This most recent installment of Concepts is a great example of how history can often times be distorted. And while this critique will be a bit more in-depth in its unpacking of the issues above, it will still only be a partial (if that) excoriation of some of the above. But it is a great way to see how Progressivism infected the American political landscape, and not for the better. For lack of time, let us dive right in.

What has Progressivism brought us from its founding on women’s issues? Is it good or bad? One assumes, for instance, that the popular feminist personalities and organizations of our day truly are for protecting women from unfair treatment, right? The question is, is this “protection” apolitical or deeply rooted in a worldview set to harm a large portion of femininity? We will see in the posting below. How did the American Progressive movement influence the eugenics movement here and abroad (Nazi Germany)? Does it matter that Hitler, while in jail, read the many eugenicist experiments and forced sterilizations here in the states? Looking at this subject will demand a look into the past and racist beliefs of a Progressive heroin. These two inconvenient components of the Progressive party (radical gender politics and racist/eugenics) intertwined into their history since the early 1900’s should get one to reject this movement and maybe, in the least, consider an alternative viewpoint on the many issues above. Like, as an example, how subsidizing farmers and making a minimum wage, not just for women, but for everyone hurts the poor and the farmers.

Before looking into the claims that Progressives were a big help to women, we should first understand that Progressivism believes in a radical form of humanism.

Humanism is a philosophy, worldview, and religion that places humanity and the material at the center of philosophical inquiry. It rejects God and theistic religions, instead seeing man as the measure of all things. (Conservepedia)

In the early palpitations of the Progressive movement, they referred to themselves as “Liberal Fascists” [No Joke!], here is Jonah Goldberg’s interesting history of the term:

The introduction of a novel term like “liberal fascism” obviously requires an explanation. Many critics will undoubtedly regard it as a crass oxymoron. Actually, however, I am not the first to use the term. That honor falls to H. G. Wells, one of the greatest influences on the progressive mind in the twentieth century (and, it turns out, the in­spiration for Huxley’s Brave New World). Nor did Wells coin the phrase as an indictment, but as a badge of honor. Progressives must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis,” he told the Young Liberals at Oxford in a speech in July 1932. Wells was a leading voice in what I have called the fascist movement, when many Western elites were eager to replace Church and Crown with slide rules and industrial armies.[1]

One of authors that influenced heavily both Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt was Herbert Croly, who was himself obsessed with Auguste Comte who “argued that humanity progressed in three stages and that in the final stage mankind would throw off Christianity and replace it with a new “religion of humanity,” which married religious fervor to science…”.[2] They were the Social Darwinists of their day, and today they continue on in the positivists views of ethics, science, and radical environmentalist fervor that seem religious in their dogmatism and “crucifying” of fellow academics and political opponents. A large portion of the Democratic Party are ideologically Progressive in this regard.

Jonah Goldberg mentions in his chapter entitled, “Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism,” the major players and authors who influenced Roosevelt and Wilson [Progressives], noting that “Nietzsche was in the air,” and that Teddy Roosevelt was an avid reader of the German thinkers. (As a side note, it was during this intellectual time in Germany that Historical Biblical Criticism was born, late in the 18th century and early 19th century.) Which leads us back to Croly who asked “who would be the prophets and pilots of the Good Society?,” noting that “for a generation progressive liberals believed that a better future would derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources which research could discover and ingenuity could devise.”[3] Five years earlier, Croly noted in the New Republic (the magazine he founded and that defended fascism and communism throughout the 1920’s) that the practitioners of the scientific method need to “plan and effect a redeeming transformation” of society whereby men would look for “deliverance from choice between unredeemed capitalism and revolutionary salvation.” Of course “revolutionary salvation” in social engineering is the go-to Liberal/Democratic position.[4]

For instance, in feminism we see this radicalism embedded in a movement said to be concerned about rights of women:

The January 1988 National NOW Times, the newsletter for the organization, said: “The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist.”[5]  This is extreme to say the least, and it is this type of radical thinking that has made many women see the emperor with no clothes on, and she is not pretty.  This radically political movement likewise looks forward not only to the overthrow of the nuclear family but of capitalism as well.  Well-known feminist author and co-founder/editor of Ms. magazine, Gloria Steinem, said the following about feminisms end game: “Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole #@*! patriarch!”[6]

