progressivism had become the "effective American consensus" - ask Bryan and TR about their experiences during the 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912 elections. Good times, what? - but that Somebody-Else's-Ox-Getting-Gored's-Okay-by-Me-ism has been wildly popular a lot longer than the US of A's time on earth and has naught to do with progress. What do you suppose those 36 state legislators would have decided had they been given a glimpse of what this little mouse of progressive thinking would mature into?

fuster wrote:

@ Joe NS:
….that lasted into the Grant administration, IIRC.

All the way to the next administration. As long as that? I take it all back.

CK MacLeod wrote:

@ Joe NS:
Since I’m actually of the opinion that progressivism is deeply American, I won’t mind such an extension of the term, but then you’ll have to grant me the Founding and even more the Framing of the Constitution as progressive moments, and I may eventually end up calling human civilization, life on Earth, and the expanding universe progressive. I believe it not just because it’s absurd, though that doesn’t hurt.

Well of course! And the barons who forced King John to sign Magna Carta, they were progressives, too. Let's not forget Hammurabi, author of the first building codes. Old Man Ham and Woodrow Wilson surely would have enjoyed sitting around shooting the shit over a tall cool one.

Absurdity is one thing. Silliness another.

@ fuster:

I mean more or less the opposite of that.

Lincoln's income tax was an emergency, war-time measure.

Colin, going back and looking it over, I see that I certainly did mis-type. I carelessly elided the Wiki entry with your second Goldberg quote. Sorry about that.

American Progressivism of whatever vintage is not and never has been much concerned with "martial valor" or the "militarization of government and society" for their own sake. To the extent that Goldberg "believes" - his word - that, he is quite mistaken; however, I think you must admit that the 1930s NRA codes came uncomfortably near to the spirit of the latter. An awful lot of the proles at the time were ardent for the Blue Eagle. It was the Supreme Court, in my opinion, not 1930s popular sentiment clipped its wings.

Also, judging solely by the specifics, not to mention the tenor, of the laws that progressives have dreamt up from time to time, for example, the income tax, actually existing Social Security as opposed to FDR's purely notional "insurance" program, and OSHA, a list that could be much elongated, the danger of other sorts of regimentation would not seem to be what keeps homo progressivus up at night.

Mark Steyn points out, tellingly in my opinion, that under the Bourbon kings, to take just one of many possible historical precedents, the people of France were absolute subjects of the Crown and liable to be bound in all things by his will and whim. Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem - (Ulpian), and all that. That was the theory anyway. The practice was something different. If the ordinary citizen had meaningful intercourse with the monarch or his officers twice a year it was unusual. Given the technical innovations of our era, accelerating hourly it seems, the possibility of very active, very practical, day-to-day dirigisme is terrifyingly real. It is the dirigiste enthusiams of progressives that repulse me. In a nation of mostly law-abiding citizens, one doesn't need to have the guns up front and center to browbeat the citizenry - though, to be sure, the guns are somewhere nearby.

And yes, before you beat me about the ears yet again with referenda and party primaries, those "achievements" do not have much to do with coercion or regimentation. Yet, I confess that I am puzzled as to why those reforms seem uppermost in your mind in judging the legacy of Progressivism. Conservative objections to Progressivism really have little to do with government's monkeying with election law - who else under our Constitution has the clear authority to do it? - but with everything else that catches the attention of reform-minded politicians. And even on the merits, I'm not at all clear that primaries have been such a godsend. Not being a political junky, I am bored to tears with election campaigns that, like the heartbreak of psoriasis, go on and on and on. The whole nation is kept in needless, media-driven turmoil for two or more years. Moreover, the primary system really was a very small political potato until 1960 (have I mentioned television?). What was so bad about the old state-convention system anyway. I think it's more likely than not that had such a party-centric system of selecting candidates been operating two years ago, Barack Obama's predations would still be limited to making nice with Dick Lugar in the Senate.

Incidentally, Mussolini's adoption of the fasces as, not only the symbol, but for the very name of his political party places them in a whole new category of political meaning from whatever ceremonial and anodyne purposes they were put to before.

