Vol. 42, No. 04
04/01/2026
The Curse of “Progressivism”
AT A GLANCE
• Progressivism, a Big Government movement, is very closely allied to socialism.
• Teddy Roosevelt was the first progressive president.
• Woodrow Wilson enacted much of the progressives’ agenda.
• Progressivism continued after World War I with Herbert Hoover.
In his book The Progressive Era, Murray N. Rothbard makes the case that government policies during “the progressive period” (roughly the mid-1890s to the mid-1920s) should be considered as the origin of the “welfare-warfare state” in America. American society went from “a roughly free and laissez-faire society ... when the economy was free, taxes were low [there was no income tax], persons were free in their daily lives, and the government was noninterventionist at home and abroad,” to “a welfare-warfare imperial State, where people’s daily lives were controlled and regulated to a massive degree.”
In Progressivism: A Primer on the Idea Destroying America, legal scholar James Ostrowski explains how progressivism was the result of a generations-long assault on “historical liberalism,” the system of individual freedom, relatively free markets and free societies, and limited constitutional government. In its place was to be a “quasi-religious belief in state action.” It is “quasi-religious,” writes Ostrowski, because “the progressive offers no plausible argument for his positions” and “does not and cannot proffer empirical data to support his view. And no amount of contrary evidence will change his mind.”
Ostrowski would undoubtedly agree with the basic premise of Thomas Sowell’s book The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell shows how, with myriad public policies regarding crime, education, economics, and more, the “progressive” political Left routinely ignores decades of experience, research, and facts that prove the failures of their Big Government policies. “For this reason, some people are calling progressivism a mental illness,” he writes.
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