How can a civil rights movement be interested in capitalism?  As if chauvinism and patriarchal over expressiveness suddenly vanish with Marxist forms of government.  As if Stalin wasn’t a womanizer.[7] Obviously then, it isn’t the system of markets that create patriarchal attitudes.[8] It is, however, free markets and government that afforded women the opportunity to create equal rights under the law.  Here of course what these ladies are talking about are not equal rights under the law but using “special rights” to propose a whole new system of government, which drove Tammy Bruce, former president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW as well as being a former member of NOW’s national board of directors, to say: “What Gloria Steinem, Molly Yard, Patricia Ireland and all the rest have presented to you over the last 15 years (at least) has not been feminist theory.”[9] Ms. Bruce goes on to show that Betty Friedan and Patricia Ireland, ex-presidents of NOW, (and others) are involved with socialist or communist political parties or organizations.[10]

So according to this view of [progressive] feminism by its recent founders one should be both a Marxist economically and a lesbian sexually in order to be a true feminist or believer in women’s rights. Women’s issues shouldn’t be political — we tell ourselves this at least. It is worth stating here that the women at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum would disagree that feminism as popularly known today would be for all women’s rights due to the fact that they are routinely derided for their political and religious views. With this in mind we should define progressivism so we can better digest what lies herein, delineating where progressives and Democrats go astray from conservative thinking in their respective conflicting visions.

Progressivism is an ideology based on the idea that historical and social progress are inevitable. The idea of progress assumes movement toward some ideal or end that usually includes the perfectibility of human, nature and human society. Progressives con­ceive of this end in various ways: history may culminate in an era of absolute freedom, social and economic equality, or some form of utopia. Given the predilection to progress, the past is viewed as an inferior state of ex­istence with various afflictions that wither away over time. While some progressives con­sider progress inevitable, others believe that political, economic, and social reforms are necessary to achieve it…. Progressivism is intimately tied to mod­ern liberalism and the politics of the welfare state, which holds that the transformation of society can only be achieved by a central­ized government that has sufficient power to remake society. In this vein, progressives take up causes that conservatives consider misguided. Examples of progressive reforms would include the Great Society’s war on poverty, the abolition of private gun owner­ship, and the Eighteenth Amendment. Con­servatives criticize progressive reforms be­cause they believe these reforms do not ac­count for unintended consequences, are based on a misunderstanding of the human condition, and fail to accept a degree of evil in the world. Consequently, conservatives often conclude that progressive reforms end up doing more harm than good. For example, abortion, which has been a central reform in the progressive cause of liberating women from traditional sex roles, has helped achieve liberation at the cost of infanticide and the depreciation of human life. Thus, in many ways progressiveness is an inclination diametri­cally opposed to that of conservatism.[11]

These “others” mentioned above are who we are talking about and who started the Progressive party in the early 1900’s. Which was the distinct separation of one political party from a free-market to one guided by the government via “enlightened” individuals. (I am thinking here of the messianic adherence and adulation given to Obama as a representative of the Progressive Democrats.) Here is a larger excerpt from my chapter on feminism from my book that deals directly with the radicalism in this Progressive vision and its foundations.

One author makes the point that gender feminists try and “force us all to conform to their agenda based on the unnatural ideology that there is no difference between men and women…. As feminist author Robin Morgan told a Phil Donahue audience, ‘We are becoming the men we once wanted to marry’.”[12]  This may explain the continued growth of the religiously conservative Concerned Women for America (CWA), and the continued decline of the National Organization of Women (NOW).

Keep in mind that “secular” feminism can be religious as well, Louis Frankel in an article that appeared in the humanist magazine Free Inquiry, suggests that women worship goddess – a female god.  “Goddess religion celebrates the body,” Miss Frankel says, “including its sexual and reproductive functions.  Rituals celebrate menstruation, birth, and the joy of sexuality.”  Miss Frankel contends that “the values of Goddess religion are largely humanistic.”[13] The move to goddess religion, however, is merely a halfway house to full Humanist theology – atheism.  Says Frankel, “If we ‘need the Goddess’ to break the shackles of the patriarchal God, then once we are, we can thank her for her assistance and forge our own path toward freedom and independence.”[14] Freedom and independence mean freedom from belief in God or Goddesses, i.e., atheism.[15]

