Barack Obama is the first black president of the United States, but his doctrine is by no means unique. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished 100 years ago.

Many of the trends, problems, and disasters of our time are a legacy of that era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying the price — and not just in money — for the bright ideas and clever rhetoric of our current administration.

The two giants of the Progressive era — Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — clashed a century ago, in the three-way election of 1912. With the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt’s newly created Progressive party, Woodrow Wilson was elected president, so that the Democrats’ version of Progressivism became dominant for eight years.

What Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had in common — and what attracts some of today’s Republicans and Democrats, respectively, who claim to be following in their footsteps — was a vision of an expanded role of the federal government in the economy and a reduced role for the Constitution of the United States.

Like other Progressives, Theodore Roosevelt was a critic and foe of big business. In this he was not inhibited by any knowledge of economics, and his own business ventures lost money.

“In this he was not inhibited by any knowledge of economics” — what a marvelous turn of phrase. And as Sowell concludes regarding another president with a lacuna of economic common sense, “Barack Obama’s rhetoric of ‘change’ is in fact a restoration of discredited ideas that originated 100 years ago.”

Think of it as “Barack to the Future.”

Of course, Wilson and both Roosevelt had the advantage of getting there first, and expanding a then-small government. Today, after a century of unending bloat, the left is now a series of competing special interest groups, often working at cross-purposes with each other, all vying, hat-in-hand for their president’s attention and the taxpayers’ money. Just as the Keystone pipeline pitted unions (who’d like more jobs) against radical environmentalists (who in the Rousseauian heart of hearts would like to see all industrial production everywhere end, as long as they can keep NPR and their local Starbucks), as the Anchoress writes,  “Obama Has Stranded the Catholic Left:”

But Obama’s move on Friday wasn’t about nuance; it was about destroying the surprising unity of the “Catholic Right” and the “Catholic Left” on this issue; it was about dividing and conquering. In a deeply cynical move, Obama used Sister Carol Keehan to foment that division; he needed her credibility to reassure the Catholic Left that it could prefer unity with his administration over unity with the church.

His punch was off. Possibly he hadn’t anticipated a block to guard the possession of rights, which are not his to dole out as he sees fit. He seems not to realize, even now–as his administration muddies up the story with talk of costs and savings–that his Catholic allies’ rejection of his HHS Mandate wasn’t about contraception or sterilization, nor could their approval be regained with a skillful uppercut to the men in the miters. What the HHS Mandate has revealed is that the preservation of the freedom of religion–of the churches rights to be who and what they are and to exercise their missions–is worth going to the mat for, no matter which corner you’re coming from.

QED.

In addition to the books I linked to yesterday, another title arrived while I was in New Jersey last week — the galleys for my PJM colleague Roger Kimball’s forthcoming book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, due out the end of May, which presumably fleshes out the article that Roger wrote with the same title for the New Criterion:

“The history of philosophy,” Jean-François Revel observed in The Flight from Truth (1991), “can be divided into two different periods. During the first, philosophers sought the truth; during the second, they fought against it.” That fight has escaped from the parlors of professional sceptics and has increasingly become the moral coin of the realm. As Anthony Daniels observed, it is now routine for academics and intellectuals to use “all the instruments of an exaggerated scepticism … not to find truth but to destroy traditions, customs, institutions, and confidence in the worth of civilization itself.” The most basic suppositions and distinctions suddenly crumble, like the acidic pages of a poorly made book, eaten away from within. “A rebours” becomes the rallying cry of the anti-cultural cultural elite. Culture degenerates from being a cultura animi to a corruptio animi.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World may be a second-rate novel, but it has turned out to have been first-rate prognostication. Published in 1932, it touches everywhere on twenty-first-century anxieties. Perhaps the aspect of Huxley’s dystopian—what to call it: fable? prophecy? admonition?—that is most frequently adduced is its vision of a society that has perfected what we have come to call genetic engineering. It is a world in which reproduction has been entirely handed over to the experts. The word “parents” no longer describes a loving moral commitment but only an attenuated biological datum. Babies are not born but designed according to exacting specifications and “decanted” at sanitary depots like The Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre with which the book opens.

As with all efforts to picture future technology, Huxley’s description of the equipment and procedures employed at the hatchery seems almost charmingly antiquated, like a space ship imagined by Jules Verne. But Huxley’s portrait of the human toll of human ingenuity is very up-to-date.

