I've told you how I got rich by honest graft. Now, let me tell you that most politicians who are accused of robbin' the city get rich the same way.  They didn't steal a dollar from the city treasury. They just seen their opportunities and took them. That is why, when a reform administration comes in and spends a half million dollars in tryin' to find the public robberies they talked about in the campaign, they don't find them.  The books are always all right. The money in the city treasury is all right. Everything is all right. All they can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft. Now, let me tell you that's never goin' to hurt Tammany with the people. Every good man looks after his friends, and any man who doesn't isn't likely to be popular. If I have a good thing to hand out in private life, I give it to a friend. Why shouldn't X do the same in public life?

Senator George Plunkitt,  "Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft"  (1905)

When anyone bothers to ask, I identify myself as a "liberal" or "liberal democrat" or "left of center".  If I thought most people would understand the phrase, I'd probably call myself a "Social Democrat".  Over the past few years as persons of my ilk (more or less) have resurrected the use of Progressive as a descriptor, I've been uncomfortable adopting the title for myself, for reasons which are perhaps a little clearer now than they were before-I have more time for navel gazing in the summer.  Part of the reason was a reluctance to allow "liberal" to be turned into a dirty word.  We've not completely recovered from the Republican's attempt to do that to "intellectual".  I've refused to take cover behind a synonym bush, so far.  

Let me make sure that I don't allow myself to be labeled "reactionary" because I don't use "progressive" as a self-reference.  Looking back at the Progressive Movement-(giving it about a generation, more or less, from 1880 to World War I,)-- I'd be most comfortable in the company of the Social Progressives-everyone from literary figures like Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser to journalists like Ida Tarbell, Jacob Riis, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett - to William James and John Dewey who would both be aghast that pragmatism has received something of a bad name in "progressive" circles today.  The list is not endless, but it could take up a number of additional paragraphs-Jane Addams and the women who came close to inventing the profession of social worker, Walter Rauschenbusch, Liberal Baptist (there were/are such types) and author of A Theology for the Social Gospel and Washington Gladden, to name just a few more. 

I have deep respect for a number of Politicians associated with populism and progressivism, among them William Jennings Bryan, and Robert LaFollette.  Poor William deserves better of us than ridicule for all that monkey business in Tennessee.  Fighting Bob was a Republican, along with Lincoln one of the few I can usually find something nice to say about.  

But the Progressives of the last century who give me pause are those who focused their Progressive energies on "Reforming the System".  The "goo-goos" as they were called-the good government reform guys.  Together, they instituted four types of political change which remain with us today, and we generally accept each as a "good thing"-after all the changes are historic, the history books generally applaud them and their sponsors.  Yet the years since 2000 have led me to wonder-to scratch my hairy chin (it itches anyway) and wonder whether the specific reforms achieved much of anything-and whether or not in some instances the old bugaboo, "unforseen consequences," may have, in the long run, negated some of the short term benefits.  When I release in mere bytes, (drum roll, please), I'm quite sure most are going to think I've gone around the bend.  And I'm absolving myself from imagining the tinker which would fix each of the problems I'm going to diagnose.  But anyhow...the four reforms which may have gone awry are
1.    The secret or Australian Ballot
2.    The Direct Election of Senators
3.    Direct Democracy (Initiative, Referendum, and Recall)
4.    Zoning by use and related planning tools.

Looks like four more parts coming up, doesn't it?  I guess I'll take them in the order above, which happens to be the chronological order as well.