Progressivism is antithetical to freedom

I'm currently taking the Hillsdale College online Constitution 101 course.  We're currently on Week Eight.  Each lesson consists of a video lecture, reading assignments, a study guide, discussion board and a quiz.

So far, we've dealt with the philosophical underpinnings of the Constitution (the readings included Artistotle and John Locke), such as the implications for liberty when the human being moved from a state of nature into societal organization, the arguments put forth in the Federalist, the anticipation of problems such as factionalism and majority tyranny, the role of territorial expansion in Constitutional considerations, and the slavery question.

The last two lessons have focused on the Progressive challenge to the principles the Framers embraced. Herbert Croly, Louis Brandeis, John Dewey, and certainly the two overtly Progressive US presidents of the early 20th century - Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson - all believed in historical contingency, the notion that nation-states' guiding legal documents arise from particular circumstances occurring at the time they are crafted.  This concept runs directly counter to the Framers' notion that human nature is fixed and that any morally viable form of government must be based on an understanding of that.

Jefferson, in crafting the Declaration, and Madison, in crafting the Constitution, could have taken the expedient route, letting their thinking be guided by the question, "What is needed for this particular situation, a sliver of thirteen entities along the coast of a largely unsettled continent?"  Instead, they chose to enshrine an immutable truth - that the human being is a sovereign creature answerable only to his or her Creator, and anyone with whom he or she has freely entered into contractual obligations - into their document.

Alexander Hamilton was not keen at all on tacking a Bill of Rights onto the basic document.  His argument was that since it exudes the spirit of limited government, any specification of areas in which government is restrained might foster the notion that there are areas in which it is free to devise grand schemes that have implications for basic liberty.

Hamilton's mirror opposite came along a little over a century later in the person of Theodore Roosevelt. He took the circumscribed nature of the Constitution's language to mean that whatever government is not specifically prohibited from doing is perfectly fine to undertake. It's an exact inversion of the Framers' intent, which was for government's basic assumption to be that it can't do anything that the Constitution doesn't provide for.

It was a delight to run across George Will's WaPo column this morning and see that he's rather passionate about this point as well:

The argument is between conservatives who say U.S. politics is basically about a condition, liberty, and progressives who say it is about a process, democracy. Progressives, who consider democracy thesource of liberty, reverse the Founders’ premise, which was: Liberty preexists governments, which, the Declaration says, are legitimate when “instituted” to “secure” natural rights.

Progressives consider, for example, the rights to property and free speech as, in [constitutional scholar Timothy] Sandefur’s formulation, “spaces of privacy” that government chooses “to carve out and protect” to the extent that these rights serve democracy. Conservatives believe that liberty, understood as a general absence of interference, and individual rights, which cannot be exhaustively listed, are natural and that governmental restrictions on them must be as few as possible and rigorously justified. Merely invoking the right of a majority to have its way is an insufficient justification.

With the Declaration, Americans ceased claiming the rights of aggrieved Englishmen and began asserting rights that are universal because they are natural, meaning necessary for the flourishing of human nature. “In Europe,” wrote James Madison, “charters of liberty have been granted by power,” but America has “charters of power granted by liberty.”

I've run into the Progressive view in  several Facebook snits of late.  It's the argument that human material advancement presents us with unprecedented circumstances that the Constitution is unequipped to address.

What Mr. Madison would undoubtedly say in response is that, through the amendment mechanism we can so address them, but we still must be guided by the one truth that never changes:  Freedom is the only essential condition for human well-being.  The Constitution was the first founding document of a nation-state to recognize just what a human being is and what he or she needs to thrive.

Yes, you can amend the Constitution, but if you do so without this truth front and center in your deliberations, you're destroying America.