Now that we have discussed the religious aspects of the Gnostic writings within the context of a Women Studies class,[16] we must come to grips with the setting in which feminism currently views its role in political and social life.  As we will come to find, it is this political force that drives this re-interpreting of history and theology.  Understanding that modern feminism is not necessarily monolithic is very important; however, at the university level it has become, or is becoming, institutionalized.  So institutionalized, that many have asserted that it is simply impossible to oppose gender feminism and to be hired to teach Women’s Studies.[17] For instance, the Committee on the Status of Women at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) maintains that criticism of feminism or Women’s Studies is impermissible because it has a “disparate impact on woman faculty and chills the intellectual climate for academic women.“[18] According to Bell Hooks, a feminist writer and teacher, “feminist education has become institutionalized in universities via Women’s Studies programs.”[19] The question is what has become institutionalized?

• Defining Terms

To better understand what modern, or gender feminism means, we must understand what liberal feminism represents.

The gender feminist believes that women constitute an oppressed class within an oppressive system: what ails women cannot be cured by merely achieving equal opportunity.  As a class women are seen to be politically at odds with the patriarchy that oppresses them.    Consequently, the gender feminist will never accept the testimonies of ordinary women, since the gender feminist believes that ordinary women have unconsciously bought into a system that oppresses them.  Thus, without marshaling an argument… the gender feminist simply presupposes her worldview and reinterprets all contrary facts as examples of false consciousness.[20]

This worldview permeates all that the modern feminist comes into contact with, including such things as history and religion.  The gender feminist, then, has a radical perspective.  As Professor Sommers continues her thought, “She [the gender feminist] views social realit[ies] in terms of patriarchal ‘sex/gender system’ that, in the words of Sandra Harding, ‘organizes social life throughout most of recorded history and in every culture today’.”[21] Of course the history of this movement has been this radical for quite some time, as one liberal professor[22]  explains in his book The Dark Side of the Left:

The liberal feminist, on the other hand, merely seeks legal equality for women and equality of opportunity in education and in the work place.  It is this type of woman who wants what any classical liberal wants for anyone who suffers bias: fair treatment under the law.  Unfortunately this is not what has been institutionalized in most of the Women’s Studies programs at the university level.

As I wrote in my larger post about the history of Planned Parenthood and a Progressive icon, Margaret Sanger, this history that is often forgotten by people like John Van Huizum, continently mentioning only the positives, not mentioning motives and never mentioning the negatives (the least of which is the inheritance tax):

Today, liberals remember the progressives as do-gooders who cleaned up the food supply and agitated for a more generous social welfare state and better working conditions. Fine, the progressives did that. But so did the Nazis and the Italian Fascists. And they did it for the same reasons and in loyalty to roughly the same principles. Historically, fascism is the product of democracy gone mad. In America we’ve chosen not to discuss the madness our Republic endured at Wilson’s hands—even though we live with the consequences of it to this day. Like a family that pretends the father never drank too much and the mother never had a nervous breakdown, we’ve moved on as if it were all a bad dream we don’t really remember, even as we carry around the baggage of that dysfunction to this day. The motivation for this selective amnesia is equal parts shame, laziness, and ideology.[24]

Here is some of the Eugenic history I compiled in my post on Margaret Sanger, one of the enlightened leaders Croly mentions leading Progressive ideals:

The introduction of a novel term like “liberal fascism” obviously requires an explanation. Many critics will undoubtedly regard it as a crass oxymoron. Actually, however, I am not the first to use the term. That honor falls to H. G. Wells, one of the greatest influences on the progressive mind in the twentieth century (and, it turns out, the in­spiration for Huxley’s Brave New World). Nor did Wells coin the phrase as an indictment, but as a badge of honor. Progressives must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis,” he told the Young Liberals at Oxford in a speech in July 1932. Wells was a leading voice in what I have called the fascist mo­ment, when many Western elites were eager to replace Church and Crown with slide rules and industrial armies.