You know, I still have yet to read Liberal Fascism. I'm as poor as a church mouse, totally lack the discretionary funds to invest in books on subjects apart from my own research interests, which do not include politics or political science, and therefore probably never will buy the book in question. So I rely on excerpts, precis, and the opinions of others, C.K. Macleod, for instance. In more comfortable days, namely before I chose to reside permanently in a neighborhood as expensive as the Virgin Islands, I accumulated a respectable library, but I now and again note with sadness the copyright dates on most of my collection receding further and further from the aggressive present.

That said, I wish to point out that Goldberg does not supply definition of Fascism so much as a description of what he himself calls "aspects of Fascism." Is that important? I think so. By analogy, is a definition of Communism possible? Marx and Engels thought so: worker ownership of the means of production. Very succinctly put, with respect both to its comprehensiveness and its adequacy in shaping and sustaining a political program.

But Marx and Engels were unflinching and uncompromising materialists. As such, a phrase such as "the means of production" really means "the material means of production," which pretty much comes down to money or, as Marx, coming straight to the point, framed it, das Kapital. History itself has been crudely reified, which permits marxists the luxury of ignoring all kinds of interesting questions. All the "aspects" of Fascism that Goldberg enumerates are, I suspect, comprehensively swept up in the reality of a Workers State's ownership of all the cash lying around. Whether any useful or even credible notion of "ownership" may survive so formulaic a summary of human culture, as opposed to a society of animals, is a philosophical question that needn't detain us here. It certainly didn't distract Marx, Engels, or Lenin one bit.

Fascism, on the other hand, in its paradigmatic German, Italian, and Japanese incarnations, was not wholly or even primarily materialist. Fascism here is spiritual, and the word that best describes fascist spirituality is pagan (quite literally in the case of Japan, the only one of the three that successfully incorporated a state religion, Shinto, into its political program. Hitler's - and especially Himmler's - creepy fascination with an assortment of Siegfrieds, Brunhildas, and Nibelungen from the Teutonic days of eld is well known. The minatory bundle of rods (used for public beating of the wayward) and ax blades, the fasces, that the lictors of imperial Rome, an aggressively pagan enterprise, not so much carried as flaunted, has supplied a not unreasonable name for the whole business. May I suggest that the challenge of segregating its spiritual and material aspects frustrates every attempt to define Fascism?

If so, we again see the impossibility, indeed the headstrong foolishness, of determinedly ignoring the explicitly religious dimension of any political program - something I've been on about elsewhere - in literally coming to terms with same, namely, in defining it. Communism is irreligious only because that is what communists avow, which is not good enough for me. As was often said in the "higher criticism" controversies of modern Protestantism, you can drive theology out the front door, yet it will always return through the back.

The motivational backbone, the transcendental aspirations of Progressivism, are its most important "aspects." The persuasive power of various Progressivisms is more indebted debt to Emerson than Dewey. I have somewhere claimed that Progressivism, as we behold it today, is a religious zombie. Its soul, the well-intentioned effort of the WASP ascendancy in Christian America to remain good citizens and good Protestants, has been banished to some sort of limbo; yet a sort of vegetative spirit, to follow Aristotle, continues mechanically to animate the limbs, crafting this or that prohibition, granting this or that dispensation, ostensibly seeking what it has, at some length, repudiated: transcendental rewards.

The various species of Spiritism, I hurry to point out, are the least demanding religious modalities. That is the source of their appeal. Voodoo, juju good and bad, magic, in short the intentional desire to hoover any loose change laying around for the benefit of whomever (or, brr, whatever) casts the spell or recites the incantation, an instinct capacious enough to include curses such as anthropogenic global warming and blessings like food stamps, are the lowest common denominator of Materialism and religion - if one insists on so styling the impulse - are intent on routinizing well-being, a monstrous and self-contradictory endeavor, of complacently rationalizing compassion: this is good, take; that bad, avoid. See the Federal Code if you must know why.