When I was a freshman many moons ago, students around campus and across the country were euphoric over the grassroots support that propelled Barack Obama to the presidency. Hope was in the air that this politician could bring a reformed, open and democratic style to Washington.

But keen observers of then-candidate Obama’s campaign recognized the incompatibility of his progressive platform with this idealized manner of government.

Progressivism seeks to vest more power in the federal government and concentrate most of that power in the hands of the executive branch and its bureaucracy. This ambition is inherently incompatible with democratic principles. Progressive ambitions are anathema to constitutional democracy because the latter tethers executive action to the consent of others.

It should be no surprise then that President Obama does not hide his contempt for the constitutional limitations of executive power.

In an interview Monday, the president lamented, “What’s frustrated people is that I have not been able to force Congress to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008.” Obama continued, “It turns out that our founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change that I would like sometimes.”

Far from being an aberration, Obama succeeds a century of progressive presidents who have openly rebuked traditional limits to executive power.

Woodrow Wilson, the godfather of progressivism, boasts a resume that includes ardent support for racial segregation and imprisonment of political dissidents.

Wilson also roundly critiqued the founding principles. The Democrat argued, “We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”

But you don’t just need to take the words of politicians to recognize this tendency. In its three years, the Obama administration has consistently eschewed democratic process for governance that is increasingly removed from the people.

When then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted, “We have to pass (Obamacare) to find out what is in it,” she could not have known how much truth there was in her Orwellian admission. The 2,700-page healthcare overhaul no one read was not so much tons of new regulation as tons of new rules giving executive bureaucracies free rein to create even more regulations.

Consider that Health and Human Services (HHS), the bureaucracy charged with implementing the law, has turned the six pages of Section 3022 into 429 pages of regulations.

Though they are far from finished with their carte blanche renovation of the health insurance industry, if HHS continues writing regulations at the same pace as Section 3022, the final tally of regulations will come to nearly 200,000 pages. Most importantly, none of those regulations will have been voted on by your representatives or even debated in the public arena.

Of course some of these regulations may seem mundane, and many are. But many strike very sensitive chords. Chief among those is the very recent HHS decision to require all religiously affiliated organizations, like many hospitals, to cover the cost of contraception and abortion-inducing drugs for their employees even if it’s incompatible with the organization’s religious beliefs.

Ironically, Obamacare would not have passed without approval from Catholic groups and pro-life Democrats like former Congressman Bart Stupak. All of these groups sought, and were promised, assurances that their religion would not be undermined by the force of government.

If this HHS mandate on religiously affiliated groups had played out in the democratic sphere, the outcome would have been far different.

Our founders were the first politicians in history to recognize that issues of religion and conscience are so sensitive that they are best left to the realm of personal choice. And if these issues do wander into the public, they should be decided as locally and democratically as possible so to avoid national strife.

On the other hand, progressivism, which seeks to manage minute aspects of people’s material lives, consistently runs athwart issues of personal freedom of the most sensitive variety. And because progressives must govern using the flexibility of the bureaucracy, they also undermine the desire of a civil people to decide such matters democratically.

Episodes like the HHS contraception mandate are not haphazard side effects of particular progressive reforms but rather an unavoidable corollary. The larger and larger our government grows, the smaller and smaller our democracy shrinks.

The reason progressives, like President Obama, leverage bureaucratic power is because it is the only power compatible with running a government as powerful as they envision.

A government that yearns to care for all of your material needs is one that cannot practically or efficiently manage them so long as its democracy slows it down.

For this reason, some say progressivism is a slippery slope. I say it is a cliff.

If we eventually step off into the abyss of bureaucratic socialism, there is no telling how much freedom we will never get back.

Ryan Fazio is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected]

All opinions expressed in this column are solely the opinions of the columnist and do not reflect the views of The Daily Northwestern. If you would like to respond to the column, you may comment below, email the columnist or submit a 300-word letter to the editor to [email protected].