Indeed, we have not—not quite, not yet—caught up with the situation he describes. We do not—not quite, not yet—inhabit a world where “mother” and “monogamy” are blasphemous terms from which people have been conditioned to recoil in visceral revulsion. Maybe it will never come to that. (Though monogamy, of course, has long been high on the social and sexual revolutionary’s list of hated institutions.) Still, it is a nice question whether developments in reproductive technology will not soon make other aspects of Huxley’s fantasy a reality. Thinkers as different as Michel Foucault and Francis Fukuyama have pondered the advent of a “posthuman” future. Scientists busily manipulating DNA may prove them right. It is often suggested that what is most disturbing about Brave New World is its portrait of eugenics in action: its vision of humanity deliberately divided into genetically ordered castes, a few super-smart alpha-pluses down through a multitude of drone-like Epsilons who do the heavy lifting. Such deliberately instituted inequality offends our democratic sensibilities.

What is sometimes overlooked or downplayed is the possibility that the most disturbing aspect of the future Huxley pictured has less to do with eugenics than genetics. That is to say, perhaps what is centrally repellent about Huxley’s hatcheries is not that they codify inequality—nature already does that effectively—but that they exist at all. Are they not a textbook example of Promethean hubris in action?

In the seventeenth-century, Descartes predicted that his scientific method would make man “the master and possessor of nature”: are we not fast closing in on the technology that proves him right? And this raises another question. Is there a point at which scientific development can no longer be described, humanly, as progress? We know the benisons of technology; are we about to become more closely acquainted with its depredations? For example, if, as in Brave New World, we manage to bypass the “inconvenience” of human pregnancy altogether, should we do it? If—or rather when—that is possible, will it also be desirable? Well, why not? Why should a woman go through the discomfort and danger of pregnancy if a fetus could be safely incubated, or cloned, elsewhere? Wouldn’t motherhood by proxy be a good thing—the ultimate labor-saving device? Most readers will hesitate about saying yes. What does that tell us? Some readers will have no hesitation about saying yes; what does that tell us?

As Huxley saw, a world in which reproduction was “rationalized” and emancipated from love was also a world in which culture in the Arnoldian sense was not only otiose but dangerous. (This is also a sub-theme of that other great dystopian novel, 1984.) Culture has roots. It limns the future through its implications with the past. Moving the reader or spectator over the centuries, in Arendt’s phrase, the monuments of culture transcend the local imperatives of the present. They escape the obsolescence that fashion demands, the predictability that planning requires. They speak of love and hatred, honor and shame, beauty and courage and cowardice—permanent realities of the human situation in so far as it remains human.

While you’re waiting for Roger’s book to be published, the article itself is also well worth your time.

• Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World, by Jay Nordlinger.
• The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, by Jonah Goldberg.
• Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, by Charles Murray.
• American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.

The last title dovetails nicely with my recent interview with Thomas Hibbs, the author of the newly updated Shows About Nothing, set at the corner of Hollywood and Nietzsche.

The books by Jonah and Jay Nordlinger are due out in the spring. The titles by Hibbs, Murray and Ratner-Rosenhagen have been out for a bit. If you’ve read them, please post your thoughts in the comments.

(Cross-posted at the Tatler.)

“Remember when no one understood why ABC asked about contraception at the NH Republican debate?” William A. Jacobson writes, adding that Newt’s comeback (posted above) “was prophetic in hindsight:”

Well what do you know, about a month later the Obama administration proposes administrative rules under Obamacare which would require free contraception be provided even by religious institutions which oppose contraception on religious grounds.

It’s almost as if Stephanopoulos got the memo first. Unless, of course, you believe in coincidences.

Disney-ABC in tight message coordination with Democrats? Heaven forfend.

At the Tatler, Clarice Feldman adds, “It’s time the RNC asks [Stephanopoulos] if he coordinated this with the White House directly or through its media shills like Media Matters.  And if he did or refuses to answer or to offer a credible explanation, ABC should be booted from further debate moderating privileges.

Why should the RNC grow a spine now?

Earlier: “CNN Host Asks If Initial Outrage Over Contraception Mandate was ‘Manufactured’ to Hurt Obama.” Can you spell projection, boys and girls?

