Gathered and prepared by David Frisk
“What, then, is progressivism? … we can think of it as an argument to progress, or to move beyond, the political principles of the American founding. It is an argument to enlarge vastly the scope of national government for the purpose of responding to a set of economic and social conditions which, progressives contend, could not have been envisioned at the founding and for which the founders’ limited, constitutional government was inadequate.”
—Ronald J. Pestritto and William J. Atto, introduction to Pestritto and Atto, eds., American Progressivism: A Reader
“The attitude of the radical toward the real order is contemptuous … It is a very pervasive idea in radical thinking that nothing can be superior to man. This accounts, of course, for his usual indifference or hostility toward religion and it accounts also for his impatience with existing human institutions. His attitude is that anything man wants he both can and shall have, and impediments in the way are regarded as either accidents or affronts.
This is very easy to show from the language he habitually uses. He is a great scorner of the past and is always living in or for the future … in a world of fancy. Whatever of the present does not accord with his notions he classifies as “belonging to the past,” and this will be done away with as soon as he and his party can get around to it. Whereas the conservative takes his lesson from a past that has objectified itself, the radical takes his from cues out of a future that is really the product of wishful thinking.”—Richard M. Weaver, “Conservatism and Libertarianism,” in George W. Carey, ed., Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate
“Those who would like to limit or reverse liberalism’s effects must face the fact that, over many generations, it has pervasively reshaped Americans’ expectations of government and of life. Nevertheless, it didn’t win its victories all at once. Liberalism spread across the [20th] century in three powerful waves, interrupted by wars and by visceral reactions to its excesses.”
—Charles R. Kesler, Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness
“Few things so clearly separate the liberalism of the nineteenth century from twentieth-century liberalism and progressivism as the nearly complete acceptance by the latter of bureaucracy.”
—Robert Nisbet, Twilight of Authority
“Equality has a built-in revolutionary force lacking in such ideas as justice or liberty. For once the ideal of equality becomes uppermost it can become insatiable in its demands. It is possible to conceive of human beings conceding that they have enough freedom or justice in a social order; it is not possible to imagine them ever declaring they have enough equality—once, that is, equality becomes a cornerstone of national policy.”
—Robert Nisbet, Twilight of Authority
“The call by liberalism to conformity with its economic dispensations does not grow out of the economic requirements of modern life; but rather out of liberalism’s total appetite for power. The root assumptions of liberal economic theory are that there is no serious economic problem; that in any case economic considerations cannot be permitted to stand in the way of “progress”; that, economically speaking, the people are merely gatherers of money which it is the right and duty of a central intelligence to distribute.”
—William F. Buckley, Jr., Up From Liberalism
“The crystallization … of an American conservative movement is a delayed reaction to the revolutionary transformation of America that began with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. That revolution … has been a gentler, more humane, bloodless expression in the United States of the revolutionary wave that has swept the globe in the twentieth century … Everywhere, however open or masked, it represents an aggrandizement of the power of the state over the lives of individual persons. Always that aggrandizement is cloaked in a rhetoric and a program putatively directed to and putatively concerned for “the masses.” ”
—Frank S. Meyer, “The Recrudescent American Conservatism,” in William F. Buckley, Jr., ed., American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century
“Liberalism finds in every social situation problems to be collectively solved by planned action, usually action involving the use of the power of government.”
—Frank S. Meyer, “The Recrudescent American Conservatism,” in William F. Buckley, Jr., ed., American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century
“Even the most generous left-wing critics argue that conservatives are the dogmatists and liberals the pragmatists. Indeed, as a matter of ideological fixation, contemporary liberals have convinced themselves that they have no ideological fixations. The reality is that they are profoundly dogmatic—so dogmatic, in fact, that they are blind to their own dogma about the wisdom and efficacy of the state …”
—Jonah Goldberg, foreword to Frank S. Meyer, ed., What is Conservatism?
