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He was a government guy. In those days before the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution was seen by many as an outburst of anarchy and something to be avoided at all costs. So too were plutocracy and the opening up of a vast gap between rich and poor, as well as internal weakness and division, which could make nations become the prey of more powerful countries.

Statism wasn't seen as that big a threat to Roosevelt, since he hadn't experience of how powerful governments could get. The dangers of too-intrusive, too powerful governments top our history syllabus in a way that they didn't at the Harvard of TR's day. Before the First World War many in his generation admired the efficient bureaucracy of the Kaiser's Germany and the docility of the population. They didn't see the dangers in that, or in imperialism or racism.

Anyway Roosevelt was the guy who said, in a quote that was repeated a lot in our own century:

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”

I'm not saying you're wrong, but TR's starting point and the challenges he thought he faced were different from ours.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but TR's starting point and the challenges he thought he faced were different from ours.

Of course, TR thought he faced unique challenges that required unique solutions: that's what he thought about everything.

But that's not the point here. His terms "national" and "nationalism" were about centralizing authority. That's what he wanted, right or wrong.

To excuse his impulses because it is what "he thought" was needed equally ignores what his contemporaries "thought" to the contrary. So, ultimately, you're just taking sides, like the rest of us.

The challenges are always different. It’s the sought-after solutions which decide whether or not one is guilty or not.

I’m not giving progressives the benefit of the doubt. I would’ve done so over a decade ago before I really started digging into their works. But I’ve yet to find a progressive who wasn’t plotting and scheming more than they let on and engaged in _some kind_ of deception.