Posted on 08/21/2026 2:57:35 PM PDT by Tench_Coxe
oodrow Wilson holds a distinction no other American president has: he earned a Ph.D., completing his doctorate in political science and history at Johns Hopkins University in 1886. That same year, he wrote an essay called “The Study of Administration,” later published in the inaugural volume of Political Science Quarterly. Historians widely credit this essay as the founding document of public administration as a formal academic field, and Wilson himself as the father of that discipline.
Wilson’s central argument was that government should be split into two separate domains: politics, where elected officials set broad goals and policy direction, and administration, a technical, expert-driven sphere that should be run with “large powers and unhampered discretion” and insulated from day-to-day political interference.
Wilson suggested that government ought to be removed from the political process…in other words: “Democracy is too important to be left to voters.” He explicitly encouraged American reformers to study European administrative models – including Prussia’s – for lessons in efficiency, arguing that the US had fallen behind other nations in developing a science of government administration.
(snip)
With total command over media and law enforcement, it is possible to rewrite the collective memory of an entire population if you have one generation in which to accomplish it. With fully infiltrated and captured institutions it is possible to take control over an entire country without firing a shot if you have two. We are in the final mile, and the ghost in the machine has a government ID.
(Excerpt) Read more at brownstone.org ...
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“a science of government administration”
That was a claim of “progressives” going back a century ago—they conflated “social science” with “science”.
They made a laughably basic error.
Science required identical initial conditions for its experiments so they can be repeated over and over and over again...
Needless to say that does not work in a social science setting—unless you have nations of robots.
I think I see your problem, right there.
(And Harry Truman never graduated college - tons more common sense).
This is why Term Limits won't work. This is what we have here in Commiefornia. The politicians may be termed out but the staffers remain. They simply tell the politician how they are to vote.
Remember the video of Dianne Feinstein starting to give a speech at a committee gathering and one of her staffers leaned in and stopped her in mid-sentence and told her she just needed to vote no on whatever the committee was considering.
see also: Nanzi Pelosi's famous (infamous?) "We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it." brain turd. She didn't know what was in it. All she knew was that her stocks would go up.
Didn’t know this about Wilson. I’ll just add it to all the other evil he did.
Wilson also resegregated Federal Service, pushing Blacks into menial positions. He wrote the screenplay for the old pro-KKK movie, Birth of a Nation. He tied us to World Banking. Possibly he was the most evil of all US Presidents.
With World War I (totally avoidable), Federal Reserve creation (again totally avoidable), Federal Income Tax (total disaster) made Wilson the worst president ever imho.
That said—LBJ and Obozo gave him a run for his money.
Agree. Byedone was no slouch in that department, though his seconds did all the actual dirty work.
She is quite right that Wilson is the beginning of many of our most entrenched problems today.
Now we know where the Deep State started.
Wilson was a closet Marxist.
Period.
This was the birth of our bifurcated system of government; on the one hand the formal government of the Constitution. On the other, the rise of the Administrative state, existing separate from the checks and balances of the Constitution and wielding usurped powers. This 2nd 'shadow' government needs to be ruthlessly beaten down and subjugated, made strictly subservient to elected officials, before we can credibly claim to be a free country again.
Lotsa marxist stuff happened around the time of his presidency. Look at all of those amendments. What were my grandparents thinking??
Wasn’t Wilson the dumb ass who let his wife start the League of Nations?
17th amendment.
I thought Jimmy Carter had a PhD in nuclear physics.
IIRC he was also a captain of a submarine.
Wilson was described to me as the “First Worst” by the best college professor I ever had.
The Income Tax became law when the 16th Amendment was ratified a month before Wilson even took office.
The Federal Reserve Act was the result of the National Monetary Commission. The NMC was created by the 1908 Aldritch Vreeland Act, a Republican bill signed by Teddy Roosevelt.
Congress declared War on Germany in April 1917. The Senate voted 82-6, the House 373-50 and Wilson signed it. Teddy Roosevelt urged Wilson to let him organize another Rough Rider batallion and get into the war.
Glenn Beck and Dinesh D’Souza have popularized a clown version of history that ignores the role of the GOP and pretends that this was all Wilson’s doing. The 1912 Progressive Party was a splinter group of the GOP and Teddy ran as its candidate.
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