The big news today: according to family members, by the end of his life Osama bin Laden was telling his family to “Go to Europe and America and get a good education.”

What? The great Islamic umma, center of global culture and light of the world has no universities where the children of the Great Jihadi can get a decent education?  The clueless, hell-bound infidels of Europe and America make the Sons of the True Faith look incompetent and backward on the vital matter of educating the young?  It isn’t enough to sit on a dirt floor in Pakistan memorizing the Koran and learning how to wear a suicide bomb vest?

But what about the obligation to take up the cause of jihad and violence and crush the evil doers in the West?

Never mind about all that, Osama supposedly told his children and grandchildren.  “Do not follow me down the road to jihad,” he said.  “You have to study and live in peace and don’t do what I am doing or what I have done.”

All those Salafi ideologues promoting the idea of jihad against the West as a sacred obligation compulsory on all Muslims are presumably choking on their beards as they read these words.  The homosexual-hangers and the adultress-stoners are having a bad morning. No doubt they will tell themselves that this story is yet another lie from the cynical west, but they will have to wrap themselves ever more tightly in the delusions and wishful thinking that blinker their thoughts — and undermine their political effectiveness.

They’ll give up on jihad right around the same time that ClimateGate convinces the a different group of religious zealots to change their own destructive course. (QED)

As the very young Saturday anchor on duty scrambled to fill the air time, viewers and Houston fans were treated, on top of the usual grasping at straws inanities to the following:

• A parade of America’s leading ghouls and vultures fighting for their a bit of air time in the wake of the death including Al Sharpton, Dr. Drew and Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman – the latter a regular presence on Breaking News Hollywood death broadcasts, this time appearing with the stunning report that the Grammy Party of Clive Davis, Houston’s mentor, was likely to be affected by the news.
• A reporter stopping people on the street to gleefully break the news of Houston’s death and capture their stunned reactions, like some sort of Letterman prank.
• The only “news” the Cable News Network provided in these first hours has thus far been reading of celebrity tweets responding to the death.  The fun began in the first hour of the coverage when the anchor suddenly announced that Malcolm Jamal Warner had tweeted his condolences. The 140 character regrets of Kim Kardashian among others soon followed.

This seems to be what we need a major news organization for these days: to read celebrity tweets to us.  Because apparently they think 140 characters are more than we could get through on our own.

Because Twitter has been so kind to the network’s on-air “talent.”

Related: Another recent look at the MSM bungling a celebrity’s obit: “Joe Paterno, 1926-2012; CBS Jumps the Gun Reporting Obit.”

• “NBC’s Lauer to Obama: Can Mitt Romney ‘Identify With the Middle Class?’”

– Newsbusters, February 6th.

• “Sources connected to NBC tell TMZ … Lauer was done with Today and wanted out — but the word at the network is he will now re-sign if NBC ponies up way more than the $17 mil he’s currently making, “TMZ reported yesterday. “We’re told negotiations are now ongoing — but if NBC agrees … Lauer could score as much as $30 MILLION a year.”

Related: “Multimillionaire Chris Matthews: Is Mitt Romney ‘Just Too Damn Rich?’”  Matthews’ fortune is estimated at “$16 million with an annual salary of $5 million.”

Roland Martin, tweeted on Sunday, walked it back Monday, chastened on Tuesday, suspended on Wednesday…

That’s the short version of recent events in the life of the CNN commentator and author of Speak, Brother! A Black Man’s View of America.

The tale begins on Super Bowl Sunday, when Martin tweeted:

If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!

and

Who the hell was that New England Patriot they just showed in a head to toe pink suit? Oh, he needs a visit from #teamwhipdatass.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) took umbrage, immediately tweeting back:

@rolandsmartin Advocates of gay bashing have no place at @CNN #SuperBowl #LGBT.

The organization followed up with a statement demanding Martin’s dismissal.

As John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

Fascistic GLAAD wins another scalp.

Over the years, CNN’s Roland Martin has said some awfully outrageous stuff about Republicans and the Tea Party — and not on his Twitter feed, but on the air at CNN. [Not to mention the rest of the country -- Ed] He’s pretty much accused us of being everything  just short of Nazis due only to legitimate policy differences we’ve had with his precious Barack Obama. As a response, the left-wing speech police — who disguise themselves as “media watchdogs” — have never (according to memory and Google) put any pressure on CNN to have Martin fired, suspended, or reprimanded.

