Like China’s Communists, American progressives aspire to build a more perfect one-party state.
Like China’s Communists, American progressives aspire to build a more perfect one-party state.
T he principle of “democratic centralism” was articulated by Vladimir Lenin soon after the Russian Revolution, as a way to reconcile the Communist Party’s aspirations to both deliberation and total control. Centralization of power quickly won out, making a dystopian farce of democratic procedures.
That system has survived in China to the present day. As the website of the Chinese mission to the United Nations in Geneva proclaims, “democratic centralism is the fundamental principle of organization and leadership of state power in China.” In practice, that means that the Chinese Communist Party controls everything, even in the modern era of mass media and frenetic economic activity. As a Congressional Research Service report explains, “the media, big business, research institutes, university academics, associations, and grassroots non-governmental organizations” all contribute to political discourse but always in support of the political monopoly of the Communist Party.
In America, progressives have never consciously sought a one-party dictatorship. They have always seen themselves as fighting for the “little guy.” But in their zeal to help that little guy, they have often seen the Constitution’s limits on government power as obstacles to be circumvented or removed. In order to give effect to what they see as the “will of the people,” progressives have relentlessly sought the expansion and centralization of government power.
Indeed, the centralization of power has been the one consistent driving force of progressivism for more than 100 years, and it has only accelerated in the modern era. Even as China opens up its economy, it is perfecting its version of “democratic centralism.” Coming from an open economy, the leaders of American progressivism are perfecting their own version of it, too. Both visions increasingly overlap, as if driven by convergent evolution toward a single form: the rule of the one-party state.
The century of progressivism began with a massive expansion of the federal government’s power to collect taxes: The 16th Amendment allowed the imposition of a direct income tax for the first time, in 1909. Just a few years later, Woodrow Wilson was elected president. Openly critical of the Constitution and a big fan of Germany, Wilson created an array of new commissions (such as the Federal Trade Commission) that sought to shield government policy from the always unsatisfying compromises of the legislative process — and of a federal system in which most matters were left to the states. About a decade after his death, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected promising a “New Deal,” in which the federal government would finally respond to the aspirations of a united people.
The New Deal aimed to raise wages among workers in the cities and in the countryside. Union laws catered to urban labor, while agricultural price-support programs catered to farm labor — the twin pillars of FDR’s political coalition. The New Deal promised to protect the “right to work” and the “right to farm” but did so — in both cases — by severely curtailing those rights and limiting the number of people who could exercise them. In other words, the New Deal created cartels and monopolies for FDR’s political constituents to force hidden transfers of wealth from everybody else — a hallmark of the progressive platform ever sense. That was also when America acquired the bad progressive habit of solving every problem through the federal government, rather than giving states or local communities — or the free market — the chance to come up with solutions of their own.
At first the Supreme Court struck down FDR’s new programs on the grounds that they exceeded the federal power to regulate commerce “among the several states.” However, when FDR threatened to “pack the Court” with additional justices who would tilt the balance in his favor, the Court backed down, abdicating to the progressive vision of the state and its aspiration to unlimited power.
It did not take long for prominent progressives, such as Walter Lippmann, to label this program “democratic collectivism.” For Friedrich Hayek, there was an even simpler term: “socialism.” They assailed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal for seeking to establish a tyranny of the majority, beholden to few constitutional limits and limited by few protections for political minorities.
This new centralized constitutional system was ratified by the next Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, during the 1950s. Ever since, America has been a progressive state, reflecting the progressive commitment to centralized and unlimited power in all its constitutional arrangements.
Starting with Eisenhower’s interstate highway system, the federal government quickly learned to use federal funds to coerce states into match-funding federal programs. That became the blueprint for the federal takeover of state health-care programs known as Medicaid, and for hundreds of similar programs that force states to match-fund and administer progressive policy priorities.
Next were Richard Nixon’s amendments to the Clean Air Act, whereby the federal government quickly learned to use the threat of federal regulation to force states to implement and administer progressive policy priorities on the regulatory front.
And as the federal government was using its expanded powers of taxation and regulation to establish de facto control of state governments, an even more sinister process was under way: the presidency’s steady absorption of power from Congress and the federal judiciary.
It is a process the other two branches have been all too willing to aid and abet. The progressive Warren and Burger Courts removed one area after another from the realm of legislation altogether, permanently enshrining progressive policy positions, such as abortion rights, as the law of the land, impervious to democratic deliberation.
Meanwhile, Congress is well on its way to delegating virtually all rulemaking authority to the executive branch, which nowadays produces the vast majority of “legislation” in America, in the form of agency rulemaking. Courts have abetted that process also, embracing doctrines of “deference” that let agencies do virtually whatever they want with the powers that Congress has delegated, regardless of what Congress intended to delegate.
And these are just the formal aspects of the progressives’ democratic centralism. There is at play still another process — more informal but arguably even more insidious than the others — by which the presidency is using the powers that it has formally absorbed from the other branches in order to informally extend the president’s personal control over state governments.
The great innovator in this new form of democratic centralism was of course Barack Obama. His transgender-bathroom and sexual-harassment orders under Title IX used federal education programs to impose progressive social priorities on state and local schools and universities by lawlessly threatening to cut off unspecified education funding if they didn’t comply. Using informal agency “guidance” to skirt the Administrative Procedure Act’s parameters for agency action, the Title IX orders were merely a trial balloon.
The tactic of using informal guidance to impose major national policies on Americans through the instrumentalities of state and local government — who have to comply or else risk penalties that would end the career of almost any politician — is the new frontier in the progressives’ democratic centralism. It is why President Biden’s quiet rescinding of Trump-era executive orders meant to limit the use of guidance documents was perhaps the most impactful of all the new president’s actions so far — and we have only seen the beginning of what progressive presidents will do with this newfound power.
The progressives’ relentless drive to loosen election-integrity laws, pack the courts, eliminate the Electoral College, and do away with the filibuster, among other priorities, all have a common theme. Each of them are perfectly representative of “democratic centralism,” in the same sense that China’s Communists use the term.
And notice something else: The progressives’ expansion and centralization of government power never takes a step back, even when they lose an election. Why is that? For the same reason that the Framers put so many limits on government power in the first place: because men are not angels and cannot be expected to limit the powers of their own offices. Irrespective of his party, anyone who has these powers will use them and will by their use entrench them.
We are all part of the progressives’ “democratic centralism” now — the fundamental principle of organization and leadership in America’s emerging one-party state.