The Ignoble Lie of Revolutionary Progressivism
Two-and-a-half millennia ago, Socrates told the denizens of Athens a story about what would be required to establish a perfectly ordered society. Central to these requirements was the “noble lie,” deemed necessary for maintaining the rule of the philosopher-kings who would sustain that perfect order. For the past two-and-a-half centuries, revolutionary progressives have nursed the elitism contained in Socrates’ warning, hoping to gain advantage in their ongoing war with tradition.
About a year-and-a-half ago, in the disappointing aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections, I wrote in these pages in response to surprising attacks on democracy arising from some prominent intellectuals on the Right. I warned that such disdain for the democratic process was short-sighted and wrong-headed. In the aftermath of last month’s 2024 elections, prominent people on the Left have followed up their longstanding complaints about the Electoral College with complaints about electoral democracy itself, blaming the American people for their defeat.
Like the outbursts of 2022, the complaints of 2024 go beyond the ordinary and expected expressions of temporary disapprobation from the losing side and embody systematic attacks on democratic institutions. The more recent attacks have revealed much about the far-left “revolutionary progressive” wing of the Democratic Party. It is clear from the election results and the near-hysterical responses of the largely leftist-controlled American media that the party’s “wokeist” effort to remake American society has failed and that—in their view—responsibility for this failure rests upon the alleged stupidity and ignorance of the American people themselves. In recent years, a distinguishing characteristic of progressive political elites has been their contempt for the ways of ordinary people. They appear to be one in their conviction of a sharp distinction between themselves and everybody else. That conviction is the common thread that runs through such apparently disparate figures as those discussed below in this essay.
Progressives, in order to bring about the social and political changes they want, must convince people to give up some old ways that they really don’t want to give up in order to make room for the new. There are at least three ways of doing this: 1) use reason to persuade people to conform to the new way; 2) use force to compel people to conform to the new way; 3) use duplicitous strategies of prevarication, equivocation, and dissimulation to hide the end game while persuading people and policymakers to take small, seemingly innocuous steps toward the final goal.
The best example of the first approach is provided by the American founders—who were, after all, “progressives” in their own right. The best example of the second approach is the French Revolution. And the best example of the third approach is found in the modern progressivism of the past century-and-a-half. Here, we will explore the historical background of these approaches, with special attention to the duplicitous strategy of the third approach, which has fueled modern progressivism since the middle of the nineteenth century. We have seen this approach most recently in the stepwise “progressions” of the “rights” revolution, as progressives appeal to the courts to create right after right without foundation in natural or constitutional law.
Rousseau and Robespierre
The foundations of modern progressivism’s political strategies were laid in the eighteenth century in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s positing of a “general will” that represents the political expression of a common good distinct from the “particular will” of individuals (On the Social Contract, Book I, chap. 6). This abstraction divorces the good of all from the sum of private wills, and leads to what Emily Finley has aptly termed “democratism:” an ideology in which political elites are entitled to decide what is good for the rest of us in the name of “democracy,” even though most of us can’t see that good clearly and wouldn’t vote for it in a free and fair election. According to Rousseau, voting should be “the expression of each person’s opinion of the general will,” but since ordinary people cannot always see the general will clearly, elites who can must guide public opinion and instantiate the general will by proxy. Maximillian Robespierre, a devotee of Rousseau’s political philosophy, employed the idea of the general will (again, the supposition that there is a “will of all” apart from the sum of individual wills), leading to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Political revolutionaries ever since have made use of this kind of “democratistic” thinking in one way or another. But democratism is not democracy; it is its antithesis.
Comte and Mill
Whereas the Reign of Terror provides a graphic example of what happens when revolutionary elites attempt to impose their version of the general will by force (Strategy Two above), an early articulation of the duplicitous strategy (Number Three above) came from the pen of another French socio-political theorist in the mid-nineteenth century. This time the target was not a government, but God.
