Quote of the Day - Progressive Agenda Edition

This is going to be a long one, but it's important.  From Victor Davis Hanson via an Epoch Times interview:

(T)he progressive project started in the 19th century. And it took hold with Woodrow Wilson in the early ’20s, and its basic belief was that the U.S. Constitution erred on the side of liberty rather than equality. We should have been like the French Revolution, more of a fluid concept that would change with the times and use the power of government not to ensure equality of opportunity but to mandate equality of result. And therefore, there were certain things in the Constitution that prevented that project.

Not to mention The Reign of Terror. Executions in the public square, etc.

And we’ve changed a lot of them. We now have senators elected by direct vote and not appointed by the legislatures. The states cannot have property qualifications. Some of these were justified as archaic in the 18th-century sense.

But given those reforms, we’re still not to where we want to be. And what do I mean by that? The Supreme Court can be an obstacle. And so we need to pack the court. Now, Democratic candidates no longer see the 1937 FDR effort to pack the court as disreputable, but an honorable attempt. So they’re all endorsing [this idea of] let’s pack the court and make 15 judges, if we can’t get our guys on the court. Let’s abolish the Electoral College and all the arguments that these people with powdered wigs in the 18th century came up with. Let’s just have a direct vote and let California and New York and the Great Lakes, big cities [like] Chicago, determine the election. And why do you have to go out in a place like Wyoming or Utah? And let’s get rid of this archaic idea of two senators from Utah or from Wyoming having as much clout as two senators in California. And here, we’re speaking in California. My senator represents 20 million people. A senator in Wyoming represents 250,000. One man, one vote. Let’s get rid of it, even though it’s in the Constitution.

What I am getting at is they want to streamline the Constitution continually in an effort to make a country of radical equality; that requires certain things like this impeachment or to prune the Second Amendment. Or to say that the First Amendment does not apply here at Stanford University, because we can say, “That’s hate speech, what he said. He has no right to say hate speech. I declare that ‘hate speech,’ therefore, don’t speak.” And so the First Amendment, the Second Amendment are being pruned. Due process on college campuses … If I say that I was sexually assaulted by that person over there … I don’t have to come forward to identify myself. That person is not given constitutional rights under the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments as he would in a criminal trial off-campus. The ACLU, they used to be the champion of free speech, is now a grassroots organizer, it says, political organizer. You don’t see any ACLU outrage [that] Adam Schiff is now going into the phone records of members of Congress, even though when the U.S. government looked in the phone records of terrorists in 2001 after 9/11, the ACLU said that was a violation of residents’ rights—not U.S. citizens, but residents.

So what I’m getting at is that the progressive project is a multifaceted effort by intellectuals, academics, foundations, progressive members of the Democratic Party to change, formally, the Constitution and to change the mindset of the American people, so that we can make people all the same by the powers of government. We see what’s going on. We’ve seen it in Cuba, we’ve seen it in Russia, we’ve seen it in Venezuela, we’ve seen it in China. And we’ve seen a soft benign form in Europe.

And the United States is really the only major country in the world that says, “You know what, that process inevitably leads to an Orwellian totalitarian state, and it crushes liberty and individual freedom, and we’re not going to do it here.” That’s why we have a Bill of Rights and a Constitution.