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Progressivism
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Progressivism's focus, on the other hand, is on enlightened public policy in the public interest. The educated and civilized individual will be able, according to progressivism, to determine what is best for the society as a whole.[100] Persuasion, discussion, dialogue, deliberation -- they are all tools in the service of what March and Olsen call the "shared ideological system in modern democratic societies"[101]: the commitment to rationality and reason. In contrast, "[p]opular anger and uneducated public sentiments are more likely to lead to hasty and irrational judgments"[102] Therefore, citizens have to be educated, and the more passionate and uneducated public sentiments have to be diverted and diffused. While populism is suspicious of concentration and centralization of power, progressivism locates the real threats to democratic governance elsewhere: narrowness of vision, ignorance, and parochial self-interest. Centralized authority is necessary to overcome some problems. So is expertise:
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This misportrayal of Progressivism has been intentionally cultivated because US economic elites typically seek to exploit highly emotional "wedge" issues on which cultural conservatives and cultural liberals differ most, so as to elicit the political and economic support of cultural conservatives. For this reason, it has become customary for pseudoconservative elitist politicians to pose as strong backers of American values. Yet sadly, when this type of individual is elected, cultural liberals and cultural conservatives both lose out, and the most fundamental American values are undermined.
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Gilson Gardner of Washington D.C., who was the star newspaper inside eye-witness of the eruption of "Progressivism" in 1912, writes in to the Washington office of "The Nation" revealing the historic politics of the matter. Meanwhile Donald Richberg of Chicago, Illinois, who has gained much fame in courts of law in public-utilities cases and who now is attorney for the La Follette Railroad Valuation Conference, has been turning to the historical philosophy of it. He attempts to base "progressivism" on a philosophy of history from the days of tribal chieftains down to these days of direct primaries.
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As part of the second reform period, Progressivism was rooted in the belief, certainly not shared by all, that man was capable of improving the lot of all within society. As such, it was a rejection of Social Darwinism, the position taken by many of the rich and powerful figures of the day.
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Although most historians lament the "demise" of Progressivism during the 1920s, in truth, it hardly disappeared. For one, the Federal Reserve System worked feverishly to maintain the artificial rate of exchange of the British Pound and the U.S. Dollar and expand the domestic money supply, feeding speculative bubbles which finally collapsed with Black Thursday on Wall Street. Second, even though Congress cut the top income tax rate from its World War I high of more than 60 percent to 25 percent, this tax still was the main source of revenue for a government that had not ever shrunk back to its prewar levels.
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Progressivism