I Am the Change

Introduction

1. Stanley Kurtz, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (New York: Threshold Editions, 2010), pp. 1–11, 21-60, 71–77, 86.

2. For an account of the Left that says very little about the political mainstream, see Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011).

3. Cf. Will Morrisey, “Theodore Roosevelt on Self-Government and the Administrative State,” in John Marini and Ken Masugi, eds., The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science: Transforming the American Regime (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), ch. 2.

Chapter 1: The Audacity of Barack Obama

1. See Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), chapter 9.

2. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), pp. 319, 333–34. According to Gitlin, “Mayor Daley yelled something which the TV sound couldn’t pick up but lip-readers later decoded as ‘Fuck you you Jew son of a bitch you lousy motherfucker go home.’ ” Norman Mailer, for once, was more discreet: “Daley seemed to be telling Ribicoff to go have carnal relations with himself.” See his Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (New York: World, 1968), pp. 179–81.

3. Haynes Johnson, “1968 Democratic Convention: The Bosses Strike Back,” Smithsonian (August 2008), www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/1968-democratic-convention.html.

4. Gitlin, The Sixties, pp. 285–94, 341–48.

5. Nancy Gibbs, “How Obama Rewrote the Book,” Time, November 5, 2008, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1856982,00.html.

6. David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (New York: Knopf, 2010), pp. 556–60.

7. Michael Tomasky, “Against Despair,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, no. 17 (Summer 2010), pp. 57–70, at 68.

8. Ibid., pp. 68, 70.

9. Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote, Jackson 56.1 percent, and FDR 57.4 percent. LBJ garnered 61.1 percent in his 1964 victory. Strictly speaking, the numbers for Jackson are not comparable, because two of the states did not hold a popular vote for president in 1828. Delaware and South Carolina left it up to the state legislature to assign the state’s votes in the Electoral College. See Gerhard Peters, “Presidential Election Mandates,” in The American Presidency Project, ed. John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters (Santa Barbara: University of California, 1999–2009), available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/mandates.php.

10. For example, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act avoided a Senate filibuster, passing 61–37; the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act lost 34 Democratic votes but still passed in the House, 219–212; and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, shunned by 27 Democrats, nonetheless cleared the House with a 223–202 vote.

11. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), pp. 36–37, 104, 107–8, 265, 327, 354–55.

12. Ibid., pp. 34–36.

13. Barack Obama, “The American Promise”: Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, August 28, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=78284&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36.

14. Barack Obama, “In Their Own Words: Obama on Reagan,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/ref/us/politics/21seelye-text.html.

15. James W. Ceaser, “What a Long Strange Race It’s Been,” Claremont Review of Books 8, no. 2 (Spring 2008), pp. 8–11.

16. Mark Morford, “Is Obama an Enlightened Being? Spiritual Wise Ones Say: This sure ain’t no ordinary politician. You buying it?” San Francisco Gate, June 6, 2008, http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-06-06/entertainment/17120245_1_obama-s-presence-new-age-black-president; Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pp. 31–33, 53, 97–98, 153–57, 176–78, 193, 288–89, 361–62.

17. Remarks by Senator Barack Obama at the Opening of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, April 20, 2005, http://chicago.about.com/od/chicagopeople/a/ObamaSpeechAL.htm; Michelle Obama, Speech at the University of California, Los Angeles, February 1, 2008, http://fedpapers.blogspot.com/2008/02/michelle-obamas-speech-ucla-two-weeks.html; Lauren Collins, “The Other Obama,” New Yorker, March 10, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/10/080310fa_fact_collins?printable=true&currentPage=all; William Kristol, “It’s All About Him,” New York Times, February 25, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/opinion/25kristol.htmlref=opinion.

18. Barack Obama, Speech at the Democratic National Convention, July 27, 2004, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/convention2004/barackobama2004dnc.htm; Speech before Planned Parenthood Action Fund, July 17, 2007, http://sites.google.com/site/lauraetch/barackobamabeforeplannedparenthoodaction; Remarks to the California State Democratic Convention in San Diego, May 2, 2007, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=77041&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; “The American Promise”: Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, August 28, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=78284&st=attack&st1=#axzz1j058LbOV; Remarks Announcing Candidacy for President in Springfield, Illinois, February 10, 2007, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76999&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36.

19. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pp. 32–34, 37–40.

20. Obama, Remarks Announcing Candidacy for President in Springfield, Illinois, February 10, 2007, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76999&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Remarks Following the Wisconsin Primary, February 19, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76558&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36.

21. Barack Obama, Remarks Announcing Candidacy for President in Springfield, Illinois, February 10, 2007, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76999&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Remarks Following the “Super Tuesday” Primaries and Caucuses, February 5, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76361&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36.

22. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pp. 356–57; Speech at the Democratic National Convention, July 17, 2004, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/convention2004/barackobama2004dnc.htm; Remarks Following the Wisconsin Primary, February 19, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76558&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36.

23. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Book 7, Chapter 14, 1154b10–15, p. 161; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica: I-II, Q. 40, 1, 6, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2040.htm; II-II, Q. 17, 1, 5–6, at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3017.htm; II-II, Q. 127, 1–2, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3127.htm.

24. Barack Obama, Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on Health Care Reform, September 9, 2009, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=86592&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Remarks Announcing Candidacy for President in Springfield, Illinois, February 10, 2007, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76999&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Remarks Following the Iowa Caucuses, January 3, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76232&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Remarks Following the New Hampshire Primary, January 8, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=62272&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Remarks in Columbia, Missouri, October 30, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=84665&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36.

25. See Johan Norberg, “The Great Debt Bubble of 2011,” Spectator, January 1, 2011, pp. 12–13.

26. William Voegeli, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State (New York: Encounter Books, 2010), p. 154.

Chapter 2: Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Progress

1. Barack Obama, Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on Health Care Reform, September 9, 2009, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=86592&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Remarks in Columbia, Missouri, October 30, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=84665&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Remarks Following the Iowa Caucuses, January 3, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76232&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36.

2. Woodrow Wilson, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, vol. 5 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 389–90, and vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 500; see also vol. 5, pp. 328–46. Cf. Paul Eidelberg, A Discourse on Statesmanship: The Design and Transformation of the American Polity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 315–16.

3. Contrast, for example, their views on the president’s role in making treaties, a topic highly relevant to the Senate’s failure in 1919 to ratify the Treaty of Versailles—a crushing blow to Wilson’s presidency. Hamilton cautioned: “The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States.” Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Charles R. Kesler (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), no. 75, p. 450. By contrast, Wilson boasted of the president’s “control, which is very absolute, of the foreign relations of the nation. The initiative in foreign affairs, which the President possesses without any restriction whatever, is virtually the power to control them absolutely. The President cannot conclude a treaty with a foreign power without the consent of the Senate, but he may guide every step of diplomacy, and to guide diplomacy is to determine what treaties must be made. . . . He need disclose no step of negotiation until it is complete, and when in any critical matter it is completed the government is virtually committed.” Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), pp. 77–78. Cf. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 157–61.

4. Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1913), p. 40. But cf. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1965; orig. ed., 1909), pp. 167–75. The best accounts of TR as a political thinker are Jean Yarbrough, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Critique of the Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012); and Lance Robinson, “Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft: The Constitutional Foundations of the Modern Presidency,” in The Constitutional Presidency, ed. Joseph M. Bessette and Jeffrey K. Tulis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 76–95.

5. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage, 1989) p. 306ff.; Sidney Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011).

6. See Louis Auchincloss, Woodrow Wilson: A Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), pp. 4–6; Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 186. On Progressivism and the pro-slavery argument, consider C. Edward Merriam, A History of American Political Theories (New York: Macmillan, 1920), pp. 307 and 312. Cf. Henry Blumenthal, “Woodrow Wilson and the Race Question,” Journal of Negro History (January 1963), pp. 1–10, and Arthur S. Link, “Woodrow Wilson: The American as Southerner,” Journal of Southern History 36, no. 1 (February 1970), pp. 3–17.

7. See Peter Filene, “An Obituary for the ‘Progressive Movement,’ ” American Quarterly 22 (Spring 1970), pp. 20–34; Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews of American History 10 (December 1982), pp. 114–23.

