Throughout his treatise, Wilson used the lexicon of the Constitution to justify its deconstruction—a practice employed regularly by utopian masterminds today, including those who serve as judges and justices. He argued that the federal masterminds and their experts were best qualified to rule over the people, yet he simultaneously claimed they were most knowledgeable of and responsive to the opinion of the people—another rhetorical device adopted by modern utopian politicians and propagandists. Hobbes wrote, “Nothing the sovereign representative can do to the subject, on what pretence soever, can properly be called injustice, or injury, because every subject is author of every act the sovereign doth.…” (138)
Moreover, Wilson proved the insight of Madison’s fear—that is, without the Constitution’s limits on the federal government’s authority, an election could empower a temporary majority or faction to fundamentally alter the governmental structure in ways that threaten the individual’s liberty and rights. Furthermore, since the federal courts are free to exercise extraconstitutional power and, according to Wilson, have the final word, elections that deliver results contrary to utopian ambitions become largely inconsequential in containing or reversing those ambitions, for the masterminds, in the name of the people, can blunt or reverse them.
Wilson argued for obstructing every avenue for preserving or reestablishing constitutional primacy by corrupting the Constitution itself. Having emptied it of its original purpose, the Constitution would become the vessel into which the utopians pour their agenda. The president is to be as powerful as he can, the courts are to rewrite the Constitution at will, and the Congress is to rule over state legislatures without limits. The federal government, therefore, could never be tamed. Its utopian direction could not be effectively altered. The entire American enterprise would be corrupted. Montesquieu observed that “in a popular state there must be an additional spring, which is VIRTUE. What I say is confirmed by the entire body of history and is quite in conformity with the nature of things.… [I]n a popular government when the laws have ceased to be executed, as this can come only from the corruption of the republic, the state is already lost” (1, 3, 3). In despotic government, “virtue is not at all necessary to it.…” (1, 3, 8)
So perverse was Wilson’s language and thinking that “virtue” would be defined by its opposite—deceit. Wilson advocated nothing short of a diabolical counterrevolution, by means of contorting the instrumentalities of government, to undo the purposes of the American Revolution. He sought to supplant the basic character of American society and the nation’s founding with a supreme central government. The greater the liberty and flexibility of the federal government to act, the more debilitated the individual, for he is the focus of its designs. The individual is, in fact, lost in this scheme. Locke explained that “freedom from absolute, arbitrary power is so necessary to, and closely joined with, a man’s preservation, that he cannot part with it but by what forfeits his preservation and life together.…” (4, 22)
A few decades later, Wilson’s post-constitutional utopianism would serve as a blueprint for Franklin Roosevelt. Much like Wilson, before climbing to the presidency Roosevelt revealed his own contempt for the Constitution’s limits on federal power. He, too, conflated the nature of civil society with the tyranny of unbridled government. Roosevelt also insisted that although the utopian counterrevolution was supported by most Americans, its full realization was thwarted by divisions among the utopians and obstructions by an intransigent conservative minority. In his 1926 Whither Bound address, Roosevelt argued, “In the methods of our governing … we have come to accept, or at least to discuss without fear, problems and methods formerly mentioned only by wild-eyed visionaries.… Probably on any given problem of modern life, if a count or classification could be made, the out-and-out conservatives would be found to be in a distant minority. Yet the majority would be so divided over the means by which to gain their ends that they could not present sufficient unity to obtain action. This has been the history of progress.… Measured by years the actual control of human affairs is in the hands of conservatives for longer periods than in those of liberals or radicals. When the latter do come into power, they translate the constantly working leaven of progress into law or custom or use, but rarely obtain enough time in control to make further economic or social experiments. None of us, therefore, need feel surprise that the government of our own country, for instance, is conservative by far the greater part of the time. Our national danger is, however, not that it may for four years or eight years become liberal or even radical, but that it may suffer from too long a period of the do-nothing or reactionary standards. Certainly it would appear on the surface that a natural advantage lies with those among us who dislike to see change. It is so much more easy to accept what we are told than to think things out for ourselves. It takes courage, too, to disagree with our everyday companions; the obvious path is simpler to follow than one of our own making.”18
