Give Us Liberty by Dick Armey

Author:Dick Armey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

PROGRESSIVELY PROGRESSIVE

TODAY’S DEMOCRATS HAVE EFFECTIVELY silenced the fiscal conservatives in their caucus with a Far Left agenda of tax-and-spend policies that are anathema to a commonsense middle built around government restraint. Today’s Democratic Party is not much more than a coalition of special interests that want something from government. They want a program, an earmark, a regulation, favored treatment, or, if possible, a handout.

We have little hope that the Democrats could serve our positive vision for America. We despair over the state of that party. Moreover, it’s too late—the “progressive movement” has already spent the past century taking over the Democratic Party.

Understanding how the Far Left hijacked the Democratic Party is instructive. The progressive movement in the United States began during the late 1800s and argued that government should get involved in making life “fair” and “equal” by mandating higher wages and shorter working hours, offering welfare, and curing social ills through alcohol prohibition, among other things. Progressives called for top-down solutions—using the force of the state to require everyone in society to behave as they desired—but politically, they used a bottom-up approach in local elections.

By the 1910s, progressives had become a substantial force. Buoyed by their inflated view of their own importance, they made a critical mistake that the Tea Party movement must avoid. Rather than taking over one of the two major parties, they decided to form a new party to run their own candidates. In 1912, the Progressive Party was formed7 and created a platform that went by a name that may sound familiar to you: the Contract with the People. They ran popular former president Theodore Roosevelt as their candidate for president. Even with one of the faces that ended up on Mount Rushmore as their candidate and decades of local campaign experience, they were only able to win 8 electoral votes to Woodrow Wilson’s 435. Over the course of a decade, they put one governor, one U.S. senator, and just thirteen U.S. House members in office8. That’s 50 short of a majority in the Senate and 205 short of one in the House—which is to say, a colossal waste of time.

The Progressive Party faded away, but its ideas did not. By the 1930s, legendary progressive leader Saul Alinsky began organizing and training activists to be more effective. His goal was to organize a mass army of people from the community to pressure politicians into supporting “progressive” policies. Rather than spend time creating a new political party, he was going to spend his time more effectively and take over the existing structure. Alinsky—one of the original “community organizers”—is widely known as one of President Obama’s greatest intellectual inspirations and the source of many of his organizing tactics. Alinsky’s guide to being an effective activist is called Rules for Radicals. We’ve all read it at FreedomWorks and suggest you do, too.

The political landscape was changed as progressives influenced Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, helping him pass the New Deal and select Supreme Court justices who argued for a “living constitution” that evolved with the times.

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