8. For an overview, see Alonzo L. Hamby, “Progressivism: A Century of Change and Rebirth,” in Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur, eds., Progressivism and the New Democracy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 40–80. For more or less contemporaneous treatments, see, e.g., S. J. Duncan-Clark, The Progressive Movement: Its Principles and Its Programme (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1913), chs. 1–2, 17; H. L. Mencken, “Roosevelt: An Autopsy,” in H. L. Mencken: Prejudices, A Selection, ed. James T. Farrell (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), pp. 47–69; and Merriam, A History of American Political Theories, chs. 8–9.

9. James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 298–300; Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), p. 52.

10. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), pp. 152–53; Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, p. 298.

11. Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People, 5 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1902), vol. 5, p. 58; Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 44–45.

12. Progressive Platform of 1912, in Ronald J. Pestritto and William J. Atto, eds., American Progressivism: A Reader (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), pp. 273–87, at 274. Wilson, The New Freedom, pp. 4, 35, 57. Cf. Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977), chs. 8, 14.

13. Isaac Kramnick and Theodore J. Lowi, eds., American Political Thought: A Norton Anthology (New York: Norton, 2009), pp. 787, 802–3.

14. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Prophecies of Mr. Bryan,” in William H. Harbaugh, ed., The Writings of Theodore Roosevelt (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 48.

15. Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), p. 132.

16. Kramnick and Lowi, American Political Thought, pp. 803–4.

17. As James H. Davis, a Texas Populist, exulted, “The principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the National Demands of the . . . People’s Party . . . contain all the requisite provisions for the grandest and most perfect civilization.” James H. Davis, A Political Revelation (1894), in Norman Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 203–27, at 204. Cf. Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894): “The Constitution and laws of the United States are, however imperfectly, the translation into the language of politics of doing as you would be done by—the essence of equal rights and government by consent.” In Pollack, The Populist Mind, pp. 496–534, at 523.

18. See Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Free Press, 1986; orig. ed., 1913), and J. Allen Smith, The Spirit of American Government: A Study of the Constitution: Its Origin, Influence and Relation to Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1907).

19. Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage Books, 1974; orig. ed., 1948), p. 316. Hofstadter’s debunking of Populism in this book (Bryan lived and died “a provincial politician following a provincial populace in provincial prejudices,” p. 265) and in his other famous study, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1956, confirms his own Progressive inclinations, as he admitted. Cf. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 12–21 and chs. 1–3.

20. Wilson, The New Freedom, pp. 37, 42. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 17, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson, p. 213. Abraham Lincoln, Speech on the Dred Scott Decision, in Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher, (New York, NY: Library of America, 1992), pp. 117–121; Speech at Springfield, Illinois, in Fehrenbacher, ed., Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings, pp. 277–278. On the views of progress prevailing in America before Progressivism, see the discerning discussion in James Ceaser, Nature and History in American Political Development: A Debate (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

21. See the thoughtful treatment in Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Standing at Armageddon: Morality and Religion in Progressive Thought,” in Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur, eds., Progressivism and the New Democracy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 103–25. Cf. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 274–88, 407–25, 504–24.

22. The Federalist Papers, No. 49, pp. 311–314; but cf. No. 14, pp. 99–100. See Charles R. Kesler, “The Founders and the Classics,” in The American Founding: Essays on the Formation of the Constitution, ed. J. Jackson Barlow, Leonard W. Levy, and Ken Masugi (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 57–90; and Gary Rosen, American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999).

23. Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981; orig. ed., 1885), pp. 27, 215.

24. Richard T. Ely, An Introduction to Political Economy (New York: Chautauqua Press, 1889), pp. 85–86, 315–16; Woodrow Wilson, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1895), sec. 23, and cf. 1159: “Society is in no sense artificial; it is as truly natural and organic as the individual man himself. As Aristotle said, ‘man is by nature a social animal; his social function is as normal with him as is his individual function.’ ”

25. See the careful new study by Jason R. Jividen, Claiming Lincoln: Progressivism, Equality, and the Battle for Lincoln’s Legacy in Presidential Rhetoric (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), especially chs. 2 and 3; and Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 141–94.

