# Which progressive ideas have not worked? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 30, 2012, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378 "2012-10-30T23:39:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/141 "2012-11-03T02:00:15Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > I have more. No need. Clearly, I was wrong to use Warren as an exemplar of conservatism. That gaffe aside, I have still never seen any evidence that the Japanese Internment was a “progressive” idea. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/142 "2012-11-03T02:12:22Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > No need. > Clearly, I was wrong to use Warren as an exemplar of conservatism. > > That gaffe aside, I have still never seen any evidence that the Japanese Internment was a “progressive” idea. I think it’s better to see it as an idea popular amongst both conservatives and progressives. Beyond that, I agree. Thomas Jefferson was certainly a progressive, but he had many idea that most of us certainly wouldn’t see as progressive(such as the idea that blacks smelled differently) and the Knights of Labor strenuously advocated prohibiting Chinese immigration into the US but I don’t think anyone would argue that such beliefs were “progressive.” And don’t get me started on Jan Christian Smuts or David Ben Gurion. Frankly, I’m far more confused by people insisting that “separate but equal” was a “progressive idea” when it seemed like it was a reaffirmation of the conservative idea that blacks and whites had to be separate. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/143 "2012-11-03T03:34:17Z")
> [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](#): > > No, I’m really not. I do think that progressive thought is beneficial, but I’m sure we’ve had more than one serious, major fuck-up along the way. I’m just looking to find out which they were. Well, that’s easy. NRA criminalized a lot of small businessmen and threw many in jail and it was all declared unanimously unconstitutional. Welfare’s shortcomings are well known. Racial quotas are now regarded as generally a bad idea and are illegal. There’s also still the open question of whether progressives can make the welfare state sustainable. Selling the welfare state to the public always required underestimating the costs, and whenever those costs come due it causes fractures in the progressive coalition. The first domino to fall is public employee pensions, we’re seeing it now all over the country with cities going bankrupt. The second domino to fall will be Medicare, which is projected to crowd out all other spending. And social security is about to become a system where people pay more in than they get out, where before it was a system where people paid in a little to get a lot. If those problems aren’t dealt with, the ensuing fallout will completely discredit progressivism as an ideology. ---
**Author:** ![Dave\_Hartwick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7feea3/32.png) [@Dave\_Hartwick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dave_Hartwick)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/144 "2012-11-03T03:57:28Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > Minimum wage legislation was originally passed so that white workers would not have to compete with workers of other races who were willing to work for less. Where was this? More than one country has minimum wage laws. If you’re talking about the US, and specifically the establishment of a national minimum wage in the 1930s, I’ll need some cites. Some economists, like Friedman, have argued that minimum wage laws have discriminatory unintended results, but I’ve never heard that the original intention of minimum wages laws, in the US or elsewhere, was racist. Actually, my recollection of the history of the minimum wage in the US is that opposition was more common in the South as wages, for blacks and whites, were lower than the North’s. Can’t find a cite, though. > [@](#): > > Abortion was first advocated because as Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it there was “growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of” > Modern liberalism has kept the support for the policies but jetisoned the rascist rationale. I found the quote, Ginsburg really say that (New York Times, 2006). However, she was not a SC Justice when Roe v. Wade happened. It’s easy to find pro-choice racists (not saying Ginsburg is one, but M. Sanger was clearly old-school racist), just as it’s easy to find pro-life racists. I can find pro-chocolate racists, too. Doesn’t make chocolate racist. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 3:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/145 "2012-11-03T03:59:56Z")
FDR on welfare: '“The stark fact before us is that great numbers still remain unemployed. . . . The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral distintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. … I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further sapped by the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few hours of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves or picking up papers in the public parks. . . .” ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 4:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/146 "2012-11-03T04:29:47Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > FDR on welfare: '“The stark fact before us is that great numbers still remain unemployed. . . . The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral distintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. … I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further sapped by the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few hours of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves or picking up papers in the public parks. . . .” I always dislike incomplete quotes with ellipses and little context. Doing a simple search shows that that cut off quote is overused in very conservative sites, chances are that the real context shows that it is not as simple as the right win blogosphere is telling it, [searching, a mess of conservative sites with the mangled quote, looked for the source, aha:] Franklin D. Roosevelt Annual Message to Congress. January 4, 1935 > **[Annual Message to Congress | The American Presidency Project](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-congress-3)** FDR actually mentioned that there is still a group that are not able bodies that will still need support, and as for the able bodies that could not find a job in the darkest days of the depression: > [@](#): > > **There are, however, an additional three and one half million employable people who are on relief.** With them the problem is different and the responsibility is different. This group was the victim of a nation-wide depression caused by conditions which were not local but national. **The Federal Government is the only governmental agency with sufficient power and credit to meet this situation. We have assumed this task and we shall not shrink from it in the future. It is a duty dictated by every intelligent consideration of national policy to ask you to make it possible for the United States to give employment to all of these three and one half million employable people now on relief, pending their absorption in a rising tide of private employment.** The point is clear, when the private sector was paralyzed the lesson was that the government would be foolish to not do an effort to keep those able bodies working until the conditions in the private sector got better. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 4:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/147 "2012-11-03T04:38:54Z")
