The following excerpt is from an article titled The Progressives’ Legacy of Bankruptcy by Tiffany Miller. The full article starts out by describing the failed economic policies of progressives but eventually gets to the foundations of modern liberal thought concerning the role of government. The dominant theme being that individual self-sacrifice for the state will somehow lead to a collective spiritual Nirvana, but history has already shown that it leads to tyranny or the “overlordship” of Progressivism.

It is the question of why progressives believe what they believe, and their rejection of the American Founders and individual liberty that I want to highlight:

The Progressives’ first step in reconstructing America was thus to raze the most fundamental principle of the Founders’ social-compact theory of government - the idea, as the Declaration of Independence expresses it, that “all men are created equal.” For the Founders, the equality principle, which was part of their larger understanding of “the laws of nature and Nature’s God,” is the primary source of the individual’s rights and duties. On one hand, if “all men are created equal,” all ordinary adult human beings have a right by nature to rule themselves without depending upon the permission of anyone else. Man’s natural freedom, in other words, is the necessary implication of equality, and divides up into a host of natural or inalienable rights - and “among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” On the other hand, the very recognition of man’s natural equality also imposes a duty upon individuals to refrain from acting in any way that arbitrarily interferes with another’s right to rule himself - e.g., murder, rape, theft, assault, kidnapping, etc. Liberty, in other words, is not license, and individuals are morally obligated to respect the freedom of all. So long as individuals honor these limits - and otherwise honor the more extensive obligations they have to their spouses and especially their children - they have every right to pursue their own concerns. The pursuit of self-interest in itself is not immoral, only that pursuit which transgresses the natural rights of others or, by extension, the preservation of political society itself.

The Founders’ understanding of the origin of government, in turn, proceeds from a recognition of the difficulty many individuals have in honoring the obligations that flow from the equality principle. Government is formed, in other words, for the express purpose of better enforcing this duty among men, thereby better securing the freedom of all. “If men were angels,” as Madison famously wrote in Federalist 51, “no government would be necessary.” Precisely because men are not angels, because many are strongly inclined to violate the rights of others when it is in their interest to do so, individuals consent to enter into the social compact, and establish government on the understanding it will use its powers to restrain those domestically and internationally who would violate their freedom. In principle, then, the power of government is not absolute but is limited to whatever actions are necessary to secure the natural rights of its members.

In principle, accordingly, all of the rights previously believed to inhere in the individual - e.g., the rights to life, to physical liberty, to decide whom to marry, to enjoy the fruits of his labor, to speak freely, etc. - were now subject to public disposal. Whether and to what extent government allows individuals to control any aspect of their personal concerns was now purely a matter of how it viewed the consequences of doing so. To illustrate just how far the Progressives were willing to take this, Merriam, in drawing the foreign-policy implications of this change, declared: “Barbaric races, if incapable, may be swept away; and such action ‘violates no rights of these populations which are not petty and trifling in comparison with its [the Teutonic race's] transcendent right and duty to establish legal order everywhere.’” As Progressive economist and New Republic editor Walter Weyl summed up this shift in 1912, America was now “emphasizing the overlordship of the public over property and rights formerly held to be private.”

If the Progressives’ rejection of the Founders’ understanding of natural rights exposes individuals to virtually limitless public interference (or “overlordship”), the Progressive redefinition of individual freedom as spiritual fulfillment basically guarantees it. The constructive aspect of the Progressive refounding of America , in other words, stems from the fact that the Progressive conception of the State finds both its origin, and its ultimate purpose, in a new conception of individual freedom synonymous with the “perfection” or fulfillment of human nature - with, in other words, the realization of the comprehensive human good. Following Hegel, the Progressives widely believed that Freedom consists in the individual’s ability to actualize the spiritual potential inherent in his being, becoming thereby a “perfect” or complete human being. Freedom is thus “something to be achieved,” as Dewey put it, but not through “growth” or change in any indiscriminate or open-ended sense.

“The definition of freedom,” as Progressive sociologist Charles H. Cooley wrote, “is perhaps this: that it is opportunity for right development, for development in accordance with the progressive ideal of life that we have in conscience.” For the Progressives, as with Hegel, then, Freedom is inextricably tied to an evolutionary, or, more precisely, progressive, conception of History in which each successive stage of civilization, like an acorn maturing into an oak tree, represents a fuller or more complete development of man’s moral or spiritual nature than the previous one. History, then, is ordered toward a specific end - the actualization of man’s spiritual nature - and has an identifiable path or content. As Richard Gamble concludes, “History possessed a distinct and discernable tendency, a teleology. It moved from the physical to the spiritual, from perdition to redemption.”

