It's Been A Hundred Years Since America Swooned It all started when America decided to hire an erudite professor - a guy who sold things like hope and change, a guy who sounded smart when he said not-so-smart things, a guy who looked better than his Republican opponents - to the presidency.
They wanted a change.
They just forgot that, when things change, they might get worse - not better.
That was a hundred years ago, and the successful presidential candidate was Woodrow Wilson.
He'd been president of Princeton University, was thought to be an untouchable legal scholar, and is still referred to as "the father of American public administration.
" Yes, Wilson was an administrator.
He believed that educated, smart people should be the nation's leaders, that you should be "qualified" to be elected to major public office, and that the government should be big enough and powerful enough to mandate life in America.
He believed in a statist Utopia where there were no winners and losers, where the benevolent and intelligent government was always there to help you like a "big brother," and where the major decisions regarding the country's future were not left up to untrained bumpkins just because they were eligible to vote.
His favorite book was "Philip Dru: Administrator.
" If you haven't read it, you should, because it'll tell you everything you need to know about Woodrow Wilson, statism, and the genesis of the "progressive" movement in America.
When Wilson was elected, America believed in its founding principles and in its Constitution.
Today, by a slimmer majority, the same holds true.
However, in Wilson's day, colleges and universities delivered a strong education based on the pursuit of truth and generally free of political indoctrination.
These days, it's hard to make the grade in almost any secondary institution without singing from the collectivist hymnal.
The smart should rule.
The working class should shut up and listen.
"Liberals" (or statists, or collectivists) believe in a big, all-controlling, central-planning government.
The Founding Fathers, in contrast, believed in a small, limited government and in popular sovereignty.
Those two views of what's best for America are diametrically opposed.
More than a hundred years ago, right around the time Woodrow Wilson was rising to power, the statists adopted an approach to eventually collapse the American free-market powerhouse and replace it with a collectivist state, with all power centralized to a huge and all-controlling government.
But rather than accomplishing this through bloody revolution, as their comrades in Russia did during Wilson's administration, the American collectivists opted for a slow "evolution" toward their goal...
and the progressive movement was born.
In Wilson's day, something like five percent of the professors and secondary teachers in America were socialists.
By the 1930s, a time rife with depression and war, that number had swelled to perhaps twenty percent.
By the 1950s, the statist foothold in American universities might've been around 40 percent.
By the 1970s, the progressives were in the majority; today, after the progressive generation-after-generation indoctrination of each class by its predecessors, the control of academe by statists is nearly total.
As this trend progressed, the American administrative state grew.
Coincidence? Hardly.
Otherwise-good people are not allowed to enter a career of public service without Wilson's "qualification," obtained by kissing the ring of progressivism at university.
The totalitarian collectivist state is the goal; for more than a century, progressivism has been the means to that end.
Wealth-mongerers who still believe in the American founding principles and Constitution face dark days today.
Experts say things will get much worse before they get better; the progressives will probably have to be allowed to collapse the American free-market system completely before the people realize what they've lost and rally to refound the nation.
When that happens, American opinion-leading institutions (from schools to the media to Hollywood) will finally return to their senses and begin espousing themes of freedom and prosperity.
Meanwhile - and it's likely to be a long meanwhile - the sensible must hunker down and get prepared.
Start your own business - you need an income stream you can call your own.
Shore up your personal values - you need an ethical and moral foundation to see you through the onslaught to come.
And get smart about the global conspiracy against wealth.
Progressivism has its roots in academe, but its control over American day-to-day thought is pervasive.
The time is now to prepare for the destruction - and eventual resurrection - of the free market, and all the benefits it brings to the United States and all mankind.
by Michael D.
Hume, M.
S.