But in other ways today's Progressives depart radically from the Progressives of a hundred years ago. Two come to mind as we approach the 2012 election season. Teddy Roosevelt and his "Bull Moose" Progressive Party saw itself explicitly as a bulwark against socialism, and TR and other leading Progressives rejected the language of class conflict. Most of today's Progressives are stealth socialists, and make class conflict a central organizing principle.For a succinct example of the modern progressive/socialist mind listen to Michael Moore sounding like he just walked out of the pages of Orwell's Animal Farm: There's plenty of cash out there if only we'd just take it from the people who have it. Aside from the sheer injustice of Moore's proposal, the question that someone needs to put to Mr. Moore is, "Then what?". What do we do when there are no more "haves" from whom to take? What do we do when everybody's sitting in the wagon and there's nobody left to pull it?
Second, the Progressive movement, and TR's party in 1912, was suffused with the spirit of Protestant evangelical Christianity, as Sid Milkis points out in his fine book on the 1912 election. The conventioneers sang and swayed to Christian hymns including "Onward Christian Soldiers," and TR's famous oration to the convention began with the ringing call that "we stand at Armageddon" ready "to battle for the Lord." That kind of language at a Democratic Party convention today would get you arrested; no group is more estranged from the agenda of today's Progressivism than Protestant evangelical Christians. William Jennings Bryan, were he alive today, would be run out of the Democratic Party faster than you can say "Joe Lieberman."
It really is risible listening to Moore sound like a socialist Mother Teresa. According to Jeffrey Kuhner of the Washington Times, Moore is the same person who is suing the producers of his film Fahrenheit 9/11 for almost three million dollars in unpaid profits that he claims are owed to him. His career is built on denouncing capitalism while he himself makes multimillions through the free market. He travels in a private plane and a fleet of SUVs. He claims to come from working class roots, but in fact grew up in a middle class home and attended a private school. His father was prosperous enough to play golf most every day at a private club. He criticizes middle class whites for fleeing the cities, attributing this to white racism, while he, himself, lives in a swanky mansion in an upscale, almost exclusively white community in Michigan. He neither hires blacks for senior positions in his films nor likes paying union wages for workers on his sets. He also invests in many of the companies he has disparaged and employs accountants to minimize his tax liability to the U.S. Treasury, while demanding, of course, that others pay more.
To the extent that Michael Moore is representative of many on the Left his unprincipled conduct is a serious indictment of the hypocrisy of these people and of the policies that they would foist on everyone else while doing all they can themselves to escape their effects.
