Woodrow Wilson’s ideas are opposed to the basic American creed. They can’t coexist forever.
Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement—…—to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration. Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident.
Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.
But we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bounds for the supposedly enlightened world of Hegel, Marx and their followers. Fascism—which, after all, was a national socialism—triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions. The socialism of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China proceeded to kill more tens of millions of their own people. This is what happens when natural rights give way to the higher good of notions of history, progress, or, as Thomas Sowell has written, the “vision of the anointed.”