Posted on 11/25/2018 9:32:55 AM PST by Para-Ord.45
Claremont Review of Books, the brainiest and best publication in the conservative world, published my review of a new biography of America's first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson.
He was an unreconstructed defender of slavery and a rancorous apologist for the Confederacy. His whole academic and political life was devoted to tearing up the Constitution and replacing it with a progressive dictatorship. This resentment against a Union that had crushed his native south in the Civil War drove his obsession with a world government with power to issue orders to the United States of America.
The constitution in Wilson’s reading had become a relic of a bygone era. He proposed to jettison this putatively archaic document in favor of a government less burdened by checks and balances. His first major publication in political theory, an 1879 essay titled “Cabinet Government in the United States,” preferred what he called the British Cabinet system to America’s separation of powers. What he advocated, of course, had nothing to do with the actual British Constitution, in which the monarchy restricts the capacity of a passing parliamentary majority to undertake drastic and permanent change. Wilson had proposed a sort of quasi-parliamentary dictatorship, with no appeal to natural or unchanging rights. Later he revised his views, resting his hopes on a strong executive Leader to direct the government and people into the future.
The same utilitarian criteria that Wilson applied to the Constitution guided his judgment about capitalism and socialism. He abandoned the personal God of his clerical antecedents in favor of the Social Gospel, to which he was introduced at Princeton by Richard T. Ely, a close friend and ally of movement founder Walter Rauschenbusch. As economists Clifford Thies and Gary Pecquet have observed, “Wilson believed that the difference between socialism and democracy was a matter of means rather than ends.” In an unpublished 1887 essay Wilson averred that socialism
" proposes that all idea of limitation of public authority by individual rights be put out of view, and that the state consider itself as bound to stop only at what is unwise or futile in its universal superintendence alike of individual and public interests…. Applied in a democratic state, such doctrine sounds radical, but not revolutionary. It is only a [sic] acceptance of the extremest [sic] logical conclusions deducable from democratic principles long ago received as respectable. For it is very clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same."
America was ripe for Woodrow Wilson at the turn of the 20th century. It was our luck that this bearer of the Progressive standard was obsessive in his convictions to the point of political ineffectiveness.
(EXCERPTED)
Worst President, ever.
He wasn’t dumb. Just evil.
Negro rule under unscrupulous adventurers had been finally put an end to in the South, and the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites, the responsible class, established. -- Woodrow Wilson, "Division and Reunion", 1829-1889 (1893), p. 273
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/wilson-legacy-racism/417549/
The Racist Legacy of Woodrow Wilson
Then his wife illegally took over.
Contrast Wilson's views with those of our very First President.
George Washington, in his 8th Annual Address expressed acknowledgement of "the People" who "instituted" it (the government) for the "protection of their liberties," recognized "the Supreme Ruler of the Universe and Sovereign Arbiter of Nations," and that Ruler's "providential care."
"The situation in which I now stand for the last time, in the midst of the representatives of the people of the United States, naturally recalls the period when the administration of the present form of government commenced, and I can not omit the occasion to congratulate you and my country on the success of the experiment, nor to repeat my fervent supplications to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe and Sovereign Arbiter of Nations that His providential care may still be extended to the United States, that the virtue and happiness of the people may be preserved, and that the Government which they have instituted for the protection of their liberties may be perpetual." - G. Washington - 8th Annual Address
After Obama of course.
Nope. Wilson did much more damage.
The last sentence of this piece seems to resonate more for Øbozo than Wilson. Both had terrible ideas but the Choom-King was long on running his mouth and short on getting anything accomplished. Wilson by a nose hair...
And, arguably, LBJ.
Wilson was an evil bastard. He was the KKK’s president, only mocked African Americans and even invent the work cubical so White workers would not even have to look as Black workers. He had a private showing of Birth of a Nation in the White House. He gave Puerto Ricans semi citizenship specifically to enable him the draft young P Rs into the World War I army.
Wilson’s path to the presidency was paved with the rich railroad and steel businesses buying off the Senate and controlling businesses in many cities. Their corruption was “solved” by the Seventeenth Amendment.
Wilson didn’t create the problems, he capitalized on them.
We survived Wilson. Now we are fighting a true enemy from within, making the Obama faction a substantial enemy of the republic. Calling Wilson the worst president ever is a foolish statement while Zero’s accomplishments are still being written.
“Worst President, ever.”
And a nasty insidious racist, too. The arcetype progressive.
President Wilson really pushed for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations but Congress never ratified them.
Lincoln was a Marxist/ progressive who dismantled the constitution.He said he didn’t believe in the constitution.
I’m no fan of the league of nations or the federal reserve take over. It was more progressive take over, but it started with Lincoln.
His wife ran the administration after Wilson had a stroke.
The media was corrupt back then and covered it up just like FDR’s polio and later his illness that anyone that looked at him could tell he was dying.
Show where.
Complete nonsense.
Wilson was your typical pro-Confederate Lost Causer, KKK supporting, big government progressive globalist.
Think of Wilson as Jefferson Davis' political grandson.
Lincoln's heir of that time was the modest conservative "America First" leader who presided over peace and prosperity during the "Roaring 20's" -- President "Silent Cal" Coolidge.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.