Roosevelt repositioned the utopians as enlightened, modern, and futuristic, and, conversely, presented the advocates of civil society and constitutionalism as obstructing individual and societal progress. “If, then, we realize that the days in which we live present great problems wholly new, we may adopt one of two attitudes. Some among us would stop the clock, call a halt in all this change, and then in some well-thought-out way bring back an orderly, defined method of life. Old standards and customs would revive to meet the new conditions, classic dicta would again govern—the ‘good old days’ restored. It is an attractive picture, but it is a painting of the imagination—not a photograph of the living facts. The other method—but let us wait till we look into the days to come.… I have spoken of the up-and-down curves of history—or rather of the periods of quiescence followed by rushing, active progress. We are in the midst of one of the latter now. Are we at the end of it? Are we about to slow up, to begin to digest in comparative quiet the huge meal of new activities given to the human race in the past fifty years? I think not. On the contrary. I believe that more new and startling developments will take place in the immediate future than in the immediate past. With these will come other great changes in the lives and doings and thoughts of the average man and woman. Can we, by artificial means, call a halt? Obviously not.”19
As president, Roosevelt undertook a wholehearted and thoroughgoing makeover of the nation. No more uneven progress of which he had complained a decade or so earlier. Since I,20 and others, have written extensively about the New Deal’s details, there is no purpose in rehashing them here. However, it is well summed up by Roosevelt’s manifesto—his 1944 State of the Union speech, delivered near the end of his presidency, in which he proposes his Second Bill of Rights.21
Roosevelt told the nation, “This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty. As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”22
Here Roosevelt cleverly but deceptively deviated from the Declaration of Independence. Inalienable rights belong to every individual and are not political but God-given and natural. The phrase “inalienable political rights,” as Roosevelt labeled them, is not unlike Wilson’s use of the word privilege, for they both imply the government has the authority to grant or deny the individual “the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Therefore, the individual has no real rights independent of those recognized by the government. Furthermore, Roosevelt argued that “true individual freedom” requires “economic secu
rity.” By this he did not mean the protection of the individual’s private property but its antithesis—that is, the dispossession of the individual’s property as the government sees fit. Of course, if individuals do not produce goods and services, there is nothing that even a mastermind can redistribute. As Locke explained, “I think it will be but a very modest computation to say, that of the products of the earth useful to the life of man, nine-tenths are the effects of labor. Nay, if we will rightly estimate things as they come to our use, and cast up the several expenses about them—what in them is purely owing to Nature and what to labor—we shall find that in most of them ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to be put on the account of labor” (5, 40). No government can re-create let alone improve upon man’s nature, where he is free to invent, create, and produce; pursue, acquire, and maintain property; and enter into beneficial commercial arrangements, which not only improve the individual’s life but enrich society generally.
In fact, Locke anticipated and rejected the tyranny of radical egalitarianism. “God gave the world to men in common, but since He gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational … not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious. He that has as good left for his improvement as was already taken up needed not to complain, ought not to meddle with what was already improved by another’s labor. If he did, it is plain he desired the benefit of another’s pains, which he had no right to, and not the ground which God had given him, in common with others, to labor on, and whereof there was as good left as that already possessed, and more than he knew what to do with, or his industry could reach to” (5, 33). Moreover, Locke argued that not only does the individual have the right to preserve his property in the state of nature, but the primary purpose of the commonwealth is to protect his property against transgressors—which is linked inextricably to “his life, liberty, and estate” (7, 87–88).
In his Second Bill of Rights, Roosevelt succinctly described the societal and economic mission to which he had committed the federal government during the course of his presidency, and which he strived to make eternal. He said, “In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; of every family to a decent home; to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; to a good education.”23
These are not rights. These are tyranny’s disguise. By dominating the individual’s property, the utopian dominates the individual’s labor; by dominating the individual’s labor, he dominates the individual. There is little space between Roosevelt’s premise and the distorted historical views of Marx and Engels. They insisted that “[t]he selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—the misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your bourgeois form of property” (The Communist Manifesto, 39). They insisted that all ties must be severed with the past. “In bourgeois society … the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.… [I]n Communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer” (36).
