Leaning Left: At a fundraiser Monday, the president boasted to Hollywood celebrities and deal makers about enacting "the most progressive legislative agenda" in decades. That may be true, but it's hardly something to be proud of.

It may sound harmless, but by declaring himself a progressive, the president has positioned himself on his party's far-left wing. It's also revealing. Given the progressive movement's baleful and pervasive influence over academia, the media, Hollywood and even kids' schools, it's hard not to find an area of modern life it hasn't touched.

Much of the left today calls itself "progressive." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton does, and Democrats too numerous to name. It's part of an old tradition. In addition to many well-known activists, writers and philosophers, progressivism can claim many presidents — ranging from Woodrow Wilson, both Roosevelts and Herbert Hoover, to Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and, of course, Obama himself.

So what is progressivism, you ask? Many things. But as a creed, it stresses the importance of centralized government control over Americans' lives as paramount. It actively seeks to diminish the constitutional limits on what government can — and can't — do.

Influenced heavily by European social theorists and American Utilitarian thought, progressivism took root after the Civil War. Adherents understood that the idea of limited government based on individualism, natural rights and property rights — as defined by the Founding Fathers — had to be discredited.

It stood in the way of their social engineering agenda, which views patriotism as a danger, religion as a vice and constitutionalism as a mere historical tic to be eradicated.

In short, progressivism is a creed of Big Government — government with few checks and balances; government not of the people, by the people and for the people, but government of, by and for the special interests and elites that form the movement's backbone.

Here are Obama's progressive "accomplishments":

• The epic $862 billion "stimulus," which has led to record long-term joblessness while bailing out Obama's union supporters and the most irresponsible states while punishing taxpayers and their heirs for decades to come.

• The $700 billion TARP program, which we were told would be used to give securities markets a boost but instead was used, essentially, to take over the auto industry, bail out friends of Obama and continue meddling in the markets.

• The massive medical care overhaul known as Obama- Care, which will eventually supplant the best medical system in the world with a government-run system modeled after the substandard contraptions found in Canada and Britain.

All of this has political precedent.

Back in 1912, Woodrow Wilson, the quintessential progressive, summed up his movement this way: "You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible ... But that time is passed. America is not and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise."

Later, the heavily statist New Deal was essentially a progressive blueprint for taking advantage of the crisis presented by the Great Depression to gain power.

With the New Deal, no act of government was considered outside the Constitution — price controls, wholesale takeover of industries, taxes imposed on specific groups, government seizure of private property, bureaucratic management of whole sectors of the economy — nothing.

In recent months, Americans have been alarmed at the nonchalance with which the left has approached the nation's problems. But it's all by design. Progressives don't care whether things work; what they want is power.

Progressives deny it, but it's a basic tenet of their belief that average Americans are too stupid to care for themselves and so must defer to the all-knowing wisdom of the legions of educated and ideologically attuned "experts" who staff our bureaucracies.

This is not how America was meant to be. That's why when we hear the president brag about his ruinous progressive legacy to Hollywood's ignorant glitterati, we can only have faith in the wisdom of the people — and count the days until Nov. 2.