26. See especially Theodore Roosevelt, “The Heirs of Abraham Lincoln,” February 12, 1913, in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, National Edition, ed. Hermann Hagedorn, 20 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), vol. 17, pp. 359–78; and Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln: A Man of the People,” in College and State: Educational, Political, and Literary Papers (1875–1913), vol. 2, pp. 83–101, in The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925), 6 vols., ed. Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd.

27. Wilson, Congressional Government, pp. xi, 10; Wilson, Division and Reunion, 1829–1889 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1906), pp. 216, 287; Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” in Harbaugh, ed., The Writings of Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 315–33, at 321; Jividen, Claiming Lincoln, pp. 34–37, 58–75. America’s lack of a proper State had been an element of Hegel’s criticism of the U.S. See The Philosophy of History, pp. 84–6; and James Ceaser, Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), ch. 7.

28. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 1–8. Jefferson’s University of Virginia was exceptional in trying to keep clergymen at arm’s length. But the point of his university, as Jefferson saw it, was to educate Virginia’s future statesmen, rendering them proper guardians of their fellow citizens’ rights—not to turn the graduates into experts whose knowledge gave them a new title to rule their fellow citizens.

29. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 29, 460–66.

30. Jencks and Riesman, The Academic Revolution, pp. 12–14.

31. Among others who studied in Germany were John Burgess, Simon Patten, Charles Merriam, W. E. B. DuBois, and Walter Weyl. Of Wilson’s peers, those who studied exclusively in America included John Dewey and Frederick Jackson Turner. See Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), ch. 1; Eldon Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994); John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 24–32.

32. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory, p. 23; Frederic C. Howe, Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), pp. vii–xii.

33. Howe, Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy, pp. 38–39.

34. A well-known case of such pressure was Ely’s “trial” in 1894 before the Regents of the University of Wisconsin, of all places, on the charge of teaching socialism. See Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, pp. 210–11, 265–66.

35. Wilson, “The Study of Administration,” in Ronald J. Pestritto, ed., Woodrow Wilson: The Essential Political Writings (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), pp. 231–248, at 232.

36. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 17–19, 29–31.

37. Ibid., pp. 17–20, 31, 33–37.

38. Cf. Wilson, The New Freedom, pp. 38–40 with 41–2.

39. Frances Fukuyama, “The End of History?” in National Interest, Summer 1989; The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).

40. Leo Strauss, “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, rev. and expanded ed., ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991), pp. 177–212, at 212; Harry V. Jaffa, “The End of History Means the End of Freedom,” http://www.claremont.org/publications/pub_print.asp?pubid=8.

41. Quoted in Strauss, “Restatement,” p. 210.

42. Wilson, The New Freedom, p. 33. Cf. A Crossroads of Freedom: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Woodrow Wilson, ed. John Wells Davidson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956), p. 245.

43. John Dewey, “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” in Kramnick and Lowi, eds., American Political Thought, pp. 1030–35, at 1031, 1035.

44. Paul F. Boller Jr., American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism, 1865–1900 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969), pp. 54–56.

45. Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Varieties of Social Darwinism,” in her Victorian Minds (New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 314–32, at 315–16; Obama, Commencement Address at Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, June 4, 2005, http://obamaspeeches.com/019-Knox-College-Commencement-Obama-Speech.htm; “A Hope to Fulfill”: Remarks to the National Press Club, April 26, 2005, http://www.votesmart.org/public-statement/92449/a-hope-to-fulfill.

46. The pejorative use of “Social Darwinism” dates at least to 1906, though the sentiment is present as early as the 1880s. In the chapter titles of his renowned study, Hofstadter calls Sumner a Social Darwinist and Lester Frank Ward, Sumner’s leftist counterpart, simply a “Critic.” Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955; orig. ed., 1944), pp. 51, 67, 82.

47. For creative euphemisms, see Eric Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Knopf, 1953), and John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Perigee Books, 1980; orig. ed., 1935).

48. Himmelfarb’s essay “Varieties of Social Darwinism” and her Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996; orig. ed., 1959), part 6, remain the best accounts.

