One hundred years of OccupyUS
Here is one of the first US progressives sermonizing in 1909:
...The prevailing preconception of the reformers, that the existing evils and abuses have been due chiefly to the energy and lack of scruple with which the business men and politicians have taken advantage of the good but easy-going American, and that a general increase of moral energy, assisted by some minor legal changes, will restore the balance, - such a conception of the situation is less than half true. No doubt, the “plain people” of the United States have been morally indifferent, and have allowed unscrupulous special interests to usurp too much power; but that is far from being the whole story.
...How utterly confusing it is to consider reform as equivalent merely to the restoration of the American democracy to a former condition of purity and excellence! Our earlier political and economic condition was not at its best a fit subject for any great amount of complacency. It cannot be restored, even if we would; and the public interest has nothing to gain by its restoration. No amount of moral energy, directed merely towards the enforcement of the laws, can possibly avail to accomplish any genuine or lasting reform. It is the laws themselves which are partly at fault, and still more at fault is the group of ideas and traditional practices behind the laws.
...If reform actually implies a criticism of traditional American ideas, and a more responsible and more positive conception of democracy, these implications will necessarily be revealed in the future history of the reforming agitation. The reformers who understand will be assisted by the logic of events, whereas those who cannot and will not understand will be thwarted by the logic of events.
...It may be affirmed without paradox, that among those branches of the American national organization which are greatly in need of nationalizing is the central government... Proposals to increase the powers of the central government are, however, rarely treated on their merits. They are opposed by the majority of American politicians and newspapers as an unqualified evil. Any attempt to prove that the existing distribution of responsibility is necessarily fruitful of economic and political abuses, and that an increase of centralized power offers the only chance of eradicating these abuses is treated as irrelevant.
...To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of a constructive national democracy. The national advance will always be impeded by these misleading and erroneous ideas, and, what is more, it always should be impeded by them, because at bottom ideas of this kind are merely an expression of the fact that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.
...At the present time there is a strong, almost a dominant, tendency to regard the existing Constitution with superstitious awe, and to shrink with horror from modifying it even in the smallest detail; and it is this superstitious fear of changing the most trivial parts of the fundamental legal fabric which brings to pass the great bondage of the American spirit. If such an abject worship of legal precedent for its own sake should continue, the American idea will have to be fitted to the rigid and narrow lines of a few legal formulas; and the ruler of the American spirit, like the ruler of the Jewish spirit of old, will become the lawyer. http://wadsworth.com/history_d/special_features/ilrn_legacy/waah2c01c/content/amh2/readings/amlife.html (Herbert Croly. The Promise of American Life.)
Croly's style is a bit old-fashioned; otherwise, there is no substantive change in rhetoric as compared to the same folks sermonizing in year 2011. The same complaints about the horrors of power controlled by ordinary mortals; the appeal to fit the law to the needs of the technocrats (to extinguish the "Jewish spirit," as it was unpretensiously called in 1909); and to centralize government ("a more positive conception of democracy") for the glory of public interest.
A whole century has passed, but these ideas, already dumb and stale at their inception, keep going round and round, circling inside a giant ferret - or is it Ferris? - wheel.
...The prevailing preconception of the reformers, that the existing evils and abuses have been due chiefly to the energy and lack of scruple with which the business men and politicians have taken advantage of the good but easy-going American, and that a general increase of moral energy, assisted by some minor legal changes, will restore the balance, - such a conception of the situation is less than half true. No doubt, the “plain people” of the United States have been morally indifferent, and have allowed unscrupulous special interests to usurp too much power; but that is far from being the whole story.
...How utterly confusing it is to consider reform as equivalent merely to the restoration of the American democracy to a former condition of purity and excellence! Our earlier political and economic condition was not at its best a fit subject for any great amount of complacency. It cannot be restored, even if we would; and the public interest has nothing to gain by its restoration. No amount of moral energy, directed merely towards the enforcement of the laws, can possibly avail to accomplish any genuine or lasting reform. It is the laws themselves which are partly at fault, and still more at fault is the group of ideas and traditional practices behind the laws.
...If reform actually implies a criticism of traditional American ideas, and a more responsible and more positive conception of democracy, these implications will necessarily be revealed in the future history of the reforming agitation. The reformers who understand will be assisted by the logic of events, whereas those who cannot and will not understand will be thwarted by the logic of events.
...It may be affirmed without paradox, that among those branches of the American national organization which are greatly in need of nationalizing is the central government... Proposals to increase the powers of the central government are, however, rarely treated on their merits. They are opposed by the majority of American politicians and newspapers as an unqualified evil. Any attempt to prove that the existing distribution of responsibility is necessarily fruitful of economic and political abuses, and that an increase of centralized power offers the only chance of eradicating these abuses is treated as irrelevant.
...To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of a constructive national democracy. The national advance will always be impeded by these misleading and erroneous ideas, and, what is more, it always should be impeded by them, because at bottom ideas of this kind are merely an expression of the fact that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.
...At the present time there is a strong, almost a dominant, tendency to regard the existing Constitution with superstitious awe, and to shrink with horror from modifying it even in the smallest detail; and it is this superstitious fear of changing the most trivial parts of the fundamental legal fabric which brings to pass the great bondage of the American spirit. If such an abject worship of legal precedent for its own sake should continue, the American idea will have to be fitted to the rigid and narrow lines of a few legal formulas; and the ruler of the American spirit, like the ruler of the Jewish spirit of old, will become the lawyer. http://wadsworth.com/history_d/special_features/ilrn_legacy/waah2c01c/content/amh2/readings/amlife.html (Herbert Croly. The Promise of American Life.)
Croly's style is a bit old-fashioned; otherwise, there is no substantive change in rhetoric as compared to the same folks sermonizing in year 2011. The same complaints about the horrors of power controlled by ordinary mortals; the appeal to fit the law to the needs of the technocrats (to extinguish the "Jewish spirit," as it was unpretensiously called in 1909); and to centralize government ("a more positive conception of democracy") for the glory of public interest.
A whole century has passed, but these ideas, already dumb and stale at their inception, keep going round and round, circling inside a giant ferret - or is it Ferris? - wheel.