“The present disposition is to liquidate any distinction between state and society … The state is society; the social order is indeed an appendage of the political establishment, depending on it for sustenance, health, education, communications, and all things coming under the head of “the pursuit of happiness.” ”
—Frank Chodorov, “The Dogma of Our Times,” in Frank S. Meyer, ed., What is Conservatism?
“All Liberal thinking—we repeat ALL—is directed in one degree or another … toward the goal of universal equality, or what in an earlier age was called “leveling.” Conversely ALL Conservative arguments are in some way opposed to the leveling process.”
—Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey, Preface to Kendall and Carey, eds., Liberalism Versus Conservatism: The Continuing Debate in America Government
“In a much-quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” … Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic “what you can do for your country” implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary.”
—Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
“Of course, their dreams are not all exactly alike; but they have this in common: each is a vision of a condition of human circumstance from which the occasion of conflict has been removed, a vision of human activity co-ordinated and set going in a single direction and of every resource being used to the full … To govern is to turn a private dream into a public and compulsory manner of living … this jump to glory style of politics in which governing is understood as a perpetual take-over bid for the purchase of the resources of human energy in order to concentrate them in a single direction …”
—Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative,” in Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and other essays
“The collectivist liberal has no use for anything that is not operationally useful. One of his few inheritances from the nineteenth-century liberal is the engineer’s approach to political and social matters.”
—Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays
“To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior … The new freedom promised, however, was to be freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice … Before man could be truly free, the “despotism of physical want” had to be broken, the “restraints of the economic system” relaxed … The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for an equal distribution of wealth.”
—Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“Liberalism … disassembles a world of custom and replaces it with promulgated law. Ironically, as behavior becomes unregulated in the social sphere, the state must be constantly enlarged through an expansion of lawmaking and regulatory activities.”
—Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed
“The New Politics dated from Adlai Stevenson’s accomplishment in bringing the intellectual and professional classes into grass-roots politics during the fifties, and it reflected the radicalizing effect of the New Left upon those classes.
Advocates of the New Politics conceived of politics as a moral and intellectual exercise and were contemptuous of the jockeying for relatively marginal advantages that characterized the interplay of organized interest groups. They saw themselves as uniquely suited to be the protectors of the poor and unorganized, arbiters of the national good, tribunes of peace and order in an irrational world.”—Alonzo L. Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers: FDR to Reagan
“The inroads of socialist thought, the rejection of the acquisitive ethic, and the reflex hostility toward business enterprise all led naturally enough to a tacit repudiation of the older goal of equality of opportunity and the acceptance of a newer goal of equality of results.”
—Alonzo L. Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers: FDR to Reagan
“Of course, many liberals like research, too, but they are more confident, I think, that if the data reveal a problem, the means can be found to solve it. At the risk of outraging some intelligent and public-spirited liberals, let me suggest that liberals are a bit more likely to let what they want to believe influence what the facts allow them to believe.”
—James Q. Wilson, foreword to Mark Gerson, ed., The Essential Neoconservative Reader
“This importance which traditional socialism—the Old Left, as we would call it today—ascribed to economics was derived from Marxism, which in turn based itself on the later writings of Marx. But the socialist impulse always had other ideological strands to it, especially a yearning for “fraternity” and “community,” and a revulsion against the “alienation” of the individual in liberal-bourgeois society. These ideological strands … are prominent again today, in the thinking of what is called the “New Left.”
The Old Left has been intellectually defeated on its chosen battlefield, i.e., economics. But the New Left is now launching an assault on liberal society from quite other directions. One of the most astonishing features of the New Left—astonishing, at least, to a middle-aged observer—is how little interest it really has in economics. I would put it even more strongly: The identifying marks of the New Left are its refusal to think economically and its contempt for bourgeois society precisely because this is a society that does think economically.”—Irving Kristol, “Capitalism, Socialism, and Nihilism,” in Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea
“ … there have always been many people … who do not believe that liberty is the most important political value. These people are sincere dogmatists. They believe they know the truth about a good society; they believe they possess the true definition of distributive justice; and they inevitably wish to see society shaped in the image of these true beliefs.”