(Liberal Fascism, p. 21; more on this can be found in a post entitled, “Mussolini Defines Fascism: Does the Left = Communism? And The Right = Fascism?“)

It will be noted more in-depth later, but I must now point out that Margaret Sanger was the mistress to H.G. Wells. There was no conflict of ideals betwixt these two “enlightened Nazis.” The other book is just an expose of Planned Parenthood (unlike Jonah Goldberg’s book which deals with a panoply of topics), it is entitled Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood, by George Grant. This book is the best I have found yet on this topic. Each chapter ends with a Biblical critique as well, so if you are non-religious person this book is set up so you can skip entirely any theology if wished. If one cannot consider any “religion” on a topic however, one must ask if they are “theophobic” (a term I like to think I coined in my post entitled, “Defending the Faith Over a Syrah“). These two books (Jonah’s chapter entitled, “Liberal Racism: The Eugenbic Ghost in the Fascist Machine,” and George Grants book) will give any amateur historian or studier of movements enough fodder to turn the tables on those who profess equality at all costs.

A third book that is worth a mention is by Edwin Black, entitled, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. A thick history of how the eugenic movement that spurned the Third Reich in their “master race” found its scientific basis in the American Left. The theological roots for it are not the topic here, but they are rooted in the occultism found in Madam Blavatsky’s book The Secret Doctrine.

The racialist ideas that were developing independently in India and Europe fused in esoterica. In The Secret Doctrine [1888], Helena Petrovna Blavatsky saw the “Aryans” as the fifth of her seven “Root Race.” This is where the term used by the Nazi’s came from.

(For more on the roots of Nazism, read my post entitled: “Hitler’s Homosexuality, Pedastry, and Occultism.”)

The question remains however, do recent Planned Parenthood (PP from here on out) leaders want what Sanger wanted? Some history and input on this is in order:

Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of mod­ern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the progressive pan­theon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, “I stand by Margaret Sanger’s side,” leading “the organization that carries on Sanger’s legacy.” Planned Parenthood’s first black president, Faye Wattleton—Ms. magazine’s Woman of the Year in 1989—said that she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.” Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sanger’s cause. Recipients are a Who’s Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC’s West Wing. What Sanger’s liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other “raceologists.” Indeed, she made many of them seem tame.

(Liberal Fascism, pp. 270-271)

George Grant opines in on this as well:

Planned Parenthood is a paradigmatical illustration of this prin­ciple. Margaret Sanger’s character and vision are perfectly mirrored in the organization that she wrought. She intended it that way. And the leaders that have come after her have not attempted to have it another way. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, the man who immediately succeeded her as president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, once said, “We are merely walking down the path that Mrs. Sanger carved out for us.” Faye Wattleton, president of the organization during the decade of the eighties, has claimed that she is “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps” of Margaret Sanger. And the president of the New York affiliate is Alexander Sanger, her grandson.

(Grand Illusions, 81-82)

Now that we know these PP leaders are “walking in Margaret’s footsteps,” let us see where these imprints lead us in history. Edwin Black makes it known that Maragret Sanger was no “saint.”

…Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist, and she would turn her… birth control organizations into a tool for eugenics, which advocated for mass sterilization of so-called defectives, mass incarceration of the unfit and draconian immigration restrictions. Like other staunch eugenicists, Sanger vigorously opposed charitable efforts to uplift the downtrodden and deprived, and argued extensively that it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help, so that the eugenically supe­rior strains could multiply without competition from “the unfit.” She repeatedly referred to the lower classes and the unfit as “human waste” not worthy of assistance, and proudly quoted the extreme eugenic view that human “weeds” should be “exterminated.” Moreover, for both political and genuine ideological reasons, Sanger associated closely with some of America’s most fanatical eugenic racists. Both through her publication, Birth Control Review, and her public oratory, Sanger helped legitimize and widen the appeal of eugenic pseudoscience.

(War Against the Weak, p. 127)

To follow through with this idea that charitable organizations were detrimental to her cause, George Grant (Grand Illusions, p. 40) quotes from Sanger’s book, The Pivot of Civilization:

In one passage, she followed the Malthusian party-line advocating the abandonment of all forms of charity and compassion. She wrote:

Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound crit­icism. It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order are the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the failure of philan­thropy, but rather at its success. These dangers are inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have today produced their full harvest of human waste.”

Again, she wrote:

The most serious charge that can be brought against modern benev­olence is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delin­quents, and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modernf business lavishing upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large. Looked at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect probably more dangerous, more dys­genic, more blighting than the initial practice of profiteering.”

You may be asking how someone could think in terms like the above? Well, the simple answer is, radicalism. Political, and moral:

In the first issue of The Woman Rebel, Margaret Sanger admitted that “Birth control appeals to the advanced radical because it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian churches. I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tyranny of Chris­tianity no less than Capitalism.”

