Unmaking the Leviathan Part II: The Long Betrayal: How Progressives Undermined the Founders

This didn’t happen by accident. It was engineered.

At the turn of the 20th century, a new breed of American intellectuals and politicians—Progressives like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Croly—openly rejected the Constitution. They saw it as outdated, naive, and dangerously tied to the idea that rights come from a Creator and not the State. They were vehemently opposed to a rights-based government and the separation of powers and were determined to undo the machinery of the Republic.

To them, government wasn't a necessary evil meant to secure rights and protect liberties. It was salvation itself, the vehicle by which all humanity would be saved and we would reach the apotheosis and deification of mankind. The end of history would be achieved and we would bring heaven to earth through the power of applied science implemented by a “benevolent” class of educated elite. And so they set out to transform it—centralize it, professionalize it, and above all, separate it out from the messy input of politics and voters.

What they created is what we now call the Administrative State. A massive, sprawling bureaucratic Leviathan that interprets, enforces, and even via statues and regulations, essentially writes laws—all while remaining outside the reach of those it governs.

We cannot look at the Progressive moment that arose at the turn of the 20th century as a benign reform movement that was only interested in better food quality or suffrage for women. That would be naive. The Progressive intellectuals like Wilson, Roosevelt, Croly, and others like Frank Goodnow and John Burgess, were deeply antagonistic and hostile to the Founders and their Constitution. They viewed almost everything this Republic was founded on with great disdain, even hatred, from the basic beliefs in human nature to the actual role and purpose of government. They viewed all of that as a roadblock to the “progress” they envisioned for America. So they intentionally, willfully and openly set out to destroy the moral and political authority of the US Constitution and the government that arose from that document.

So we must shift our thinking on the Progressives and their Administrative State from viewing it as a benevolent one to a malevolent one. The movement was a coup against the Republic, not a correction. It was, and is, regime change politics. That is why it must be dismantled. Not repurposed, but shattered into a million pieces and rejected wholesale. That is the only way we can restore the Republic.