In the 1840s, Auguste Comte founded a secular positivist church representing what he called the Religion of Humanity. Comte’s positivist church included sacraments, hymns, prayers, rituals, and a calendar venerating the great men of history—especially those regarded as having advanced humanity’s “progression” through its purported three stages of development (theological, metaphysical, and positivist—according to Comte’s historiography). The whole thing was designed to substitute humanity in place of God.
Comte was cognizant of both the negative religious implications of his positivist theology and the conflicting religious impulses of his fellow human beings. To resolve this obvious problem, Comte and his sometime friend John Stuart Mill devised an approach conceived as a long-range plan to enlist the trappings of traditional religion and divert these from the worship of God to the worship of Man. Mill summed up the motivation for this approach in his final work, the Three Essays on Religion (1874). In Three Essays, Mill trashes all the traditional arguments for God’s existence. He also excoriates nature (and nature’s God) as the cruelest of tyrants, and establishes an audacious (and prophetic) program for “secularizing” religious sentiments. Though Mill ultimately broke with Comte over the outward trappings of the Religion of Humanity, he remained firm in his atheistic humanism until the end of his life.
Three Essays is astonishing, coming from the pen of a writer who is generally hailed as a champion of freedom, equality, and democracy. In Mill’s apocalyptic progressivism, Good (Altruism) is destined to triumph over Evil (Selfishness), in part because the natural religious “feelings” of “humble” people, their devotion to God, can be manipulated and diverted to the worship of Man. Although the humble may have to be deceived a little in the beginning about the nonexistence of the God they are devoted to, such duplicitous means will prove justified by the end, in which the “true” religion, the worship of man, will have its “due ascendancy,” and we will all become altruistic atheists.
Three Essays indicates the severe animus against traditional religion that existed among many English intellectuals during the mid-to-late nineteenth century, providing fertile ground for the rise of the scientistic and positivistic ideologies that became so prominent in the centuries to follow. The hatred of God (and of the man who is made in his image), palpable in the thought of Comte, Mill, Nietzsche, and other leading thinkers of the nineteenth century, is an important part of this philosophical foundation.
Alongside the general formulation of Strategy Three by Comte and Mill was the contemporaneous publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, which appeared to lend scientific support to the growing secularism and materialism of the time. Indeed, the already-existing animus against traditional religion accounted in large part for Darwinism’s rapid success. Thus Darwinism may be regarded as a scientific prong of a larger project that is both religious and philosophic in nature.
Wilson, the Living Constitution, and the Administrative State
The success of Darwinism in Europe was not lost on another group of progressive intellectuals in the U.S. In the early twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson and others employed another duplicitous variant of Strategy Three to launch another revolutionary transformation, and this time, the target was the Constitution. Like most modern progressives, Wilson swears fidelity to the Constitution. But it is not the Constitution of 1787 that claims his loyalty. For Wilson, the Constitution is, or should be, a malleable instrument subject to manipulation by progressive policymakers to impose their version of the common good on everyone. Bringing this about would require making constitutional change much easier via circumvention of both the Article V amendment process and the checks-and-balances system.
The American founders—who were no enemies of progress—believed that the only way to effect legitimate change was via deliberation, by “reflection and choice” (i.e., Strategy One). To this end, they carefully constructed a constitutional amendment process to ensure a wide consensus in support of any proposed constitutional change. This process is spelled out in Article V, which requires extensive participation of both houses of Congress as well as the legislatures or special conventions in the states. This means that the founders regarded constitutional development as a profoundly democratic process. The founders also established a balanced governmental framework in which no branch of government can claim ultimate authority to determine the constitutional power of another, a fact of which Wilson was keenly aware and greatly disapproved. In a book Wilson wrote and published a few years before his first presidential run, he acknowledged that the framers “constructed the federal government upon a theory of checks and balances which was meant to limit the operation of each part and allow to no single part or organ of it a dominating force,” concluding that “no government can be successfully conducted upon so mechanical a theory.”