49. Quoted in Boller, American Thought in Transition, pp. 49–51.

50. Ibid., pp. 64–69.

51. He liked to compare himself to George Washington. As his biographer and erstwhile friend, William Bayard Hale, recalled, “On another occasion, commenting on the curious part the number thirteen had played in his own life, he mentioned to his biographer the circumstance that the name, WOODROW WILSON, like that of GEO. WASHINGTON, contained thirteen letters.” A peculiar observation, comparing their signatures rather than full names, and neglecting to mention that Wilson didn’t call himself Woodrow, dropping his first name Thomas, until he had gotten his B.A. from Princeton and begun his legal studies at the University of Virginia. His Princeton friends knew him as “Tommy.” Hale, The Story of a Style (New York: Huebsch, 1920), p. 76; John Milton Cooper Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 36.

52. Wilson, The New Freedom, pp. 44–48; Constitutional Government in the United States, pp. 54–57.

53. Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, pp. 54–56; The New Freedom, pp. 46–47. Wilson consistently disregards the framers’ intention to form a national government that would be not merely checked and balanced but also “energetic,” republican, and capable of pursuing long-term projects for the public good. See Charles R. Kesler, “Woodrow Wilson and the Statesmanship of Progress,” in Thomas B. Silver and Peter W. Schramm, eds., Natural Right and Political Right: Essays in Honor of Harry V. Jaffa (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1984), pp. 103–27; Kesler, “Separation of Powers and the Administrative State,” in Gordon Jones and John Marini, eds., The Imperial Congress: Crisis in the Separation of Powers (New York: Pharos Books, 1989), pp. 1–21; Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism. And see Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and William Kristol, “The Problem of the Separation of Powers: Federalist 47–51,” in Charles R. Kesler, ed., Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding (New York: Free Press, 1987).

54. Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, pp. 41–4, 57; Niels Aage Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson, 1875–1910 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 145.

55. Wilson, The New Freedom, pp. 28–31, 38–44. Cf. Wilson, The State, secs. 1160, 1286.

56. Wilson, The New Freedom, pp. 29–30, 44; The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, 69 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–94), vol. 10, pp. 22–23. On the two Wilsons, see the fine discussion and thorough citations in Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, especially pp. 19–23, 253–54. Cf. Hofstadter’s conclusion: “The early Wilson made room in his philosophy for change, for reform, as an organic principle, and his ultimate conversion is no more drastic than a change of emphasis.” Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, p. 317.

57. Wilson, “A Calendar of Great Americans,” in Pestritto, ed., Woodrow Wilson: The Essential Political Writings, pp. 81–90 at 85. Cf. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, pp. 10–13, 51–54, 254–57.

58. Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, pp. 56–57. Emphasis added. Cf. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans., H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), sec. 271, p. 304.

59. On the judicial and jurisprudential revolution, see Bradley C. S. Watson, Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2009); Christopher Wolfe, The Rise of Modern Judicial Review: From Constitutional Interpretation to Judge-Made Law (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994; rev. ed.); and Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn, Pragmatism, Statesmanship, and the Supreme Court (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1977).

60. Wilson, The State, sec. 1161; Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. xi; Hegel, The Philosophy of History, pp. 96, 98, 419–422. The final quote is from Johann Caspar Bluntschli, who at Heidelberg taught the teachers of Wilson and TR (H. B. Adams and John Burgess, respectively), quoted in Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship, p. 120.

61. Edward A. Freeman, “Some Impressions of the United States,” Fortnightly Review 32 (September 1882), p. 327, quoted in Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship, p. 122.

62. See Lawrence H. Fuchs, American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), chs. 1-3, and Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). But cf. Charles R. Kesler, “The Promise of American Citizenship,” in Noah Pickus, ed., Immigration and Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); and Edward J. Erler, John Marini, and Thomas G. West, The Founders on Citizenship and Immigration: Principles and Challenges in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). The Founders, particularly Jefferson, had their own penchant for Anglo-Saxonism, but the differences are instructive. Jefferson extolled the Saxons’ love of liberty and democracy, in contrast to the Normans’ addiction to aristocracy and feudalism. In his version of the Robin Hood story, after 1066 the Normans diverted English political development onto an absolutist track, which lasted until the overthrow of the Stuarts and perhaps until the American Revolution. He elevated Saxonism to the level of politics, of republican versus monarchical regimes. Wilson preferred to reduce regime questions to the level of culture or race. The one stressed the role of human freedom in politics, the other the role of fate or historical determinism.

