By CDR Phillip J. Keuhlen, USN ret, USNA ’71

Introduction:

The American Revolution and the Constitution designed to protect the nation born from it are landmark achievements of Western Civilization. Both are under attack by the self-styled “Progressive” movement.

But words matter, and the misnamed “Regressives” are a radically reactionary, counter-revolutionary movement. The goal of their movement is nothing less than subverting the American Revolution and its Constitution, and the functional overthrow of the American Republic.

Background:

American historians who were Progressivism’s intellectual architects, or in deep sympathy with them, portray the movement as focused on social injustice. But they bury its core beliefs that reject the Republic’s Founding Principles stated in the Declaration of Independence. The Preamble to the Constitution refers to those principles and defines the National Interest of the United States as supporting, defending, and perfecting constitutional governance of We the People to further those Founding Principles.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Our Constitution is designed to protect God given individual rights fought for in the American Revolution. It is designed and equipped with safeguards to preserve the union, minimize abuse of power, and assure justice for all citizens. The principal features that protect constitutional governance include:

• Separation of powers between the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of government.
• Provisions to protect minorities, as individuals, classes of individuals, or as States, from the tyranny of a majority by features such as due process, equal protection of laws, a bicameral legislature, and an Electoral College.
• Processes for amending the Constitution.
• Processes for electing the President.
• Reservation of powers to the States or the People respectively.

The so-called ‘progressive’ movement is actually Regressive, rebooting an earlier philosophy, Utilitarianism, rejected in the American founding.

From his 1769 discovery of the “principle of utility,” Jeremy Bentham and his philosophical successors Hegel, Marx, Gramsci & Marcuse divorced governance from consideration of God’s Law and embraced the State as the arbiter of a ‘common good;’ constituted morality as relative, defined by effect on the ‘common good;’ and held the State preeminent over individuals.

Regressives assume that human nature can be improved through social regulation and that the federal government can mold and improve the individual and transform society.

Regressive elites claim enlightenment concerning the nature of the ‘greatest good.’ On that basis they assert their right to set/enforce policies and to tax and redistribute the fruits of individual labor to achieve their goals, independent of individual rights and overriding matters of faith or conscience.

In Regressivism individual privileges are granted by government, contingent upon support of the State defined ‘common good,’ precisely as in authoritarian states such as the People’s Republic of China.

The Regressive Counter-Revolution:

For over a century, Regressivism has advanced values directly opposed to those of the American Revolution. Regressives have incrementally subverted the United States Constitution and transformed America, strengthening the Federal government’s power to regulate society and the economy, and forming a more direct link between government officials and popular opinion.

The United States was founded as a Republic to protect individual rights from majoritarian tyranny in which slim majorities dictate policy. Yet Regressives repeatedly appeal to popular democracy, overriding consideration of individual rights, and have revamped institutions to subordinate State Legislatures and Congressional action to strongly independent executives. The breadth of their subversion is staggering.

President Woodrow Wilson was the principal architect of Regressivism’s initial twin subversions of constitutional limited powers, the doctrine of a “living constitution” and the birth of the administrative state.

Wilson’s Regressive successors extended the transformation of constitutional governance in the 20th Century and have accelerated it over the past two decades.

The following sections provide examples of Regressive attacks on elements of the National Interest and subversion of Constitutional Safeguards. Instances span from early in the 20th Century into examples ripped from our most recent headlines.

Regressive Attacks on Elements of the National Interest:

Form A More Perfect Union

• Regressives promote Critical Race Theory that rejects the foundations of the American political order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.
• Regressives reject the Founding Fathers’ paradigm of assimilation in favor of the divisive tribalism of multiculturalism.
• Regressive politicians, academics, and media attack the legitimacy of our institutions through the “1619 Project.” They promote its demonstrably untrue narrative of racism as our founding basis. Regressive thought portrays America as a irredeemably evil, a nation that must be reformed on their principles.

Establish Justice

• Regressives subverted the legislative intent of preventing discrimination based on race through racial quotas, busing, and affirmative action.
• Regressives mandate indoctrination on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to achieve demographically equal outcomes.
• Ironically, elite Regressive universities embrace Plessy v Ferguson’s discredited logic with “separate but equal” housing, clubs, and ceremonies that recenter racial discrimination as a hallmark of Regressive society.

Insure Domestic Tranquility

• Regressive Governors, Mayors, and Prosecutors abdicated their responsibility to provide for our peace and tranquility by defunding and restricting police and by bail reform and prosecution decisions favorable to offenders. They are complicit enablers of drug smuggling that kills hundreds of thousands, of destruction of public and private property through endorsement of riot, arson and looting, and of expansion of taxes and public debt by public assistance to illegals.