—Irving Kristol, “What is ‘Social Justice’?,” in Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea
“The Enlightenment … focused on the mind’s power as its chief object. It identified that power with a particular method of inquiry and, if the reality was unsuited for this method, so much the worse for the reality. Reason appeared no longer as a process of partnership between the human and the divine, but as a self-sufficient faculty possessed by man, a force that could be turned even against nature, tradition, God, so that the kingdom of God could be replaced by the kingdom of human reason. The business of this kingdom was rebellion, for it was from rebellion against authority, superior norms—and the divine being—that reason’s new self-sufficiency had originated.”
—Gerhart Niemeyer, “Enlightenment to Ideology: The Apotheosis of the Human Mind,” in William A. Rusher, ed., The Ambiguous Legacy of the Enlightenment
“If we are differently endowed or, for that matter, if we just act differently, have different desires, or are more or less lucky, major inequalities can be avoided only by coercion … Coercion, however, creates inequalities between the coercers and those whom they coerce. Obvious as these points seem, they have not been fully understood by philosophers to this day.”
—Ernest van den Haag, “The Desolation of Reality,” in William A. Rusher, ed., The Ambiguous Legacy of the Enlightenment
“By 1950 they [the various type of conservatives] all perceived in twentieth-century liberalism the principal threat to the realization of their separate purposes. The new liberalism had embraced and vastly extended the Enlightenment’s rejection of the traditional bases of social order; it had accepted the socialist concept of the dominant role of the state in human affairs and, both by these concessions and by a conscious, if intermittent, policy of appeasement, was fatally undermining the strength of the West at the moment of its deadliest peril at the hands of communism. Not for the first time in human history, a powerful alliance was hammered together under the pressures of a common foe.”
—William A. Rusher, The Rise of the Right
“the new liberal verbalist elite … saturates the national news media, controls the educational process, operates the major private foundations and research institutions, inspires the federal and state bureaucracies, maintains and is forever expanding the welfare class, and largely dominates American foreign policy.”
—William A. Rusher, The Making of the New Majority Party
“into our life and thought there has crept, in recent decades, a spirit of challenge to the whole concept of effort and reward. At bottom it is, unquestionably, a philosophical challenge to the entire Judaeo-Christian concept of human nature. But in programmatic terms it presents itself as a denial of the possibility, and even the propriety, of the effort-and-reward system …
As the attack gathers speed, successive aspects of the effort-oriented society are condemned. Monotheistic religions, with their emphasis on every human being’s relation to his Creator, are deserted in favor of ambiguous Nirvanas (or even mere drugs) promising surcease from pain. Individual efforts to improve one’s lot are sneered at, and corporate efforts are denounced as exploitation at home and imperialism abroad. The defensive institutions of the society—the armed forces, the national security systems, the local police, the prisons—are battered by criticism …
This process has reached the point where society’s role is wholly reformed, and it is seen as the omnipresent nurse, servant, and protector of the individual, who in turn is conceived as having no reciprocal obligations whatever. In return for the progressive diminution of his liberty … he receives from the Guardian State an endlessly proliferating series of “rights” … to an education, up to any limit that appeals to him … to a job … to free medical care …”—William A. Rusher, The Making of the New Majority Party
“The word liberal is the term applied to that series of political and social impulses which elsewhere has more commonly been called “democratic socialism” or “social democracy.” Without necessarily subscribing to the historical analysis of Marxist socialism, and while maintaining a sincere commitment to democracy that many avowed Marxists regard as outmoded, democratic socialists in the world … and liberals in the United States, have consistently favored the expansion of government’s role in the management of the national economy and a correspondingly severe and comprehensive regulation and limitation of private economic activity.”
—William A. Rusher, The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite
“Thanks in part to the accident of history that kept the concept of democratic socialism in America masked behind the term liberalism, Democratic politicians and the party itself have been able to avoid any taint of socialist dogma, while on the other hand individual Republican politicians have been able to ingest substantial doses of liberalism without being convicted of demonstrable heresy.”
—William A. Rusher, The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite
