Some fourteen or fifteen years ago, in an essay I called The Leader Follows -- Where? I used his polarity to illustrate what I thought had happened to us in that form of liberalism we call Progressivism. It seemed to me that the liberals had scrapped the balanced polarity and reposed both liberty and the fundamental law in the common man. That is to say Gabriel's fundamental law had been so much modified by this time that it was neither fundamental nor law any more. It is a weakness of Gabriel's analysis that he never seems to realize that his so-called fundamental law had already been cut loose from its foundations when it was adapted to democracy. And with Progressivism the Religion of Humanity was replacing what Gabriel called Christian supernaturalism. And the common man was developing mythic power, or charisma, on his own.

During the decade that followed, the common man, as that piece put it, grew uncomfortable as the Voice of God and fled from behind Saint Woodrow (Wilson) only to learn from Science, to his shocked relief that after all there was no God he had to speak for and that he was just an animal anyhow -- that there was a chemical formula for him, and that too much couldn't be expected of him.

The socialism implicit in the slogan of the Roosevelt Revolution, freedom from want and fear, seems a far cry from the individualism of the First Amendment to the Constitution, or of the Jacksonian frontier. What had happened to the common man?