Indeed, Roosevelt’s worldview harks back to Thomas More’s Utopia, a precursor to Marx’s workers’ paradise, where the individual’s labor and property are ultimately possessions of the masterminds and subject to their egalitarian designs. More wrote, “Thither the works of every family be brought into houses, and every kind of thing is laid up several in barns or storehouses. From hence the father of every family or every householder fetcheth whatsoever he and his have need of, and carrieth it away with him without money, without exchange, without gage, pawn, or pledge. For why should any thing be denied unto him, seeing there is abundance of all things and that it is not to be feared lest any man will ask more than he needeth? For why should it be thought that that man would ask more than enough, which is sure never to lack?” (78) And, of course, by ensuring that life’s necessities are plentiful, Utopia eliminates poverty, inequality, and want. “This fashion and trade of life being used among the people, it cannot be chosen but they must of necessity have store and plenty of all things. And seeing they be all thereof partners equally, therefore, can no man there be poor or needy” (84).
There is no denying Roosevelt’s revolutionary fervor. Whereas the Founders broke from tyranny, Roosevelt and the utopians broke from the Founders. Cass Sunstein, a former academic now employed by President Barack Obama as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget, in 2004 wrote approvingly that “America’s public institutions were radically transformed under Roosevelt’s leadership. The federal government assumed powers formerly believed to rest with the states. The presidency grew dramatically in stature and importance; it became the principal seat of American democracy. A newly developed bureaucracy, including independent regulatory commissions, was put in place. The foundations of the transformation are best captured in a changing understanding of rights, often requiring helping hands.… By 1944, Roosevelt argued, the real task was to implement the second bill [of rights].…”24 Sunstein proclaimed, “We live under Roosevelt’s Constitution whether we know it or not. The American Constitution has become, in crucial respects, his own.”25
Roosevelt’s Constitution, as Sunstein labeled it, is eerily similar in certain significant respects to the former Soviet Union’s list of Fundamental Rights, set forth in Chapter X of its 1936 Constitution. For example:
ARTICLE 118. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to work, that is, are guaranteed the right to employment and payment for their work in accordance with its quantity and quality.…
ARTICLE 119. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to rest and leisure.… The institution of annual vacations with full pay for workers and employees and the provision of a wide network of sanatoria, rest homes and clubs for the accommodation of the working people.
ARTICLE 120. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to maintenance in old age and also in case of sickness or loss of capacity to work. This right is ensured by the extensive development of social insurance of workers and employees at state expense, free medical service for the working people and the provision of a wide network of health resorts for the use of the working people.
ARTICLE 121. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to education. This right is ensured by universal, compulsory elementary education; by education, including higher education, being free of charge; by the system of state stipends for the overwhelming majority of students in the universities and colleges.…26
What are we to make of this? Whittaker Chambers, who had been a member of the Communist Party USA, Soviet spy, proponent of the New Deal, editor at Time magazine, and who later condemned communism and the New Deal, wrote in his 1952 autobiography, Witness, “I had to acknowledge the truth of what its more forthright protagonists, sometimes unwarily, sometimes defiantly, averred: the New Deal was a genuine re
volution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social and, above all, the power relationships within the nation. It was not a revolution of violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking. Insofar as it was successful, the power of politics had replaced business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This shift was the revolution. It was only of incidental interest that the revolution was not complete, that it was made not by tanks and machine guns, but by acts of Congress and decisions of the Supreme Court, or that many of the revolutionists did not know what they were or denied it. But revolution is always an affair of force, whatever forms the force disguises itself in. Whether the revolutionists prefer to call themselves Fabians, who seek power by the inevitability of gradualism, or Bolsheviks, who seek power by the dictatorship of the proletariat, the struggle is for power.”27
The “living Constitution” is a constitution on its deathbed. The Founders are dismissed as quaint or worse—ancients, slaveholders, and landed gentry. This is as it must be, for utopianism is bigger than history and politics. It is a break from the past. The utopians are impatient, anxious, and frenetic, for life is short, destiny calls, and a fantastic future awaits humankind if only man, with all his flaws and imperfections, would relent or get out of the way. Therefore, the earthly grind of societal reinvention must continue unabated. One hundred years after the publication of Wilson’s Constitutional Government in the United States and sixty-four years after Roosevelt delivered his Second Bill of Rights speech, presidential candidate Barack Obama declared, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Five days later, he was elected president.28 The counterrevolution, which is over a century old, proceeds more thoroughly and aggressively today than before.