American Greatness has published an article by Stephen Soukup entitled “Thanks, Obama.” In the article, Mr. Soukup offers an explanation of what has happened to America. He discusses the enormous damage done by Barack Hussein Obama, and he also points to what he believes made it possible for Obama to accomplish so much:
The evolution of the Total State — the state that no longer acknowledges anything as nonpolitical — by and large dates from the Enlightenment. ... From that point on, matters that had once been handled by families and communities slowly but surely became the purview of governments and, eventually, centralized states.
This claim about the Enlightenment leaves out what is most important for us to understand about our American history. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are two of the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment Era, and they are among the many magnificent achievements of the American Enlightenment.
Whereas it makes sense to refer to the Enlightenment Era, it is usually a mistake to refer to the Enlightenment. That is because there were many different versions of Enlightenment thinking during the Enlightenment Era. There were English, French, Scottish, American, German, Italian, Spanish, and even Russian schools.
The Scottish and the American Enlightenments were two of the greatest intellectual achievements of Western civilization, and together they laid the intellectual foundation for America.
Unalienable rights and self-evident truths are two of the most important ideas that guided the American founders in their work. The founders got their understanding of unalienable rights and of self-evident truths from the Scottish Enlightenment. Scottish Enlightenment thinking was brought to America by a wave of teachers from Scotland at precisely the right time to arm the founders with the ideas and manner of thinking they needed in order to create America.
To find the origin of what Soukup aptly refers to as the Total State, we need to look elsewhere, especially to the French and the German Enlightenments. The American Revolution gave America limited government and the world the shining example of George Washington; the French Revolution gave rise to Napoleon. His exercise of total political power and his pursuit of military conquest provided the pattern Hitler was to follow in the 20th century.
So, with regard to the Enlightenments, what has been happening to America? The French and especially the German Enlightenments have been replacing the American Enlightenment. It was not done all at once; it was done progressively by the American progressives.
The progressives got it going in American universities. As I write in my book Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea,
If you want to understand the political assault on the Constitution during the course of the twentieth century, the place to start is with Woodrow Wilson. ... He was a disciple of the German philosopher GWF Hegel. Hegel exalted the state and rejected the idea of individual liberty. By championing Hegel, Wilson played a leading role in introducing a German strain of thought into the American body politic that was alien to the self-evident truths and unalienable rights of the Founders.
Wilson, a president of Princeton University who went on to become president of the United States, rejected the self-evident truths of the Declaration and scorned the Constitution. He paved the way for Obama and for Obama’s astonishingly destructive presidency.
The best way to understand the project of the progressive left in America is to realize that the progressives are the dedicated enemies of the achievements of the American Enlightenment. The American left is the declared enemy of the American founding and all its works. That is what explains leftists’ determination to get rid of the Electoral College, to do away with the First and Second Amendments, to make war on common sense, and to press on until no trace of the American founding remains.
The American Enlightenment gave the world the Declaration of Independence in 1776; in the same year, the Scottish Enlightenment gave the world Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The erosion of political liberty and the free market in America during the course of the 20th century is the result of the abandonment of the ideas that made America the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment Era.
For a deeper dive into this delightful and amazing story, please consider taking a look at my book, Common Sense Nation. For more on the American Enlightenment, please consider this article: “Defending the Founders and the (American) Enlightenment” For more on the damage inflicted on the American idea by American universities, please consider “What Happened to Harvard?”
Robert Curry is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea and Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World. Both are from Encounter Books. His articles and reviews have appeared in American Greatness, the American Thinker, the Claremont Review of Books, and The Federalist.
Image via Pxfuel.