Did you guys read this?? It’s blowing my mind
Watson marshals the speeches and writings of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and the jurisprudence of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, among others, as evidence for his claim of the pervasive influence of social Darwinism in the intellectual cocktail that is progressivism. As Wilson demonstrates, the progressives sought to move the energy of government from the democratic branches to the bureaucracy. Insulated from politics and popular opinion, federal bureaucrats would engage in the scientific administration of government — the overriding ethos of progressivism. The expert and, in time, the judge would supply regulations and orders to fill the multiplying and unruly (i.e., unregulated) gaps of modern industrialized society. Thus, the real purpose of politics under progressivism informed by social Darwinism is not justice, or the preservation of personal and economic liberty — those worthless dregs of past history — but the infusion into federal and state governments of the substantive powers needed to achieve the perfection of government administration.
via The Undoing of American Constitutionalism by Richard M. Reinsch on National Review Online.