Wasn’t Teddy Roosevelt also a progressive?
Yes.
Yes, Theodore Roosevelt was a social justice-oriented progressive and yes, also, many of the agencies that comprise the totality of what is today’s administrative state was created at Roosevelt’s behest.
Where Roosevelt “gets away with it”, I suspect, is the fact that the administrative state in Roosevelt’s day was so disparate that it was malfunctioning. He started from zero and had to create it from scratch.
As a malfunction and incomplete platform, it has to be focused in on in order to be seen. What Wilson was able to accomplish is not nearly the same. Wilson was able to take advantage of the disparate parts that Roosevelt created and more completely turn them into a meat grinding regulatory machine.
We wouldn’t remember Wilson today the way we do if he would’ve been the first up instead of TR.
What I’m getting at is that progressivism begets more progressivism; each progressive has had previous/successive progressive’s work to rely on. Obama relied on -—> Clinton. Clinton, on -—> Carter. etc. etc. Wilson relied on -—> Theodore Roosevelt.
Theodore Roosevelt relied on -—> Nobody.
TR was the first progressive president. He had nothing before him to build on.