63. Wilson, The State, sec. 4. He was drawing on a well-established tradition that included not only Filmer but Fustel de Coulanges and Lewis Henry Morgan, not to mention John C. Calhoun and the southern defenders of chattel slavery.

64. For example, see Obama, President’s Weekly Address, November 24, 2011, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=97313&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session in Albuquerque, New Mexico, September 28, 2010, at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=88524&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36.

65. Wilson, The State, secs. 1173–79, 1236–37, 1244; Richard T. Ely, An Introduction to Political Economy, p. 315.

66. Wilson, The State, secs. 1244, 1269. Cf. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, pp. 37-53. Many of the early libertarian attacks on “statism” reflect some of the same confusion or ambiguity between the German and English senses of the term. See, e.g., Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009).

67. Wilson, The State, secs. 1173, 1175, 1236-37, 1244-45, 1273-74.

68. Wilson, The State, secs. 1255, 1269-71, 1273-74, 1283-86.

69. See John Marini, “Theology, Metaphysics, and Positivism: The Origins of the Social Sciences and the Transformation of the American University,” in Challenges to the American Founding: Slavery, Historicism, and Progressivism in the Nineteenth Century (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), ch. 6; Robert Eden, Political Leadership and Nihilism (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1983), ch. 1; Tiffany Jones Miller, “John Dewey and the Philosophical Refounding of America,” National Review (December 31, 2009). For “leadership” in The Federalist, see nos. 6, 10, 14, 16, 18, 43, 49, 59, 62, 65, 70, and 85. See also The Federalist Papers, Nos. 6, 10, 14, 16, 18, 43, 49, 59, 62, 65, 70, and 85.

70. Wilson, “Leaders of Men,” pp. 212–213, 221–222, 224.

71. Ibid., pp. 214, 224.

72. Cf. Wilson, The State, sec. 1160.

73. Wilson, “Leaders of Men,” pp. 214, 226; and Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln: A Man of the People,” in Link, ed., Papers, vol. 19, pp. 30–59.

74. Wilson, “Leaders of Men,” pp. 215, 223, 225, 226.

75. John Wells Davidson, ed., A Crossroads of Freedom, p. 187; Wilson, The New Freedom, p. 73.

76. See The Federalist Papers, Nos. 6, 16, 26, 35, and 46.

77. Jaffa, “The End of History Is the End of Freedom”; Wilson, quoted in Kesler, “Woodrow Wilson and the Statesmanship of Progress,” pp. 123 and 127n48.

Chapter 3: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rise of Liberalism

1. Time, November 24, 2008; Peter Beinart, “The New Liberal Order,” Time, November 13, 2008, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1858873,00.html.

2. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pp. 176–77; “A Hope to Fulfill”: Remarks to the National Press Club, April 26, 2005, http://www.votesmart.org/public-statement/92449/a-hope-to-fulfill.

3. Ibid.

4. Ernest K. Lindley, “Symposium: Early Days of the New Deal,” in Morton J. Frisch and Martin Diamond, eds., The Thirties: A Reconsideration in the Light of the American Political Tradition (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010; orig. ed., 1968), pp. 131–32. See Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).

5. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Speech before the 1932 Democratic National Convention, in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, vol. 1, p. 648; Commonwealth Club Address, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, vol. 1, p. 750. Cf. his Address at the Jackson Day Dinner, Washington, D.C., January 8, 1938: “If the cataclysm of the World War had not stopped [Wilson’s] hand, neither you nor I would today be facing such a difficult task of reconstruction and reform.” The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 volume, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman (New York: Macmillan, 1941), p. 41; and see p. 614. FDR echoed Wilson’s own account in his Second Inaugural Address of his turn from domestic to foreign policy.

6. Frisch and Diamond, eds., The Thirties, p. 129; Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, pp. 311, 379; James MacGregor Burns, The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956), p. 198; Paul K. Conkin, The New Deal (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1967), p. 13; and Kesler, “The Public Philosophy of the New Freedom and the New Deal,” in Robert Eden, ed., The New Deal and Its Legacy: Critique and Reappraisal (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), pp. 155–66, at p. 160.