… In effect, the Progressives believed that men were developing an increasingly wide conception of duty to an ever-enlarging circle of men - e.g., city, state, nation, and ultimately all of humanity - which process would culminate in a felt obligation to promote the fullest spiritual development of all mankind. “Do we,” as the German-trained Progressive economist Richard T. Ely asked rhetorically, “regard all human beings as brothers, and have we a sincere longing for the welfare of all? Do we think that only some of us, and not all of us, have talents which we ought to improve; that is, to develop in the most complete manner possible all faculties, physical, mental, moral, spiritual?” For Ely and the Progressives generally, then, “‘true morality consists in the complete surrender of one’s own self, and in self-sacrifice for others.’” If men generally were not yet “angels,” they soon would be, as self-interest - in any sense other than one’s own spiritual perfection - would be a basically evanescent feature of human psychology.

Self-sacrifice to promote the fullest welfare of all humanity thus lies at the core of the Progressive conception of Freedom. While the Founders did not believe that individuals owe unrelated human beings anything like the comprehensive obligation parents owe children, the Progressives did. In their view, accordingly, to allow individuals to pursue their own personal concerns so long as they did not overtly interfere with the right of others to rule themselves was merely to allow them to disregard the spiritual welfare of others. The Progressives thus endlessly denounced the “individualism” of the Founding. The new model American citizen was to be the soldier in wartime, willing, as President Lincoln once put it, to surrender “the last full measure of devotion.” “In the days of ‘61 to ‘65,” as Charles Van Hise, a leading Progressive conservationist, economist, and president of the University of Wisconsin , wrote, “a million men laid aside their personal desires, and surrendered their individualism for the good of the nation. Now it is demanded that every citizen shall surrender his individualism not for four years, but for life, - that he shall think not only of himself and his family, but of his neighbors, and especially of the unnumbered generations that are to follow.” The extraordinary degree of self-sacrifice for others - for the public - once characteristic of Americans only in exceptional, short-lived periods of wartime, should and would become the norm in every area of life.

Our modern paragons of ‘enlightenment’ tend to be the phoniest elites imaginable, from Al Gore flying around in private jets, lecturing the masses about energy consumption before returning to his multimillion-dollar mansions, to John Kerry trying to evade taxes on his new 7 million dollar yacht. If the leaders of modern liberalism cannot adhere to their own dogma, how can they expect everyone else to? Progressive theories amount to nothing more than a fantasy or wishful thinking.

Even average people who support socialism do not truly believe in it. The best measure of human nature is what people do when no one is looking, and it’s the same the world over. People in socialist countries try to game the system any way they can from black markets to cheating on their taxes. In fact, it’s been estimated that the Soviet Union’s black market was larger than the official economy.

People just don’t behave in a way that is consistent with progressive theories, and that includes the behavior of progressives.

Their concept of “true morality” being total surrender of the individual to the “greater good” is at the heart of their beliefs, but is utterly vacuous. (1) Self-sacrifice when forced by the state is not self-sacrifice. (2) Most of those who demand total sacrifice are themselves unwilling to. Such systems are not just immoral, but likely doomed to failure in the long run. Communism is only sustainable through heavy oppression, fear and control, and therefore it is ludicrous to suggest the people are free to self-actualize by way of state-mandated ’spiritual perfection.’  They can dress a slave in a t-shirt with the word “free” written across it, but he’s still a slave.

The failure of progressive ideas to fulfill the promises of collectivism was never a matter of insufficient resolve or lack of faith among the populace. It fails because the ideas themselves are wrong on a fundamental level. Any movement that attempts to radically transform human societies will ultimately be unsuccessful if it is at odds with human nature and natural law. The Founders had it right, the Progressives had it wrong - mankind cannot be transformed into angels on earth.

The infantilizing state destroys incentives and removes the risk, ambitions, and hope for maximizing your life’s potential. In essence, Progressivism drains the life out of life. The state spiritually kills its citizens. Yet, they believe people will achieve some kind of spiritual fulfillment in such an environment without it occurring to them that true fulfillment may only be possible when free to pursue your own dreams. Striving for a collective spirituality is absurd on its face and folly in practice.