Commentary
First, a tip of the hat to the late Austrian Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek for his 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom.” (pdf) The imagery of that title is clear and penetrating. Hayek was warning of generic tyranny, not a literal return to the old English system of serfdom. There are many roads to tyranny, and American progressives are charging pell-mell in that direction. This article will trace the arc of progressivism from meliorism to perfectionism to utopianism to tyranny.
Meliorism
As I have written before, American progressivism has been infused from the start with the doctrine of meliorism. This belief system takes a worthy goal—the betterment of the human condition—and marries it with an inferior, inherently defective strategy for attaining the goal: government redistribution of wealth and economic planning….