7. Rexford G. Tugwell, “The New Deal: The Progressive Tradition,” Western Political Quarterly (September 1950), pp. 395–96. Cf. Tugwell, “The Progressive Orthodoxy of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” Ethics, vol. 64, no. 1 (October 1953), pp. 1–23, at 2–3, 14–22.

8. Robert Eden, “On the Origins of the Regime of Pragmatic Liberalism: John Dewey, Adolf A. Berle, and FDR’s Commonwealth Club Address of 1932,” in Studies in American Political Development 7 (Spring 1993), pp. 74–150. Eden seems uncertain at times whether FDR or Berle was in the driver’s seat. On necessity and executive power, see Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: Free Press, 1989).

9. Cf. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 277–86.

10. William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (New York: Macmillan, 1946), pp. 632–33, quoted in Eden, “Origins of Pragmatic Liberalism,” p. 89; and Eden, pp. 89–99.

11. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 volume, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman (New York: Macmillan, 1941), pp. xxviii–xxxiii. For the six speeches during the primary campaigns, see items 80, 90, 100, 113, 132, and 143. See also item 137.

12. Quoted in Ronald D. Rotunda, The Politics of Language: Liberalism as Word and Symbol (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), pp. 64, 72; see also ibid., ch. 4. The relevant texts of the debate over liberalism are now conveniently available in Gordon Lloyd, ed., The Two Faces of Liberalism: How the Hoover-Roosevelt Debate Shapes the 21st Century (Salem, MA: M & M Scrivener Press, 2006).

13. Rotunda, The Politics of Language, chs. 2, 3; Edward A. Stettner, Shaping Modern Liberalism: Herbert Croly and Progressive Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), pp. 1–7, 110–13.

14. After TR’s defeat in 1912, a new Progressive Party emerged in 1924. Its presidential candidate, Robert M. La Follette, was defeated by Calvin Coolidge.

15. See Rotunda, The Politics of Language, pp. 10–11, 90.

16. Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, p. 57; The New Freedom, p. 177.

17. Lloyd, ed., The Two Faces of Liberalism, pp. 96–97, 287, 291.

18. Ibid., pp. 292–95.

19. See Bruce Ackerman, We the People, vol. 1, Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1993).

20. Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 volume, p. 586.

21. Cf. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 41–42: “The chief purpose of the Christian Church in the past has been the salvation of individuals. But the most pressing task of the present is not individualistic. Our business is to make over an antiquated and immoral economic system; to get rid of laws, customs, maxims, and philosophies inherited from an evil and despotic past; to create just and brotherly relations between great groups and classes of society. . . . The Christian Church in the past has taught us to do our work with our eyes fixed on another world and a life to come. But the business before us is concerned with refashioning the present world, making this earth clean and sweet and habitable.”

22. Lloyd, ed., The Two Faces of Liberalism, pp. 103, 161, 309.

23. See James Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Sidney Milkis, The Modern Presidency and the Transformation of the American Party System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

24. Quoted in Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, p. 279; Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, pp. 334–37.

25. Rosenman, ed., Public Papers and Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 volume, p. 585; Lloyd, ed., The Two Faces of Liberalism, p. 310.

26. Consider Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

27. “Is There a Jefferson on the Horizon?” New York Evening World, December 3, 1925, reprinted in Basil Rauch, ed., The Roosevelt Reader: Selected Speeches, Messages, Press Conferences, and Letters of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1957), pp. 43–47, at 47; Lloyd, ed., The Two Faces of Liberalism, p. 115. Cf. FDR’s speech at Columbus, Ohio, on August 20, 1932: “I believe that our industrial and economic system is made for individual men and women, and not individual men and women for the benefit of the system.” Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1938), pp. 684–92, at p. 680. By contrast, Wilson was cool toward Jefferson on account of his states’ rights views and penchant for abstract theory. Cf. Niels Aage Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson, 1875–1910 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 221–22, 237; and Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, pp. 104–5, 118, 174–76. Jefferson was, “though a great man, not a great American,” according to Wilson. “A Calendar of Great Americans,” in Pestritto, ed., Woodrow Wilson: The Essential Political Writings, p. 86. But cf. The New Freedom, p. 55, where he says the same thing about Hamilton.

