BECK VS. THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

On today's radio show, Beck provided a little more information about why he thinks Progressivism is the new Liberalism. One issue seems to be that some of the early activists, like Jane Addams, weren't dumbass Fundies:

GLENN: Whereas many of the intellectuals of the late 19th century came from mainstream Christian religions, few listen to this few, if any, trace their roots to the more fundamental doctrines of the Baptist or traditional Methodists. Instead they were the intellectual heirs of Emerson and Unitarianism but with a decidedly secular bent.

In other words, they went to church, but it was a Unitarian church and it was a secular Unitarian church. The reformer Jane Adams, for example, these are the seeds of the progressive movement. The reformer Jane Adams, for example, had a Quaker background. Quakers, what are Quakers? You know one thing about Quakers. What are they?

STU: Passivists?

GLENN: Okay. Antiwar. Had a Quaker background. Absorbed little Christianity. Quote, she said, Christ didn't help me in the least, end quote. After her father died she fell into a horrible depression. Adams gained no support from Christianity. "When I'm needing something more, I find myself approaching a crisis and I look weather wistfully to my friends for help."

This is what the Encyclopedia Britannica has on Adams:

Addams worked with labour as well as other reform groups toward goals including the first juvenile-court law, tenement-house regulation, an eight-hour working day for women, factory inspection, and workers' compensation. She strove in addition for justice for immigrants and blacks, advocated research aimed at determining the causes of poverty and crime, and supported woman suffrage.

Like Jonah Goldberg, Beck is very confused about ideology. In this passage, he seems to implicity assert that William Graham Sumner was one:

Best known for his association with social Darwinism, Sumner's views were spent more complicated, blah, blah blah, embracing views of overpopulation. He expressed concern for the negative impact of charity and government policy, blah, blah blah, blah blah.

Social Darwinism was a intellectual justification for laisser-faire and conservatism, NOT Progressivism,.

Finally, Beck embraces the notion that Progressive/Liberal ideas are the result of the feminization of culture:

Some two to three million fathers absent from the home because of the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of fathers were dead, literally millions of young boys were raised in households of women only. Rather than learning masculine behavior, they had been raised by their mother who taught nurturing and caring. In the process turning to the ways of their mothers and took Christianity out of the home to save the world. It is not a stretch to suggest that the causality list of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville produced a feminized progressive world view among the emerging generation of reformers.