This Is Your Country on Progressivism

Picture an incandescent light bulb. This is your country.

Now imagine a compact fluorescent light bulb. This is your country on Progressivism.

What does a country on Progressivism look like? To start with, in the evening hours it’s pretty dim. Have you tried reading at night in a hotel room recently?

With more than 300 million of those little curly-Q fluorescent light bulbs now sold annually, our country is looking a lot less bright. Ever since Congress a few years ago declared that by 2012 Americans needed to be more energy efficient, it’s been out with Edison, in with the EPA. And turn on some more lights–I can’t see a thing!

When the CFL’s (even light bulbs get an acronym in our age) first hit the market, proponents of the new bulb responded to frequent complaints by insisting that their product would get better. Since that hasn’t happened, maybe the old model could be improved, some thought. Tweak Thomas Edison’s invention and bring it up to current standards.

As the New York Times reported this past summer about new efforts to update the Edison bulb, “Indeed, the incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation.”

In that single sentence we can see a whole volume about what Progressives believe.

Progressives, imbued with an undying confidence in the vitality of the federal government, see it as a goad to “goodness.” Government can mandate its way to “innovation.” And that “innovation” can, over time, make us good.

We should learn to love the new light bulbs, its proponents say, because it will help us all save the planet. The act of adopting something as small as a new light bulb molds us into better planet-loving people. Pro-actively energy-efficient in all that we do, we can become better citizens.

The Progressive view of the Constitution, strangely enough, mimics Progressive advocacy of the new light bulb. Update the old thing, Progressives say of our Constitution, and make it fit our times. It’s too ancient–too inefficient–for our age. A little mandate from the President, Supreme Court, or Justice Department, surely will spur constitutional innovation. This change will create a “new” Constitution, and a better country.

What is this “new” Constitution? It’s a living document–vital, dynamic, active–that allows for the greatest “innovation.” Such innovation is possible because the new Constitution grants each branch of government maximum leeway to advance the administrative state–the behemoth that brought you inferior light bulbs screwed into their sockets by Uncle Sam.

The old boundaries–separation of powers, federalism, checks and balances, and a jurisprudence of original meaning–can be swept away with the confidence of a new enlightenment that says, “Government is here to help, and the Constitution must not stand in its way.”

We should learn to love this “new” Constitution, its Progressive proponents say, because it will help us all become better people and better citizens. We will finally have the security that should have been promised by the Founders.

It’s been widely reported that when one of the new CFL’s breaks, the clean-up is a little messy. Kids have to be cleared out of the room for fear of neurotoxic poisoning, and adults are left with 12 steps, according to a handy EPA guide, for cleaning up the mercury. All you need, the EPA tells you on its Web site, are the following items: “4-5 ziplock-type bags; trash bags (2 to 6 mils thick); rubber, nitrile or latex gloves; paper towels; cardboard or squeegee; an eyedropper; duct tape, or shaving cream and small paint brush; a flashlight; and powdered sulfur (optional).” Must be simple, huh?

It’s kind of difficult to clear the kids out of the country when there’s a constitutional crisis. And while a Constitution can’t exactly be broken, it can be rendered irrelevant. Thankfully, ours is a resilient document. Its strength lies not in the parchment but rather in the immaterial principles of justice, the rule of law, and liberty and equality to all. We will find lasting greatness only in an appeal to those principles, and not in reliance upon government-mandated “innovation.”

This is your country, after all, and not that of the Progressives.