Judicial Activism- Part IV

From the 1890s until 1945, when the Cold War started between the United States and the Soviet Union, socialism was regarded by most educated people as scientific truth that had to be implemented to insure the best possible future for humanity. The founder’s Judeo-Christian heritage was relegated, at least in university circles, to the realm of ignorance. “Science,” from Karl Marx to Charles Darwin, taught that intellectual planners could perfect human nature and political societies, if outmoded beliefs in God and personal morality were no longer blocking the path of Progress.

The paradigm of social order embodied in The Federalist papers, particularly the belief that the rights of private property were the foundation of all other political liberties, became anathema to educated Americans in the Depression of the 1930s.

The evangelical message of secular socialism was spread among the general public through newspapers, general-circulation magazines, and through the preaching of Protestant Christian ministers who espoused the Social Gospel.

The Social Gospel was an insidious movement to enlist Christians in the move toward Progressive socialism by levering off the truly moral cause of improving working conditions for the poor via abolishing child labor, improving working conditions for women, and raising wage levels. As with liberal-socialism today, the objectives sound good; the problem arises from the belief that our original Constitutional principles had to be abandoned in order to restructure the social and political order. The Social Gospel thus departed from Christian teachings aimed at making each individual responsible for leading a moral and benevolent life and transferred that responsibility to the collectivized political state.

Not until the naked military aggression of the Soviet Union became apparent to the general public in the Cold-War era did liberal news media and liberal-socialist spokesmen tone down their espousal of socialism. By that time, however, it mattered little, since President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal already had gutted the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the Bill of Rights and collectivized most political power and tax revenues at the Federal level.

A sense of the prevailing climate of opinion during the 1920s and 1930s is revealed by an essay appearing in the August 8th issue of The New Yorker magazine. Louis Menand approvingly recounts the views of Edmund Wilson, described by the Wikipedia as “...one of the most important American literary and social critics of the 20th century.”

Mr. Menand writes:

“[Edmund Wilson] thought of himself as a journalist, and nearly all his work was done for commercial magazines, principally Vanity Fair, in the nineteen-twenties; The New Republic, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties; The New Yorker, beginning in the nineteen-forties; and The New York Review of Books, in the nineteen-sixties.... He wrote a few essays about the critical literature that had influenced him—Marxist and historical interpretation—but he paid little attention to the criticism being written by his contemporaries....he enlisted European modernism in a mission already mounted—the mission to deprovincialize American culture.... “

“Wilson came out of the Progressive era..... At Princeton, Wilson was taught about the necessary virtue of cosmopolitanism [moral relativism] by Gauss, a professor of Romance languages ...”

“In 1920, he began his journalistic career, with a job at Vanity Fair, followed, soon afterward, by a position at the magazine that was born of Progressivism, The New Republic, where he was an editor, off and on, for many years, and where the essays in “Axel’s Castle” first appeared.”

“By then, Wilson had firmly in his sights the twin enemies of every Progressive intellectual: unregulated business and the genteel tradition. His vicars were not Proust and Eliot; they were H. L. Mencken and George Bernard Shaw, scourges of bourgeois smugness and Philistinism. Wilson hated American chauvinism and gentility, and everything he associated with them—prudery, pedantry, commercialism, and militarism. That hatred is the starch in his prose.”

He expressed this hatred for traditional American values on the eve of Franklin Roosevelt’s first election, in a 1932 essay in The New Republic:

“Who today in any camp on the left can have the optimism to believe that capitalism is capable of reforming itself? And who today can look forward with confidence to any outcome from the present chaos short of the establishment of a socialist society – not like the Russian: how could it be? America is not Russia – but with this in common with Russia: that it shall aim to abolish social classes and private enterprise for private profit?”

Mr. Wilson’s expression of liberal-socialist views in the 1930s was actually quite restrained, compared to the views expressed by economist and writer Stuart Chase, the originator of the term New Deal, adopted by Franklin Roosevelt for his 1932 campaign and his subsequent administration.

Mr. Chase said regarding the Depression, “…the cycle is a direct product of that specialization which appeared with the industrial revolution. It is a product of laissez-faire, and the neglect to inquire what an economic system is for…There never has been control from the top, and that is the only point from which the cycle may be steadied.…I suspect it is the end of the economic system as we have known it – and suffered with it – in the past…a new deal is in order.” Mr. Roosevelt repeated this theme during his campaign and again in his first inaugural address.

What remedies did Mr. Stuart Chase propose? “The drive of collectivism leads toward control from the top. … At bottom the conception of economic planning is science supervising a people’s housekeeping. … And so the final idea of a National Planning Board emerges; …a group which knows the past, can give capable advice as to the present, and sees into the future, especially the technological future. …The real work, the real thought, the real action must come from the technicians: that class most able, most clear-headed of all in American life, hitherto only half utilized in technical detail and in college class rooms. …This is a long-swing project we are starting, longer than the secular trend; longer than the industrial revolution itself. Errors will be made; methods will be tried out and discarded; but the principle of control from the top must go on.”

It is also instructive to note the New Deal thesis about the relationship of the individual to the state, from which emerges the limitless penchant for agencies to regulate every action of every individual. When direct regulatory action via executive orders or legislative acts of Congress can’t be had, liberal-socialists like the ACLU turn to judicial activism as the ploy of last resort.

Mr. Chase describes this activist paradigm: “The state is the embodiment of the whole community, and its rule of action, in theory at least, ‘the public interest.’ If your corporation is busily dynamiting the public interest, the state has the right to close you up. …To tell an American that he cannot invest his money in this project, or even to suggest that it is thrown away in that, is a bold and unheard-of step to the left; …But how else can the obsolescence rate be steadied, excess capacity and overproduction kept within bounds of market requirements, thoroughly vicious and wasteful enterprises be checked, the non-speculative investor be protected? …One of the most interesting tasks of the Planning Board will be an attempt to draw the line between those economic areas where competition is still useful and those where it has outlived its usefulness, and either is already supplanted or should be supplanted by some form of collectivism. …The balancing and regulating of man hours will, like minimum wages, operate to weed out parasitic enterprises, establishments so inefficient that they can make their margin only by driving workers through a ten or twelve hour day. …This is the program of the third road. It is not an attempt to bolster up capitalism, it is frankly aimed at the destruction of capitalism, specifically in its most evil sense of ruthless expansion. The redistribution of national income, the sequestration of excess profits, the control of new investments, are all designed to that end. …And woe to Supreme Courts, antiquated rights of property, checks and balances and democratic dogmas which stand in its path.”

It is this 1930s paradigm that shapes today’s liberal-socialist politicians, main-stream media writers, and Hollywood entertainers. We should not be surprised at the anti-Americanism emanating from our college campuses, given the close identification since the mid-1800s of universities with the secular materialism of the socialist religion. In those ivy-covered halls, to be modern and scientific is to be a socialist.

And we certainly shouldn’t be surprised at the activism of Federal judges who have been thoroughly marinated in the corrosive acids of the secular, materialistic, and socialistic paradigm.