Yes, but FDR did see that welfare was a problem. I wasn’t criticizing FDR’s relief efforts, but highlighting how LBJ’s welfare program was an idea that Democrats before him knew was terrible, and proved to be predictably terrible until reformed. FDR also understood the potential pitfalls to public employee unions. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/148 "2012-11-03T05:16:09Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > Yes, but FDR did see that welfare was a problem. I wasn’t criticizing FDR’s relief efforts, but highlighting how LBJ’s welfare program was an idea that Democrats before him knew was terrible, and proved to be predictably terrible until reformed. > > FDR also understood the potential pitfalls to public employee unions. Nope, the point stands, the welfare criticism applies to able bodies that end up depending on the dole, Roosevelt focus was not on them. And even he mentions that there are still a good chunk of people that \*\*do \*\*need welfare. The quote is usually used to condemn all welfare with no exceptions like under a depression or recession, something that is not what Roosevelt said. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 5:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/149 "2012-11-03T05:22:13Z")
Welfare during recessions makes sense. FDR never wanted a permanent dole though. That took until LBJ to be established. It’s also interesting reading about Social Security, there were a lot of proposals that were just insane, like putting every elderly person on it whether or not they had paid in(the original Townsend plan). We conservatives love to hate FDR, but he sure did stand as a roadblock against a lot of really insane progressive ideas that were gaining credence back then. They say FDR saved capitalism, but he also saved progressivism, because if the Townsend plan had actually been implemented the US would have been in no financial condition to fight WWII, much less provide Social Security for future generations. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/150 "2012-11-03T05:29:48Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > Welfare during recessions makes sense. FDR never wanted a permanent dole though. Not the point still, it is very clear that the intention of that cut off quote was to make Roosevelt sound as if he was opposing even what you mention here. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 6:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/151 "2012-11-03T06:08:40Z")
No, the quote says that Roosevelt favors the dole when unemployment is high, after all, it was his idea. but it was supposed to be temporary. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 6:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/152 "2012-11-03T06:50:21Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > No, the quote says that Roosevelt favors the dole when unemployment is high, after all, it was his idea. but it was supposed to be temporary. The intention of the quote is to infer that the great numbers of people unemployed remain so because they were on welfare. > [@](#): > > The stark fact before us is that great numbers still remain unemployed. . . . The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral distintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. … I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further sapped by the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few hours of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves or picking up papers in the public parks. . . ." Completely removing the context that welfare was not the focus, but jobs to the ones that could not find them during the great depression, the focus is not on the ones that did abuse the system when times are good, but on the mess of people that had no jobs. So no, the quote is made to avoid the context, as I found out this is a perfect example of just a copy and paste point, the context and the link to what Roosevelt actually said does show that indeed there is something that the government can do when private industry fails to give jobs in a depression or recession. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 7:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/153 "2012-11-03T07:03:53Z")
Okay, if that’s how people use the quote. It was actually the first time I’d read it, and in the context of the article I read it in(a 1935 Time article), it was just FDR assuring the public that he did not favor a permanent dole. It also fits the context of my previous posts in this thread, that welfare as conceived by LBJ was a bad program and everything liberal and conservative critics alike criticized about it turned out to be accurate. It reduced poverty, but it also created a permanent underclass and may very well have contributed to the breakdown of underclass families and led to the increased crime rates of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. There have actually been a lot of really bad progressive ideas, but thanks to a fairly robust political system, bad ideas tended to be discarded when it was obvious they weren’t working. Bad ideas like welfare proved a little tougher, because millions became dependent on it, whereas a bad idea like NRA, the country was good and sick of it by the time it was declared unconstitutional and would have gone away anyway. There was no constituency to demand its continuance other than some ivory tower central planners. One of the things that bothers me is that smart people need to ask the question in the OP. Conservatives get snickered at for claiming liberal bias, but history books in schools talk a lot about NRA, but they talk about it as if it was actually successful, rather than a proto-fascist attempt to form businesses into cartels that lasted only a few years before being struck down unanimously by the Supreme Court. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 7:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/154 "2012-11-03T07:25:47Z")
Just thought of another failed progressive idea: the League of Nations. Even in the face of abject failure, many progressives were acting as if the League was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It would accomplish small things to settle local disputes in the Third World and they’d be acting as if it should get a Nobel for its efforts, while meanwhile letting the great powers act with impunity to attack their weaker neighbors and flout international law. The idea behind the League and it’s successor, the UN, is worthy, but progressives only make themselves and the international community look foolish and uncredible when they act as if these organizations are more effective than they are. I’ve seen the UN casually let people die by the hundreds of thousands while it dithered, all the while being praised by liberals. Then when it finally does act to put a stop to killing somewhere, they go, “See, we told you! the UN is the greatest organization in the world!” ---
