From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   QUORA: Why are progressives so intolerant of ideas that disagree with their   
   views?   
   answered by Charles Tips, Unprogressive, Sep 4   
      
   For one very simple reason… their views are agenda-driven rather than simple   
   idle preferences.   
   For a century and a half now, the progressive movement has had the agenda of   
   scrapping our constitutional republicanism in which we are all equally   
   citizens free to go about our business in the private and civil sectors   
   regardless of our race or religion.   
    What do they wish to replace it with? From the start it has been Otto von   
   Bismarck’s stolen version of Karl Marx’s social democracy, the supposedly   
   non-revolutionary version of Marx’s communism. Social democracy is not   
   citizen government but    
   statist rule with the people not free citizens but dutiful subjects. Guess who   
   they see as being in charge.   
      
   Why that particular form of rule? The thousands of American college graduates   
   laying low during and after the Civil War by seeking doctoral degrees in   
   Germany marveled that their German fellow students were preparing for   
   well-paying, powerful positions    
   in Bismarck’s new administrative state, jobs that existed nowhere in our   
   lean form of government. Bismarck had also had the genius to implement   
   Marx’s graduated income tax [item #2 in The Communist Manifesto] which   
   allowed him to take as much money    
   as he deemed necessary from the liberals (a label properly applied to the   
   entrepreneurial/free enterprise crowd) in order to reduce their political   
   clout and fund his effort to transfer their growing popularity to “bribe the   
   people” that it was    
   instead the Kaiser and his monarchical rule that cared about their concerns.   
      
   Nifty little scheme. And so in 1871, with the virulently racist Conservative   
   Democrats of the South sidelined by Reconstruction after the war and with   
   young Republicans in the North having spent their idle time reading the   
   virulently racist tracts of the    
   day claiming that Charles Darwin had proved the white race to be superior   
   (particularly the Anglo-Saxon Protestant branch) and racial mixing to be sure   
   ruin of a nation, the progressive movement was born to oppose the drive of   
   Grant’s Republicans to    
   put our founding credo that “all men are created equal” on a firmer   
   footing.   
      
   In the generation leading up to the Progressive Era (~1890 - 1920), young   
   progressives tried to insinuate themselves into our emerging large   
   corporations to help them become monopolistic conglomerates (or “Trusts”   
   in the language of the day, with “   
   Octopuses” the casual term). When captains of American industry rejected the   
   idea of buying advice from green-behind-the-ears college students, they   
   instead sold themselves to government as “trust-busters.” They started in   
   earnest building out a    
   Bismarckian-scale administrative state. By 1915, they had added the income   
   tax, and the US began operating according to Prussian statism rather than our   
   original Enlightenment values.   
      
   Indeed, Woodrow Wilson, president at the time the income tax was inaugurated,   
   became widely admired in Europe as the first fascist regime in the world.   
   Europe was abuzz with that form of anti-Marxist totalitarian statism, and here   
   was America actually    
   preferring it to our liberal ideals of freedom and citizenship! We gave Europe   
   a big boost down that sorry road.   
      
   But here in the US, progressive had “screwed the pooch.” At the time   
   Wilson was elected, some four-fifths of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who in turn   
   were four-fifths of the whole population—a near super-majority—identified   
   as progressive. By the end    
   of Wilson’s terms, “progressive” was a dirty word, and that owed mostly   
   to Prohibition, that is making the sale of alcoholic beverages illegal. In   
   Harding and Coolidge, America elected two straight liberals and got the   
   booming economy of the    
   Roaring Twenties (though some of the boom came from flaunting Prohibition).   
      
   The next two presidents were progressive, Republican Hoover and Democrat F. D.   
   Roosevelt. They did not run as progressives. In fact, FDR misappropriated the   
   word “liberal” to camouflage his politics. And this started the period in   
   which progressives    
   had to assiduously rewrite their ugly history.   
      
   No, progressives did not advance the cause of women and help them obtain the   
   vote. It was Frederick Douglass at the Seneca Falls Conference a generation   
   before progressivism started who convinced Mott and Cady-Stanton and Anthony,   
   all actual liberals,    
   that women’s suffrage was a worthy cause. When suffragettes marched, it was   
   progressives who jeered them and often broke the lines and pummeled them.   
   Meanwhile, progressive spokeswomen, like Julia Lathrop and Florence Kelly,   
   were arguing that working    
   women were essentially prostitutes and female college students were   
   “infertiles” producing less than one child per woman on average. Women,   
   according to their eugenics views, needed to stay home and raise large white   
   families.   
      
   In the same vein, the entirety of progressive history has been rewritten. Take   
   the Scopes trial in which valiant progressives supposedly stood up for the   
   science of evolution against troglodyte conservatives. The textbook in   
   question was in fact a vulgar    
   eugenics screed of zero scientific merit, being attacked by the populist wing   
   of the Democratic Party and defended by the progressive wing of that party.   
      
   Progressives kept the economy depressed from 1929 to 1947 (with an able assist   
   from British Fabian—the UK equivalent of progressive—J. M. Keynes) and   
   then we went back into the Truman recession of 1948. It was Dwight Eisenhower   
   and John Kennedy, the    
   only true liberal ever elected president from the Democratic Party, who got   
   our economy chugging again, only to see it diminish under progressives Johnson   
   and Nixon.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)