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.