(Grand Illusions, p. 83)

This is similar to Hitler saying the following:

“I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience and morality… we will train young people before whom the world will tremble. I want young people capable of violence – imperious, relentless and cruel.”

(Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God? [1994] p. 23).

George Grant runs down a quick list of whom Margaret “hung” with:

Her bed became a veritable meeting place for the Fabian (socialist) upper crust: H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Arbthnot Lane, and Norman Haire. And of course, it was then that she began her unusual and temptuouse affaire with Havelock Ellis…. virtually all of her Socialist friends, lovers, and comrades were committed Eugenicists as well—from the followers of Lenin in Revolutionary Socialism, like H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Julius Hammer,” to the followers of Hitler in National Socialism, like Ernest Rudin, Leon Whitney, and Harry Laughlin.” But it wasn’t simply sentiment or politics that drew Margaret into the Eugenic fold. She was thoroughly convinced that the “inferior races” were in fact “human weeds” and a “menace to civilization.”

(Grand Illusions, pp. 76 & 115)

Isn’t Sanger a hero of the Left though? How could she truly believe the above… isn’t there some kind of mistake? I wish there was. Here we start to go deeper into her relationships (personal and business) and views on race relations. Dinesh D’Souza points out in his wonderful book, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society, that Sanger coined the term, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit,” used by the Third Reich.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, coined the slogan “More children from the fit, less from the unfit.” In language that many of her contemporary admirers would probably like to forget, she described blacks and Eastern European immigrants as “a menace to civi­lization” and “human weeds.” Concerned that American blacks might protest Planned Parenthood’s special “Negro Project” aimed at promot­ing sterilization, Sanger wrote to an associate, “We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

(The End of Racism, p. 118)

The Negro Project?! Maybe this is why you will find groups of Black Americans banding together on sites like BlackGenocide.org/L.E.A.R.N.

Not only did she “widen the appeal” of eugenic thinking, she was in the mix of the whole movement, and even gave page space to Nazi monsters in her news letter. For instance, in the following excerpts, we see some very disturbing relationships. In her autobiography, for instance, she said that “[o]ur living-room, be­came a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.’s [Industrial Workers of the World, a socialist organization] could meet.” Jonah Goldberg continues:

A member of the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party, she participated in all the usual protests and demonstrations…. A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman—another eugeni­cist—Sanger became the nation’s first “birth control martyr” when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917. In order to escape a subsequent arrest for violating obscenity laws, she went to England, where she fell under the thrall of Havelock Ellis, a sex the­orist and ardent advocate of forced sterilization. She also had an af­fair with H. G. Wells, the self-avowed champion of “liberal fascism.”….

Her marriage fell apart early, and one of her children—whom she ad­mitted to neglecting—died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she al­ways acknowledged that she wasn’t right for family life, admitting she was not a “fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration.”

(Liberal Fascism, p. 271)

I must let Jonah continue (pp. 272-273) with his referencing the history and aims of the organization, it is jaw dropping:

She sought to ban fit. “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control,” she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, “We want fewer and better children … and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are deter­mined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citi­zens that you inflict on us.” Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world “swamped by an indiscrim­inate torrent of progeny.”)

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger’s books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugen­ics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.” As editor of the Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racism we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, the Birth Control Review ran ar­ticles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For exam­ple, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, the Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need,” by Ernst Rudin, Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

One of Sanger’s closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: “Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.”When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League.

Sanger’s genius was to advance Ross’s campaign for social con­trol by hitching the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation. In her “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” published in 1934,. she decreed that “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit … no permit shall be valid for more than one child. But Sanger couched this fascistic agenda in the argument that “liberated” women wouldn’t mind such measures because they don’t really want large families in the first place. In a trope that would be echoed by later feminists such as Betty Friedan, she argued that motherhood itself was a socially imposed constraint on the liberty of women. It was a form of what Marxists called false consciousness to want a large family.

Sanger believed—prophetically enough—that if women con­ceived of sex as first and foremost a pleasurable experience rather than a procreative act, they would embrace birth control as a neces­sary tool for their own personal gratification. She brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren’t going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact “speaking truth to power,” as it were.” This was the identical trick the Nazis pulled off. They took a radical Nietzschean doctrine of individual will and made it into a trendy dogma of middle-class conformity. This trick remains the core of much faddish “individualism” among rebellious con­formists on the American cultural left today. Nonetheless, Sanger’s analysis was surely correct, and led directly to the widespread femi­nist association of sex with political rebellion. Sanger in effect “bought off” women (and grateful men) by offering tolerance for promiscuity in return for compliance with her eugenic schemes.