And they shouldn’t. Martin has every right to be a racial demagogue, and CNN has every right to broadcast him. I don’t like the guy, but the thought of trying to silence him is anathema to everything I believe in. Unfortunately for Martin, the Washington Post and Politico aren’t big fans of the First Amendment and, as a result, just a few minutes ago it was reported that CNN has suspended Mr. Martin “for the time being.”

Martin’s sin? Tweeting a few childish jokes only a fascistic outlet like GLAAD could get away with pretending they are offended by.

Martin’s mistake? Martin inadvertently stepped into a trap he probably didn’t know existed, and as a result he is now receiving an invaluable lesson about today’s politically-correct hierarchy, where gay trumps black.

But a year ago, Martin himself was eager to join the rest of the leftwing MSM in its calls for a new civility in the wake of clip art that a crazed apolitical assassin likely never saw not leading to his shooting of Democrat Senator Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tuscon, in an editorial at CNN with the now ironic title, “After Tucson, will media tone it down?”

Note the first sentence in the quoted passage below:

If we are to embrace the notion of civility and humility in our discourse, that means not falling into our old habits. I was impressed that Roger Ailes, head of Fox News Channel, relayed to Russell Simmons’ GlobalGrind.com what he told his staff after the Tucson shootings: “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that.”

Who knows if this edict will be photocopied and posted in the office of every Fox talk show host, and throughout its newsroom, to serve as a reminder to everyone when the nation moves further and further away from the shooting?

And he’s correct; those who vehemently oppose the views of Fox News and conservative radio hosts must also adhere to the president’s call for civility.

Maybe what we should all do is make “Remember Gabby and the Tucson 6″ buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers, as a way to stop someone in his tracks who chooses to get out of control.

Live by political correctness, die by it as well — or at least go into broadcasting purgatory. Or as Michael Graham asks at the Boston Herald, “What do the Catholic Church, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and CNN’s Roland Martin all have in common? They’ve all just been given a lesson in liberal ‘tolerance:’”

The most confused victim of the New Tolerance has to be CNN’s Roland Martin. All he did was send a tweet: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!”For reasons I don’t understand, this makes Martin a homophobe. GLAAD demanded he be pulled off the air, and his lame joke was labeled “the equivalent of cheerleading for violence against gays” in The Washington Post.

Now this isn’t David Duke. It’s Roland Martin — one of the New Tolerance thugs who has long played the race card in service of the liberal agenda.

If the left is willing to throw him under the bus, nobody is safe. Forget “Yes We Can!” Today it’s “You’ve Been Warned.”

Considering Martin’s impeccably radical chic connections, like the supine Outer Party member Parsons when he winds up in 1984′s Ministry of Love for political re-education and/or a visit to Room 101, he must have been astonished to find himself a victim of the same forces of political correctness — and correction — he’s long since championed. But then, as P.J. Salvatore writes at Big Journalism, “Nobody Expects The Progressive Inquisition.”

Almost four years ago, ABC’s Barbara Walters came out with her memoir Audition, using as its selling point a tale of her tawdry 1970s affair with married black Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.). Seldom has a TV personality been a more shameless public hypocrite than Walters was on Friday with former Kennedy mistress Mimi Alford during an interview on “The View.”

Walters battered Alford four times with the notion she was greedy, with four different outbursts like “She’ll make a lot of money!” (That one came in the introduction.) Walters asked Alford why she would hurt Caroline Kennedy and her family, and then assaulted her with the reverse idea, that she could have “saved” Monica Lewinsky from ridicule if she’d talked earlier. But mostly, she insisted the book “did not have to be written” and “You could have let it go!” [Video and MP3 at Newsbusters.]

It’s always a bit amazing for a journalist, who’s supposed to want to reveal secrets, to tell people they should shut up and not tell their story. It’s more amazing to tell someone not to write a tell-all memoir after you’ve already done so, with a ka-ching. Walters was probably signaling to Alford: “I’m famous, people want to know about my fascinating life. You’re a nobody, just trying to exploit a famous man’s aura for a few bucks.”

