The grandiose health care "overhaul" signed into law last week may seem to be President Obama's brainchild -- nursed to life by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But the real visionary behind Obamacare may be Herbert Croly, who once prophesied that comprehensive social welfare schemes like it are the key to "bring[ing] vigor and happiness to mankind."

Croly eagerly awaited the day when America would be governed by a cadre of social-science "experts," much like those who will staff the 100 new federal boards and bureaucracies that will soon oversee Obamacare.

Before you believe the media hype about Obama's "bold new vision," consider that Croly, founder of the New Republic magazine, articulated that same vision in 1909.

Croly was a founder of the Progressive Movement, which roared onto the American scene around 1870 with the goal of "overhauling" life here from top to bottom. Obama, Pelosi and Co. are its heirs -- indeed, they call themselves "progressives," having largely abandoned the term "liberal" because of the many recent policy failures with which the public associates that word.

The Progressive Movement's far-reaching goal was to reorganize America along "rational" lines. Its adherents maintained that, for their project to succeed, ordinary citizens would have to cede policymaking power to experts -- social scientists, lawyers -- who alone possessed the knowledge to devise and administer the complex, government-run plans that they promised would finally solve age-old social problems like poverty and crime.

Lyndon Johnson's 1960s Great Society was the fruit of progressive ideology. Johnson's War on Poverty -- far from ending poverty -- created an entrenched, dependent underclass. Now, with Obama and a Democratic Congress willing to go to any lengths to impose their agenda, progressivism is taking the next step in its utopian dream -- a many-tentacled health care regime that will bring one-fifth of our economy under state control.

The American people fought Obamacare every step of the way. In poll after poll, they worried that it will increase costs and lower the quality of care. More fundamentally, they seem to sense that the plan's command-and-control mindset is deeply at odds with American principles of individual freedom, limited government and reliance on markets and competition to make informed choices.

Obamacare skeptics are right about the alien nature of the progressive mind-set. It arrived from Germany in the decades after the Civil War, imported by thousands of American students who had flocked there to study. These intellectuals -- who became university professors and social critics -- were infatuated by late-19th-century German "historicism," which taught that there are "laws of society," as real and clear-cut as the laws of physics. Experts who understand these laws, the theory went, are uniquely equipped to reorganize society in ways that will end suffering.

American students in Germany were also dazzled by that country's top-down government of technical experts, put in place by "Iron Chancellor" Otto von Bismarck. The young Woodrow Wilson, for example, rhapsodized that Bismarck's Prussia was the most "admirable system ... the most studied and most nearly perfected" in the world. American progressives quickly embraced the German system as a model for their own nation.

Progressives, by definition, were elitists. The knowledge necessary to transform society "cannot be brought within the comprehension of everybody," one explained in 1894.

Harvard president Charles Eliot agreed. "Confidence in experts and willingness to employ them and abide by their decisions are among the best signs of intelligence" in an individual or community, he opined in 1898.

As the 20th century opened, the Progressive Movement offered power and status to a rising new professional class. Progressives generally despised businessmen as greedy, and looked down on average people as ignorant and foolishly enamored of religion (or, as Obama might put it, as still clinging to their "guns or religion"). Progressives viewed themselves, by contrast, as disinterested "scientists" intent on the public good.

According to historian Fred Siegel, "liberal intellectuals learned to conceal, even from themselves, their will to power, reimagining it as the selfless ... pursuit of the 'new truth' they were offering to the world."

Obamacare exemplifies this elitist mindset. As Obama, Pelosi and Reid rammed their revolutionary legislation through Congress, they showed little interest in public input or approval. Their message to a resistant public: You'll learn to like it once we explain it to you.

Obamacare reveals the breathtaking hubris of progressive ideology. Its enactment was a process worthy of Otto von Bismarck's and Herbert Croly's century-old vision, in which a handful of visionary experts guide the simple masses to the promised land.

Katherine Kersten is a Twin Cities writer and speaker. Reach her at kakersten@gmail.com.