In a speech delivered during his 1912 presidential run (“What Is Progress?” in The New Freedom, 1913), Wilson elaborates on his proposal for constitutional transformation by contrasting the science of Isaac Newton with that of Charles Darwin. He views the founders’ Constitution as mechanical, based on the “Newtonian” physics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Conversely, Wilson’s constitution is “Darwinian,” based on the evolutionary biology that was popular among intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. Wilson’s metaphor is that of a living “organism,” which he places in opposition to the founders’ dead “machine.” Wilson consummates his proposal with the following statement:
All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when “development,” “evolution,” is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.
Thus begins the career of the so-called “Living Constitution,” a term coined by Howard Lee McBain in 1928.
Who will enforce the Living Constitution according to the Darwinian principle? The founders had given their answer by establishing a balanced governmental framework in which no branch can claim ultimate authority to determine the constitutional power of another. That means that each of the three main branches of government is responsible for enforcing the Constitution within its sphere of authority, but is not permitted to invade the spheres of the other branches. Nor is any branch of government entitled to concede its constitutional authority to another branch. In this way, the framers raised what they thought would be a permanent barrier against efforts by one branch of government to enlarge its authority at the expense of another.
But this system was too fragmented, cumbersome, and inefficient for Wilson and his allies, who wanted to enlarge executive power by unleashing an army of bureaucrats in the growing administrative state of his time, regulators who would be appointed by Wilson himself or his subordinates and who would operate behind the scenes, essentially unchecked, to whittle away the founders’ Constitution and build a “great house” (an American utopia) “whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single community, cooperative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.” This utopian fantasy is the dream of revolutionary progressives like Wilson, who believed that human beings and human societies can live together in perfect harmony if only we can get over our stale grievances.
Wilson’s “living constitution” came to fruition and has been advanced aggressively by the Supreme Court and lower federal courts since the 1950s. It is propped up by a lie, a duplicitous deception (Strategy Three) similar to the historical fiction once defined by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in his 1776 work A Fragment on Government:
a wilful falsehood, having for its object the stealing of legislative power, by and for hands which could not, or durst not, openly claim it, and but for the delusion thus produced could not exercise it.
The underlying falsehood is that the living constitution is merely an interpretive extension of the founders’ Constitution that coexists comfortably with the original document. This fiction has enabled the proponents of the living constitution to pretend that it has developed from the original constitution by a natural process of evolution. But the transformation of the original Constitution into the living Constitution is in fact revolutionary, not evolutionary, a bloodless coup deliberately launched by progressive intellectuals bent on undermining the founders’ Constitution.
Back to Plato
In the Republic, Plato suggested the requirements for establishing a political utopia. First, civil society would have to be destroyed, especially the most fundamental one—the traditional nuclear family (by selective breeding and the rearing of children “in common”). Second, elites would have to propagate a “noble lie” about human origins, thus destroying the religious foundation of society. Third, an authoritarian political regime would have to be instituted to preserve the relations among and between the leaders and the led.
Contemporary progressivism has made strides toward accomplishing Plato’s suggestions. Civil society has been seriously undermined by the redefinition of marriage and many other facets of the sexual revolution, by the weakening of religion, by the centralization of power in the federal government, and the decline of subsidiarity in society. Influential educational and scientific institutions have propagated a noble lie about our origins, leading to the “cancellation,” ostracism, or otherwise marginalization of individuals who challenge the neo-Darwinian creation myth in evolutionary biology and other fields. Though the totalitarian regime has not yet come to pass, wokeist indications of progress in that direction have recently been observed (e.g., COVID-19 shutdowns, vaccine mandates, the pervasiveness of DEI “re-education” departments throughout government, academia, business, and more).
All of this is based on modern progressivism’s version of Plato’s Noble Lie, which in turn is based on the Ignoble Lie of Revolutionary Progressivism: the presumption that there exists a group of elites that knows the common good and so is entitled to impose the general will on society as a whole—even at the cost of undermining legitimate constitutions and established traditions against the private wills of the majority of people. That elitist presumption is the common thread that runs through such apparently disparate figures as Rousseau, Robespierre, Comte, Mill, Wilson, and recent representatives such as Barack Obama. It is founded on lies, fictions, and myths. The presumption is false. There is no such group.
Image by cherylvb and licensed via Adobe Stock.