**Author:** ![rogerbox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/76d3ee/32.png) [@rogerbox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rogerbox)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 7:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/155 "2012-11-03T07:34:08Z")
So no UN-unfettered massacre With current UN-less massacre but sometimes let a massacre go on And Progressives are the ones who look stupid when they praise less massacre? I don’t follow. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 7:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/156 "2012-11-03T07:50:02Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > One of the things that bothers me is that smart people need to ask the question in the OP. Conservatives get snickered at for claiming liberal bias, but history books in schools talk a lot about NRA, but they talk about it as if it was actually successful, rather than a proto-fascist attempt to form businesses into cartels that lasted only a few years before being struck down unanimously by the Supreme Court. Uh, no, not likely that it did bother you, **someone else** told you that, To equate the NRA with fascism is also a favorite point of the conservative sites, as I also found quickly on a search. The NRA did not have paramilitary guys beating on business owners for not working with them. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 8:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/157 "2012-11-03T08:01:33Z")
The reason it’s compared to fascism is because first, the economic model was fascism, the organization of business into cartels to serve state purposes. Secondly, businesses that complied were rewarded with the right to carry the blue eagle symbol, and the government urged consumers to not patronize businesses not carrying the blue eagle and made it an issue of patriotism. And you are mistaken. Extrajudicial means were used to enforce NRA,most notably in the garment industry: The NRA was discovering it could not enforce its rules. Black markets grew up. Only the most violent police methods could procure enforcement. In Sidney Hillman’s garment industry the code authority employed enforcement police. They roamed through the garment district like storm troopers. They could enter a man’s factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books on the instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private coat-and-suit police went through the district at night, battering down doors with axes looking for men who were committing the crime of sewing together a pair of pants at night. But without these harsh methods many code authorities said there could be no compliance because the public was not back of it. > **[National Recovery Administration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recovery_Administration#cite_ref-7)** > > The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was a prime agency established by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) in 1933. The goal of the administration was to eliminate "cut throat competition" by bringing industry, labor, and government together to create codes of "fair practices" and set prices. The NRA was created by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and allowed industries to get together and write "codes of fair competition". The codes intended both to help workers set mi... ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 8:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/158 "2012-11-03T08:13:15Z")
That first link before the edit was not from a historian, and really, Wikipedia sites pointed out by bloggers do not fly much over here. The economic model for it was not fascism. > **[Fred Siegel: On Liberalism's alleged fascist roots](https://www.hnn.us/article/fred-siegel-on-liberalisms-alleged-fascist-roots)** > > \[Mr. Siegel is a professor at The Cooper Union in New York.\] > In 1932, H.G. Wells, the British socialist, gave a speech at Oxford urging the progressives of his time to become "liberal fascists." As the phrase suggests, Wells favored, to say the... > [@](#): > > Thus Mr. Goldberg sees in the progressive impulse a presumptive right to ensure the overall well-being of the populace – with intrusive and potentially dangerous results. He observes that Hugh Johnson, the head of FDR’s ill-fated 1934 National Recovery Administration – which proposed a corporatist solution to the ills of the Depression – was an ardent admirer of Mussolini and hung a looming picture of Il Duce in his NRA office. Going back to the late 1920s, Mr. Goldberg notes that Herbert Croly of The New Republic, whose book “The Promise of American Life” was a founding document of modern statist liberalism, defended Mussolini by comparing fascist violence to the (implicitly justified) martial means by which Lincoln preserved the Union. > > Croly was also something of a eugenicist, saying that the state needed to “interfere on behalf of the really fittest.” And indeed, American liberalism once had a strong eugenicist strain. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a close ally of the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, the author of “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.” Eugenics was at the time the natural expression of the Progressives’ public-health movement. Mr. Goldberg does not hesitate to note that it proved to be an inspiration for the Nazi Party. > > There is some truth to Mr. Goldberg’s comparisons, but it is limited. By cherry-picking liberal transgressions – or noting continuities between unappealing statist regimes and Progressive agendas – he demonizes American liberalism unfairly and ignores a counter-history. The social safety-net reforms of David Lloyd George, during the Liberal Party governments in Britain from 1906 to 1914, mattered more to American Progressives and New Dealers, as a model, than Bismarck ever did. But Lloyd George goes unmentioned in “Liberal Fascism,” as does a key political moment. And it has to be clear that I do not agree with the enforcement and ideas of the NRA but once again, if you think that was fascism you really have a broken political compass. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/159 "2012-11-03T09:14:51Z")
Fair enough. But it is an example of a progressive failure. And the history books used in schools still gloss over it’s failure. It would be better not to mention it at all, considering that it gets put in with Social Security and a lot of other reforms that still endure today. Most school history books never explain why unlike many other New Deal reforms, NRA isn’t with us today. It didn’t even survive Roosevelt’s first term. ---
**Author:** ![pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pseudotriton_ruber_ruber)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2012, 9:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378/160 "2012-11-03T09:23:07Z")
Well, it’s kind of stupid to have a National Recovery Act when the economy has recovered, isn’t it? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378.md?page=7) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-progressive-ideas-have-not-worked/639378.md?page=9)