In 1939 Sanger created the previously mentioned “Negro Project,” which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The proj­ect’s racist intent is beyond doubt. “The mass of significant Negroes,” read the project’s report, “still breed carelessly and disas­trously, with the result that the increase among Negroes … is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” Sanger’s in­tent is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even then. “We do not want word to go out,” she wrote to a colleague, “that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

The question is this, how can a graduate student make it through a 4-year university and not know about this history. They can denounce, after this four-year indoctrination, how the settlers mistreated the Native-American’s, but will lift up a racist Nazi as a hero? The logic with this thinking baffles the mind. Even the history of the Democrats and their continual choice to be on the wrong side of history is seemingly forgot.

• Great Black Patriots From American History (Part 1)
• From Bondage To the Halls of Congress (Part 2)
• The Civil Rights Movement (Part 3)

Going back to the defining parts of this essay, one of the major differences is how conservatives and progressives view “the perfectibility of human, nature and human society.” The left comes from a Rousseau’lian background where they believe the first man who, “having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine,’ and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society” (Adpated from my paper — opening debate — with an SFU student, “Locke vs. Rousseau“).

Christianity is closely tied to the success of capitalism,[25] as it is the only possible ethic behind such an enterprise.  How can such a thing be said?  The famed economist/sociologist/historian of our day, Thomas Sowell, speaks to this in his book A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. He whittles down the many economic views into just two categories, the constrained view and the unconstrained view.

The constrained vision is a tragic vision of the human condition. The unconstrained vision is a moral vision of human intentions, which are viewed as ultimately decisive. The unconstrained vision promotes pursuit of the highest ideals and the best solutions. By contrast, the constrained vision sees the best as the enemy of the good— a vain attempt to reach the unattainable being seen as not only futile but often counterproductive, while the same efforts could have produced a more viable and beneficial trade-off. Adam Smith applied this reasoning not only to economics but also to morality and politics: The prudent reformer, according to Smith, will respect “the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people,” and when he cannot establish what is right, “he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong.” His goal is not to create the ideal but to “establish the best that the people can bear.”[26]

Dr. Sowell goes on to point out that while not “all social thinkers fit this schematic dichotomy…. the conflict of visions is no less real because everyone has not chosen sides or irrevocably committed themselves.” Continuing he points out:

Despite necessary caveats, it remains an important and remarkable phenomenon that how human nature is conceived at the outset is highly correlated with the whole conception of knowledge, morality, power, time, rationality, war, freedom, and law which defines a social vision…. The dichotomy between constrained and unconstrained visions is based on whether or not inherent limitations of man are among the key elements included in the vision.[27]

The contribution of the nature of man by the Judeo-Christian ethic is key in this respect. One can almost say, then, that the Christian worldview demands a particular position to be taken in the socio-economic realm.* You can almost liken the constrained view of man in economics and conservatism as the Calvinist position.  Pulitzer prize winning political commentator, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), makes the above point well:

At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.[28]

A free market, then, is typically viewed through the lenses of the Christian worldview with its concrete view of the reality of man balanced with love for your neighbor. Keeping the chasm between the two views and the beliefs of Progressivism in their utopian views there is this nasty idea of man being able to own something. The tenth commandment makes this more explicit when it prohibits not just stealing but also desiring to steal what belongs to my neighbor:

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exod. 20:17).

The reason I should not “covet” my neighbor’s house or anything else is that these things belong to my neighbor, not to me and not to the community or the nation. This assumption of private ownership of property, found in this fundamental moral code of the Bible, puts the Bible in direct opposition to the communist system advocated by Karl Marx. Marx said:

The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.

One reason why communism is so incredibly dehumanizing is that when private property is abolished, government controls all economic activity. And when government controls all economic activity, it controls what you can buy, where you will live, and what job you will have (and therefore what job you are allowed to train for, and where you go to school), and how much you will earn. It essentially controls all of life, and human liberty is destroyed. Communism enslaves people and destroys human freedom of choice.[29]

There is much more to be said about this in a paper I wrote for one of my seminary classes:

Reforming America