Free Liars by Glenn Beck Page A

prevented Americans from appreciating a “more glorious time” to come. “Progress, development—those are modern words,” he said. “The modern idea is to leave the past andpress onward to something new.”
    Wilson’s generation was the first to question the wisdom, efficacy, and relevance of the Constitution. And much like today’s progressives, he looked across the Atlantic to Europe for guidance on how to do things “better”—to Britain’s ancient Parliament and Germany’s newfangled welfare state.
    Perhaps most damning of all, Wilson is the father of the single biggest philosophical threat to the Constitution the country has ever faced, one that splits the U.S. Supreme Court to this day. Wilson believed, in violation of everything the Founders stood for, in a “living and breathing constitution” that can and should be “modified by its environment.” These “living political constitutions must beDarwinian in structure and in practice,” he wrote in 1908.
    The Constitution was, in Wilson’s mind, subject to the concept of “survival of the fittest”—not bedrock at all but more like shifting sands. In the Wilsonian view, the government had to keep evolving, changing to meet the needs of the environment around it. There was no such thing as natural rights endowed to us by our creator or immutable principles.
    Wilson’s scorn for the Constitution rings clear and strong. He even derided the U.S. system of checks and balances: “No living thing can have its organs offset against each other,as checks, and live.” He ridiculed the idea of individual rights:
    No doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamentalprinciple. [ However, the ] rights of man are easy to discourse of, [ but ] infinitely hard to translate into practice. [ Such ] theories are never “law”; no matter what the name or the formal authority ofthe document in which they are embodied.
    In a 1912 campaign address titled “What Is Progress?” (a speech he later included in perhaps the most ironically titled book of the twentieth century, The New Freedom ), Wilson laid out in the starkest terms the progressive approach to the Constitution: “All that progressives ask or desire is permission [in an] era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word, [to] interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thingand not a machine.”
    Wilson was equally contemptuous of the Declaration of Independence, claiming, “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence,do not repeat the preface” (that is, that whole “all men are created equal . . . endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” thing). To Wilson, the “question is not whether all men are born free and equal or not,” because we all “know they are not.”
    Wilson argued that Americans “are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence,” because we “are as free as they were tomake and unmake governments.” Americans, he said, should not “worship men or a document.”
    Unless, of course, that man was him.
COMMUNITIES ARE SUPREME OVER MEN
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    Like all progressives, Wilson had a barely concealed elitist’s disdain for the regular Americans he allegedly wanted to help and protect. As governor of New Jersey and later as president of the United States,Wilson rarely talked about socialism, but he was much less guarded during his years in academia.
    Wilson’s brand of socialism was something he called “state