Comment by Linda: Progressives were then and are now mystical pantheists. For them ‘god’ was and still is an evolutionary/Darwinian energy within history that always points at the righteousness of Progressives. This is why we hear them describing themselves as standing on the right side of history (their god force).
Progressives were behind the replacement of the personal God of creation with ‘science’ (meaning magic science) and the myth of Darwinism, which together with the Big Bang (exploding Cosmic Egg) constitute the mystical pantheist origin account. In bringing their origin account into schools they were able to slowly transition all Americans away from the Biblical view of themselves as God’s individual spiritual image bearers into acceptance of themselves as dehumanized apes of evolution or aggregates of matter in evolution. Within the context of mystical pantheism, ‘common good’ means there are no individual souls, only a pantheist Oversoul or some such pantheist concept.
As the Biblical view is the foundation of our Constitutional Republic and our rights, its replacement meant the end of our Constitutional Republic and rights since apes and aggregates of matter have no rights. In this way Progressives destroyed our Republic without firing even one shot.
Bradley Thomas, Foundation for Economic Education, Mar 7, 2019
Progressive ideology focuses on the “common good” while devaluing individual rights. This mindset, however, has disturbing consequences: when you elevate the “common good” over the rights of individuals, individuals become expendable.
Such a mindset can lead to some disturbing practices.
Eugenics and the Progressive Era
Indeed, American progressives in the Progressive Era had quite an affinity for eugenics as a means to improve the stock of society by “scientific” means of control.
Princeton University scholar Thomas C. Leonard documents this in his 2016 book Illiberal Reformers; Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era.
The Progressive Era in America is typically recognized as the three to four decades after 1890. Eugenics is commonly referred to as a movement to “improve human heredity by the social control of human breeding.”
During the Progressive Era, Leonard notes, it was quite fashionable in scholarly circles to openly discuss eugenics. “In 1928, 376 college courses were dedicated to the subject of eugenics,” he wrote. During that time, popular economist Irving Fisher co-founded the American Eugenics Society, which was accompanied by the American Race Betterment Society established in 1906 and the American Breeders Magazine that began publication in 1910.
“Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Progressive Era scholars and scientists proudly called themselves eugenicists,” Leonard observed.
The state of Indiana, reported Leonard, passed its forcible sterilization law in 1907, “the first of more than thirty American states to do so.” Included among them was New Jersey’s forced sterilization law signed by then-governor and future president Woodrow Wilson. That law targeted “the hopelessly defective and criminal classes.”
The Targets of Eugenicists
Progressives of the time believed that “human heredity must be socially controlled rather than left to individual choice,” wrote Leonard. “Over 20,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized between 1931 and 1939, more than triple the number sterilized between 1920 and 1929.”
Which populations were popular targets of Progressive Era eugenicists?
In the Progressive Era, it was assumed that human hierarchies were to be determined by scientific experts. The experts were to rank various groups from best to worst, not just in terms of race but also gender, class intellect, and moral character.
Progressives of that era developed a lengthy list of undesirables. This included “degenerate Anglo-Saxon hill clans, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Asia, backward peoples in the territories of the new American empire, African Americans, the feebleminded, [and] the epileptic” among many others, Leonard reported.
Emblematic of the times, Richard T. Ely, a leader of the Progressive movement who taught at Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, and co-founded the American Economic Association, described blacks in condescending terms: “Negroes, are for the most part grownup children, and should be treated as such.”
“Unemployables” was a term coined by British Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb for these groups considered “inferior.” It included people who were indeed employed but who accepted wages below a standard the reformers deemed acceptable.
Those particularly singled out as willing to work for less were foreign immigrants, blacks, and the “feebleminded.”
Eugenics took on other forms apart from race, as well. Certain portions of the poor were deemed “unworthy,” and charity was lamented as a “shelter under which idiots and cretins have crept and bred,” Leonard wrote.
Progressives believed that certain traits were inherited biologically, including behavior like alcoholism, smoking, poor work ethic, and other vices. People in these categories were also deemed “unfit” and, as such, also needed to be targeted.
Social Darwinism Not Acceptable—Control Needed
The Darwinian notion of natural selection and “survival of the fittest” was producing unacceptable results, according to the Progressive eugenicists.
Ely compared human evolution to that of plants. Natural selection in nature, Ely noted, gave us weeds as well as nutritious food plants. Conversely, artificial or scientific selection improved upon nature. The “human garden,” according to Ely, was inefficient in natural selection and gave us too many unfit survivors—human “weeds,” if you will. But society, under conscious hereditary management, can give us “the ideal man,” insisted Ely.
“The great word is no longer natural selection, but social selection,” Ely declared.
In other words, Progressives did not reject the concept of selection per se, they merely preferred controlled selection rather than natural selection
To Continue Reading Click Link Below
https://fee.org/articles/the-progressive-ideas-that-fueled-america-s-eugenics-movement/
This is what happens to those who don’t seek the wise counsel of the One True God. They fall victim to words of folly from Satan who does to them what he did to Adam and Eve. Their vaunted secularism, like Hell, spreads death among men, not the Peace of God.
If progressives think that they’re on “the right side of history”, it’s only because they constantly revise history to look that way.
They’re on the wrong side of unrevised history, since history shows that they’re the ones who begin the decline of the empires, by destroying their structural integrity. One could even argue that that’s their aim, expecting a phoenix to magically arise from the ashes. Of course no phoenix will ever arise from their efforts since all they know is chaos and destruction and will no doubt be on hand to destroy that phoenix structure as well.