Daily Verse | Psalm 111:1
I will extol the Lord with all my heart
in the council of the upright and in the assembly.
July 1 and we’re in the middle of a series of short posts on how the craziness of the Left became what we call “cultural Marxism.” In the last two posts (here and here) I laid out, based on chapter six of Andrew Breitbart’s book, Righteous Indignation, how today’s insanity is rooted in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx.
Rousseau believed that humans are intrinsically good but are corrupted by society. That belief doesn’t square with either the Scriptures or with the Founders’ beliefs about human nature. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51,
“If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.”
Karl Marx, who lived during the 19th century, believed that society itself formed human nature. Both Rousseau and Marx believed that men were not free or equal and that society was to blame. Both envisioned replacing the current society with a new one—Rousseau with a new “social contract” and Marx by destroying the surrounding society and replacing it with communism. Both believed that “communism” was the natural and best organizational structure for a flourishing society.
What’s amazing is that near the turn of 20th century, we elected two presidents who embraced what we call “Progressivism.” As Breitbart puts it, “Progressivism was a strain in American thought that merged the Hegelian dialectic with Marxism, backed by a rosy Rousseau-ian view of humanity and the general will—basically, it was soft Marxism without the class struggle” (RI, p.109).
The first president with this ideology was Teddy Roosevelt, who served from 1901 to 1909; the second was Woodrow Wilson, who held the office from 1913 to 1921. Both loathed the Constitution’s place as our authoritative document for how America’s government should work. Roosevelt said, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!” and Wilson said, “Justly revered as our great constitution is, it could be stripped off and thrown aside like a garment, and the nation would still stand forth clothed in the living vestment of flesh and sinew, warm with the heart-blood of one people, ready to recreate constitutions and laws” (RI, pp.110-111).
We don’t need no stinkin’ constitution!
Breitbart goes on to write,
“Both Roosevelt and Wilson were far less concerned about the rights of individuals or the value of republicanism; it was the job of Great Leaders to hand down good governance. They thought that great decisions should be made on high by men of high thought, and that the dirty process of democracy just blocked any chance at true change. The philosophy paved the way for FDR, and it echoes all the way down to Obama” (RI, p.111).
Breitbart wrote this in 2011 and died in 2012; therefore, he wouldn’t have known that it now echoes all the way down to the dementia patient currently occupying the White House.
Nevertheless, there were two U.S. presidents in the early 1900s who embraced Marxist ideology, challenging the Founding Fathers’ ideology. I never knew that. Did you?
But that was just the beginning of it. Tomorrow we’ll look at the Frankfurt School, and that’s when this gets really interesting.