As an elite Northeast Corridor liberal journalist, Walters is required to take one for the team on a whole host of issues — from John Edwards (keep rockin’!) to the ACORN scandal to ClimateGate, which the New York Times famously tried to bury in 2009 with this sorry defense, the mirror image of their making their bones in the WaterGate era with the publication of the Pentagon Papers:

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

To which Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard responded at the time, “As a journalist, there is no greater glory than publishing materials that were not meant to be published.”

But for Walters and many “journalists” on the left, silence at the appropriate time, in the cause of either advancing the Official Narrative or keeping the old legends preserved intact is an even greater reward.

Or course, as my PJM colleague Andrew Klavan has noted, “just shut up” has long been the motto of the left:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Afterwards, Alford says she was “deeply embarrassed,” and as she climbed out of the pool she “could hear Dave speak in as stern a tone as I ever heard him use with his boss. ‘You shouldn’t have made her do that,’ Dave said. ‘I know, I know,’ I heard the President say. Later, a chastened President Kennedy apologized to us both.” Alford believes that Kennedy showed “his darker side … when we were among men he knew. That’s when he felt a need to display his power over me.” Kennedy didn’t just have a thing for Social Register girls; he had a thing for humiliating Social Register girls. He also had a thing for humiliating his fellow Irishman, Dave Powers.

Maybe Kennedy wasn’t this much of a creep all that much (though Alford also tells of him once forcing her to take an amyl nitrite “popper” in Bing Crosby’s living room). But the poolside ritual of humiliation is not easy to reconcile with any kind of worldly tolerance for Kennedy’s peccadilloes. Perhaps the fairest conclusion to make is that Kennedy did some good things in his public life (and also some bad), but that he was capable of monstrous cruelty that’s hard to forgive and also hard to equate even with that of successors like Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon (or with any in his less polished younger brother Ted, whose own private life had plenty of dark moments but whose public accomplishment ultimately outshone JFK’s). Clinton shared many vices with President Kennedy, but I can’t imagine him ever doing anything like this.

“I can, very easily. So can my readers,” Kathy writes, dubbing Noah’s response a textbook example of liberals as “naive sophisticates:”

As a matter of fact, isn’t one of the most famous quotes about the Clintons that of the female Democrat who claimed she’d have blown Clinton, just to thank him for keeping abortion legal? [Nina Burleigh, then-White House correspondent for Time magazine -- Ed.]

It’s always surprising what liberals claim they “can’t imagine,” despite all the stubborn protestations of “backward, paranoid” right wingers.

You don’t usually have to “imagine” it, guys. It’s usually right in front of you, and you’re just refusing to see it, because we’re the ones showing it to you.

Which dovetails into a related post of mine from November of 2010:

Ann Althouse spots an endless reoccurring cliche amongst Leftwing Elites:

Welcome to my world: Dane County, Wisconsin, home of people who tell themselves they are the smart people and those who disagree with them must certainly be dumb. They don’t go through the exercise of putting themselves in the place of someone who thinks differently from the way they do. But how would it feel to be intelligent, informed, and well-meaning and to think what conservatives think? Isn’t that the right way for an intelligent, informed, and well-meaning person to understand other people? If you short circuit that process and go right to the assumption that people who don’t agree with you are stupid, how do you maintain the belief that you are, in fact, intelligent, informed, and well-meaning?

What is liberal about this attitude toward other people? You wallow in self-love, and what is it you love yourself for? For wanting to shower benefits on people… that you have nothing but contempt for.

You see this worldview manifested endlessly among the left, whenever you hear the hyperbolic phrase, “I can’t understand why anyone would be a conservative/Republican/libertarian/vote for Bush/vote for Reagan, etc.” Well, why the heck can can’t you? Is it really that difficult to mentally spend a few minutes in our shoes? We’re always asked by the left to celebrate diversity, and to try to understand those not like ourselves. How hard it can be to get a handle on why someone has a different view on say, income tax rates, transfer payments, small business, and government handouts than you do? Or why he likes to get his news from channel #360 on his DirecTV dial than say, channel #202 or #356?

Another example of this mindset can be in the title of Harry Stein’s terrific book last year, which grew out of a conversation he had with a self-described “liberal,” when Harry dared to supply the voice of reason at a dinner party in 2008 and suggest that the young would-be emperor, soul-fixer and lightworker had no clothes.

Perhaps the ultimate mote in a far leftist’s eye can be found here.

Also Related: Paul Rahe at Ricochet on “American Catholicism’s Pact With the Devil.”