Because they proudly have no idea what they're talking about, West, Glenn Beck and the overwhelming majority of Tea Party members equate early 20th century progressivism socialism and communism. This couldn't be more ironic in so far as the institutions that allowed for the rise of the Tea Party were created by those very progressives a century earlier. Without the progressives, the modern populists would have been crushed in the gears of the political machinery that governed the United States at the time.
As much as populists love talking about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, they don't understand either very well. For example, the Second Amendment was written the way it was (beginning with the phrase "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State") because the Founders were unanimous in their belief that the new nation shouldn't have a standing military. This comes up several times in the Federalist Papers.
Being isolationist, they understood that a nation cannot have a standing army without deploying it on a regular basis. They created the United States as a retreat from the rest of the world, not as a military competitor in it. For that reason, the people would be armed and loosely organized in militias that could respond to any threat and disband when the crisis passed.
Aside from being isolationist, the Founders weren't especially democratic. They were all classical scholars and had studied pure Athenian democracy, ultimately finding it unworkable. For those reasons, they created a number of significant checks on the will of the people, including but not limited to, a division of powers between the political branches, the establishment of an independent judiciary and a Senate that was appointed by the state legislatures. In the strictest classical definitions of the words, they were republicans, not democrats.
Of course, there's no telling any of this to your average Tea Party member or Sean Hannity fan. Their famous love of tri-corner hats aside, they actually know very little about the political and constitutional history of the country they can't stop proclaiming their love of.
If you read the Constitution very closely, you'll notice that political parties aren't mentioned. This is because that some of them, most prominently George Washington, loathed the idea of what he called "factions", which impeded and retarded a republic as much as a standing army did. It was only after Washington retired to Mount Vernon for the final time that the first permanent political parties were established.
Because the Constitution didn't envision permanent parties, the parties were able to master the political machinery that the Constitution created and use it to their own ends. The parties themselves weren't any more democratic than were the Founders. Nominations to lower offices were handed out in the famous "smoky back rooms." Presidential nominations were taken care of national conventions, the delegates to which were controlled either by the state legislatures or the party "machines" that controlled a given city or state. In either event, "the people" were several steps removed from the process when they were involved at all, which wasn't often.
In the early twentieth century, the progressive movement began to change that. As I mentioned earlier, the progressives were generally Republicans. The GOP constituted much of the support for the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements and sought to bring more popular democracy into the political process than had existed at any time before in America. The Democrats entrenched as their machines were in the Deep South and urban centers like New York City and Chicago, liked things just the way they were. The progressives and the Democrats despised one another with an intensity that would shock people today.
The ridiculous and borderline retarded assertions of Allen West and Glenn Beck to the contrary, Woodrow Wilson was not a progressive. He was a creation of the Democratic political machines in New Jersey and New York. Unlike both Roosevelts, who came to power in spite of the Democratic and Republican machines, Wilson became governor and later president because of them.
The progressives began to change things before Wilson ran for office. First, created the primary system, in which the people were given a role in the nominating process for the first time. Different factions could challenge the party machines for the first time, although without much success. Until around 1960, the primaries were beauty contests that the mandarins and power brokers in both parties ignored. But during the first half of the twentieth centuries, the primary system spread across the country.
What broke the control of the party machines wasn't the primaries. It was the New Deal. There had been major reforms to the federal civil service in the late nineteenth century, but it didn't apply to the states or the cities. Nor was the government in the welfare business at any level before 1933. Both patronage and welfare were handled by the party bosses. If you or a family member needed food or a job, you went to your local party boss, who would arrange it in return for service to the party machine. When the Roosevelt administration established federal welfare programs, the influence of the party bosses (who FDR hated throughout his career) began to rapidly break apart and, outside of the Daley machine in Chicago, never recovered.
It was only after the breakdown of machine politics that the primaries took on any importance (albeit over the course of several decades.) The primary system, combined with redistricting, played a massive part in bringing America where it is today.
The Constitution gave the power to draw federal House districts to the state legislatures, who also elected U.S senators prior to the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment (which was another gift from the progressives.) Unsurprisingly, the parties made deals with one another to draw the safest districts possible, which continues to this day. But because the nominations and not infrequently the election of candidates to office were controlled by the party machines, there wasn't much in the way of a challenge to the status quo, the progressives themselves notwithstanding.
The conquest of the primary system over the machine politics of old changed that, and activists in both parties slowly took control; the Democratic activists took over their party in 1972 and the Republican activists won theirs in 1980.
Because the system of redistricting made the overwhelming majority of congressional districts "safe" (there are currently maybe 50 truly competitive districts out of 435), the activists in both parties were able to nominate progressively more ideological candidates without fear of losing. It shouldn't surprise anyone that this has had the effect over time of depressing voter turnout because ideologues rarely represent the interests of the broader - and more centrist - electorate.
One of the dirty secrets of politics, is that political professionals prefer low voter turnout. You can't predict or control what a large number of centrist, unaffiliated voters are going to do. But when an election relies on little more than turning out your activist base, it becomes much easier to predict and control a given race. It makes governing easier too, if only because once elected, you only have to work on behalf of that base.
Without the progressives creating the primary system and the New Deal destroying the party machines, the Tea Party wouldn't exist. Throughout 2009-10, the Tea Party existed only to challenge the institutional power of the Republican Party establishment, taking out as many veteran figures as it could and replacing them with lunatics like Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller. That wouldn't have been possible before. Had the historic power of party machines been available to it, the Republican establishment would have crushed the Tea Party insurgency into dust. Allen West would be selling life insurance somewhere were it not for the progressives.
It was only after the activists took over the parties that silly issues began to drive the national agenda. For example, neither Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford so much as mentioned Roe v. Wade in public while they were in office. After 1980 you couldn't get Republicans to shut up about it. Even with the American economy headed toward President Reagan's famous "dustbin of history", the GOP has spent the last two months howling about birth control.
Party insurgencies were also made easier by campaign finance reforms, such as McCain-Feingold, which eliminated the soft money the parties needed to maintain their relevance and even the appearance of control. The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United effectively replaced the national parties with Super PACs, thereby liberating candidates and officeholders from any party discipline whatsoever.
Having said that, the rise of Super PACs are eventually going to destroy the influence of the activists. Without the national parties are moderating influences, the corporate and union donors that most benefit from Citizens United are going to give only to candidates that serve their interests. And because activists tend to be populist, the interests of corporate and union PACs are eventually going to collide with those of the activists in both parties. Who do you think is going to win that fight?
West and Beck are right, the progressive legacy is ruining America, but they're too dumb to understand that it is doing so principally because it allowed people like Beck and West to exist in the first place. Too much direct democracy was injected into a system that wasn't constitutionally designed to accommodate it, and the structures that were designed to contain it were destroyed over time.
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