The Progressives’ unrestricted war on America

The greatest domestic threat to the nation today is the on-going, unrestricted warfare against the U.S. Constitution led by the Democratic Party, and aided by a cadre of fellow travelers in the Republican Party.  

America is experiencing a non-violent war of aggression pushed by an increasingly belligerent Left, that aims to progress the nation toward full-blown socialism. 

While the Democratic Party is in the forefront of the progressive onslaught, it is not the author of, nor the ideological center for, the Progressive Movement (PM).  It is its public face. 

The PM incorporates the combined efforts of activists in multiple arenas, some inside government but most outside, that share the PM’s political and cultural goals. While their focus is within the U.S., the scope of the larger international initiative, as driven by global Statists, targets the Western democracies. 

Neither a cabal, a cartel, nor a conspiracy, the PM’s alignment of interests and actions is a collective wherein non-elected progressives, sharing compatible agendas, cooperate with like-minded members of the political class, in order to re-shape and re-direct national and cultural policies and practices.  

Many Americans feel the heat of debate over the role and authority of the US Constitution is getting hotter by the month.  And, they sense these are dangerous times for all. 

So, how did this unrestricted warfare begin? After all, wars don’t come from nowhere, or surface in a vacuum.  

Consider the American Civil War. It did not start with the Confederate shelling of Fort Sumpter on April 12, 1861. The spark that ignited the powder, that launched the first cannonball from a Confederate siege mortar, did not begin the Civil War. That shot merely transitioned a long-running political debate between states North and South into to a state of carnage and destruction.  

Likewise, there is no definitive date for the start of the progressives’ unrestricted war on American freedom.  While its embryo was conceived before 1820, the PM in America was born about then. It grew during, and after, the Civil War into adolescence. It advanced through the final decades of the 19^th Century into early adulthood.  And, it reached maturity by the mid-20^th Century.  Now, in the early 21^st Century, it moves into middle age as it heralds socialism as the cure.  

But earlier, back around 1820, its precursors sailed away from America, literally, to find the meaning of progress elsewhere.     

American students sailed cross the Atlantic to attend German universities

The PM began when “Between the years 1820 and 1920 nearly nine thousand American students set sail for Europe to enter the lecture halls, seminaries, and laboratories of German universities.” (“The German Historical School in American Scholarship,” Jurgen Herbst, p. 1) 

U.S. students with undergraduate degrees, seeking post-graduate study opportunities, found little among the fledgling, advanced-degree programs in American universities.  But post-graduate programs were plentiful in the long- and well-established Germany schools. So, in search of learning, many students boarded ships and sailed East across the Atlantic.

Upon graduating in Germany, many newly minted PhD’s returned to America to join the faculties of the most prestigious U.S. schools at the time.   

Eventually, the staffs at leading Northeast and Midwest schools would include American-born, German-educated PhD’s.  The pedigree of these faculties would attract post-grad students from America’s universities. The American German-educated professors mentored many of their best students.  Among them were future members of the nation’s professorial class. 

The pace of the transfer of learning from Germany to America accelerated after the Civil War, and throughout the closing decades of the 19^th Century.

“Soon after 1870, American students of the liberal arts and the social sciences began going to Germany in large numbers. By 1878 they outnumbered those of law and of theology, and in the final three decades of the [20^th ] century they more than doubled the volume of the American student migration to Germany.”  (Herbst, p.8)

So, by 1900, as American universities developed, they assumed a greater role in providing post-graduate studies. As students learned from American-born professors who had received their advance degrees in Germany, the German scholastic influence in America continued to spread into the 20^th Century, and ultimately beyond. 

World War I, though, brought a halt to the migration of American students toward Germany, except those who went as Doughboys.

Here’s one example of how the cascading influence of German higher education on America scholars continued to spread through subsequent generations. 

John Dewey is recognized as having a major impact on American public educational reform K-12.  Dewey never studied in Germany. But he was mentored by the American George Sylvester Morris, who did study there under Hermann Ulrici and Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg.

In 1870, the University of Michigan appointed Morris professor of modern languages and literature. Morris later helped Dewey get his first college-level teaching job at the University of Michigan.  Then, at Johns Hopkins University, Morris was one of Dewey's teachers.  

The networking impact of German-educated American professors played a leading role in preparing the next generation of American-educated scholars. They, in turn, chose their successors, in a pattern that continued through decades.  

It’s no surprise that, today, the vast majority of American college professors align with Progressivism.  In was bred into their intellectual DNC long ago, and still remains there. 

As the American appropriation of the German educational culture accelerated in the final decades of the 19^th Century, Otto von Bismarck became Chancellor of the German Empire (March 1871-March 1890). 

Today, the U.S. Federal Government acknowledges Bismarck as the author of the Social Security (SS) program. His profile, wearing a spiked helmet (Pickelhaube), is featured on the SS website where a page is dedicated to his influence.   

The tentacles of the Progressive Movement in America have spread widely

Since capturing the classroom—the nests where young minds hatch—the PM has made significant inroads into many other venues.  A short list of examples follows.

Progressives control the federal judiciary, plus virtually all the departments and agencies of the federal government, regardless of the political party in power.  

Progressives lead many prominent organizations representing major scientific disciplines, like medicine and climatology.  

Many legacy foundations that were originally founded by prominent industrial capitalists have been taken over by progressives, who, in turn, present foundation grants to progressive causes. 

Progressives control the various means of mass communication (print, internet, TV and radio, and essentially all journalism), plus all major social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), as well as the development of software applications.  Shadow banning is a means to filter out what YouTube thinks you ought not hear or see.  

Progressives run the entertainment and movie industries, and they influence on-line streaming sources like Netflix and Amazon Prime.  Hollywood A-listers routinely virtue signal as proud progressives.  Popular singers think you should share their progressive beliefs. 

Legacy Christian religious institutions in the West—from the Roman Catholic Church to the Seven Sisters of mainline Protestantism—are doctrinally and politically progressive. 

Progressivism has even infected professional sports—where a NFL quarterback takes a knee when he can’t take a snap, and a NBA superstar is a giant among the citizens of the Peoples Republic of China, but vertically challenged among defenders of freedom.   

Indigenous Peoples Day replaces Thanksgiving Day. “Season’s Greetings” replaces “Merry Christmas”. The notion of “White Supremacy” mocks Martin Luther King’s dream. The false meme that was “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” fosters a demand for “Reparations” to relatives of former slaves.  

Progressives have taken the human binary equation of male and female and converted it to a troubled confliction over gender identity. Young males, undergoing gender conversion, gain supremacy in women’s scholastic sports, and New York City declares nearly as many gender types as it has Italian Restaurants.  Meanwhile, NIKE disses Betsy Ross who never did anything to harm a shoemaker, except design a patriotic flag. 

If any discipline should have a clear understanding of gender differentiation, should it not be medicine? 

Yet, in early October 2019, physicians attending the American Academy of Family Physicians CME (continuing medical education) event in San Antonio, Texas read this Restroom Policy statement posted in the hall.  

So, when and where did this unrestricted warfare start in America? 

You can trace the when to around 1820. The where was in German university post-graduate classrooms where sat America’s best and brightest. After their matriculation into the rarified air of the scholastically elite, they sailed back home to spread what they learned. 

And they still do—spread what they learned—through their progressive descendants who, today, reign over the classrooms of American universities, and often down the K-12 grades to Kindergarten, which is a German word.