Provide For the Common Defence

• President Biden’s Regressive administration has intentionally compromised national sovereignty and security by refusing to enforce immigration law, supporting “sanctuary” polities, and functionally opening our borders to sponsored mass migration of millions of illegals, often citizens of avowed enemies of America, that they release into our homeland untracked.
• Regressive leaders further endanger citizens by enacting legislation to strip citizens of their right to keep and bear arms and restrict citizens in the exercise of that right and the associated right of self-defense.   Promote the General Welfare
• Rather than fostering productive, independent citizenship, Regressives have spent $22 trillions of dollars on anti-family programs that multiplied social pathologies and dependence on government redistribution.
• Regressive Governors like Minnesota’s Walz allow the infanticide of born-alive abortion survivors returning our society to primitive pagan practices.

Secure The Blessings of Liberty

• Regressives mounted the longest filibuster in U.S. history to attempt to defeat the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
• Regressives promote Margaret Sanger’s eugenics of abortion, depriving more than 45 million individuals of their most fundamental natural right, Life.
• Regressives attack freedom of speech both directly and indirectly. They have introduced State-sponsored, corporate-enabled censorship, media propagandism, political indoctrination, economic deplatforming, and lawfare.
• Regressive leaders express open hostility to religion, bring ‘public accommodation’ lawsuits to suppress religious expression by individuals and religious organizations, and explicitly attack qualification for public office based on professed religious belief despite Constitutional prohibitions on religious tests. Increasingly Regressives are both openly Anti-Semitic and hostile to Catholics and Evangelicals.

Regressive Subversions of Constitutional Safeguards:

Separation Of Powers

• Wilson’s “living constitution” allows the Supreme Court to invent law and constitutional provisions by judicial action.
• Wilson’s “administrative state” effectively eliminates separation of powers by empowering unelected, unaccountable agencies to make rules with the force of law, enforce them, and adjudicate breeches of them.
• President Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court.
• The current Regressive President & VP propose to pack the Supreme Court, establish their own code of ethics, and establish term limits for Supreme Court Justices contrary to the Constitution.

Protection of Minorities – Due process

• Informal adjudication processes allow some Executive agencies to adjudicate rule breeches with substantial compromise of due process.

– Equal Protection of Laws

• Regressive plan to count illegals in the census disenfranchises citizens through reapportionment of the Congress and Electoral College.
• Regressives’ disparate handling of similar cases and invention of crimes out of novel legal theories strongly indicate selective, politicized prosecutions and the death knell of “equal protection.”

– Electoral College

• Regressive-dominated States have entered into a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to subvert the Electoral College.

Processes for Amending the Constitution

• Unable to secure passage of a constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College, Regressives seek popular election of the President via an interstate compact.
• Regressive President Biden proposes to legislatively establish term limits for Supreme Court Justices contrary to the Constitution.

Processes for Electing the President

• The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact circumvents constitutional rules for the electing the president. It would disenfranchise voters by requiring electors to cast their ballots based on voting in other states.
• Regressives collude to disenfranchise American voters by registering persons illegally present in the country to vote. Federal law requires U.S. citizenship to vote in elections and automatic registration, unless declined, for applications such as welfare or driver licenses. However, at the behest of Regressive politicians, only two U.S. States and one U.S. Territory require proof of citizenship to register to vote and no State has active, effective programs to detect/counter election fraud that negates the votes of U.S. citizens. The most rigorous extant analysis suggests the problem is significant enough to swing elections.

Reservation of Powers to the States

• President Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court which, threatened, acceded to expand regulation of interstate commerce in Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution, usurping powers reserved to the States.

Conclusion:

We are at a tipping point in the history of our American Republic and Constitutional governance. The Regressive Movement rejects the American Revolution and its founding values.

Regressives are ascendant in government, academia, commerce, public culture, and media commentary. On the cusp of a reactionary counter-revolution, Regressives have accomplished a long-running program of comprehensive Constitutional subversion.

They have already displayed the inclination to suppress opposition by any means available to them including selective enforcement of the laws; political indoctrination; broad proscription, censorship, and punishment of political speech; civil violence; and political lawfare.

Those who support and defend the Constitution of the United States face choices in the execution of that responsibility.

At this juncture in our history passivity in support of the Constitution risks catastrophe.

Citizens who count the American Revolution as their inheritance, and the protection of our Constitutional Republic as their duty, must act.

American Constitutionalists must speak publicly, often, and persuasively to expose the threat posed by the reactionary Regressive counter-revolution.

A good first step is to eradicate the use of “progressive” from our discourse. Substitute “Regressive,” taking every opportunity the unfamiliarity with the term presents to expose the extensive Constitutional subversion already accomplished by Regressives and their opposition to America’s Founding Principles.

We must help our neighbors to understand the imminent Regressive threat to overthrow the fruits of the American Revolution and the profound consequences of the loss of our American rights if their reactionary counter-revolution succeeds.

The choice is stark and pressing indeed.

We the People must not passively consent to this reversal.

Silence is Consent… Reject Regressivism!

Phillip Keuhlen is a retired naval officer and nuclear industry senior manager educated at the U.S. Naval Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. He had the privilege to command a U. S. Navy nuclear submarine and writes on topics related to governance and national security.