28. Cf. Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, chs. 1–2.

29. Cf. ibid., pp. 5–10. The inaptness of Magna Carta to the American case was emphasized by Hamilton in Federalist 84: “It has been several times truly remarked that bills of rights are, in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgements of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince. Such was MAGNA CHARTA, obtained by the barons, swords in hand, from King John. . . . It is evident, therefore, that, according to their primitive signification, they have no application to constitutions, professedly founded upon the power of the people and executed by their immediate representatives and servants. Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain everything, they have no need of particular reservations.” The Federalist Papers, p. 512.

30. See the penetrating discussion in Eden, “On the Origins of the Regime of Pragmatic Liberalism,” pp. 106–9, 122–39.

31. The most notable instance is FDR’s discussion of the Court-packing plan. His claim was that government is “a three horse team provided by the Constitution to the American people so that their field may be ploughed. The three horses are, of course, the three branches of government,” he said in his Fireside Chat on March 9, 1937. “Two of the horses are pulling in unison today; the third is not. . . . It is the American people themselves who expect the third horse to pull in unison with the other two.” Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937 volume, pp. 123–24; cf. p. 116. In his view, American government is purely a matter of power, horsepower in fact! The judicial, legislative, and executive powers do not have distinctive qualities that need to be respected and combined in republican government.

32. Eden, “On the Origins of the Regime of Pragmatic Liberalism,” pp. 106–9, 122–39.

33. Roosevelt, “New Conditions Impose New Requirements upon Government and Those Who Conduct Government.” Campaign Address on Progressive Government at the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, September 23, 1932, in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, vol. 1, pp.742–55; “We Are Fighting to Save a Great and Precious Form of Government for Ourselves and the World,” Acceptance of the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, June 27, 1936, in Public Papers, vol. 5, pp. 230–35; Second Inaugural Address, “I See One-Third of a Nation Ill-Housed, Ill-Clad, Ill-Nourished,” January 20, 1937, in Public Papers, 1937 volume, pp. 1–5.

34. See the excellent discussion in Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Founders (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), ch. 2.

35. For “war against poverty,” see his Radio Address to the 1940 Democratic National Convention, July 19, 1940, in Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1940 volume, pp. 293–302.

36. For further evidence of economic contradictions in New Deal policies, see Burton Folsom Jr., New Deal or Raw Deal? (New York: Threshold Editions, 2008), and Jim Powell, FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (New York: Crown Forum, 2003).

37. The classic statement is Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 166–217.

38. See the excellent discussions in Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), ch. 2; and Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., “Responsibility Versus Self-Expression,” in Robert A. Licht, ed., Old Rights and New (Washington: AEI Press, 1993), pp. 96–111. On natural rights and the virtues, ancient and modern, see Mark Blitz, Duty Bound: Responsibility and American Public Life (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

39. So far as I know, FDR never claimed that the new rights were natural rights. Something like this claim was raised by a few American political scientists influenced by the Hegelian school. For example, Theodore D. Woolsey, the long-serving president of Yale College, in his Political Science or the State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886), vol. 1, ch. 1, sec. 11: “We mean then by natural rights those which, by fair deduction from the present physical, moral, social, religious characteristics of man, he must be invested with, and which he ought to have realized for him in a jural society, in order to fulfill the ends to which his nature calls him.” Woolsey contrasts this definition with the “heathenish” sense of natural rights arising from the “uncontrolled liberties” of man in the state of nature. Socioeconomic rights, in Roosevelt’s sense, were discussed by some Progressives but with nothing like the prominence and the Jeffersonian perfume he gave them. Consider, e.g., Walter Weyl, The New Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1914), p. 161: “The inner soul of our new democracy is not the unalienable rights, negatively and individualistically interpreted, but those same rights . . . extended and given a social interpretation.” When so interpreted, they become “public trusts.”

40. Roosevelt, “New Conditions Impose New Requirements Upon Government and Those Who Conduct Government,” ibid.

41. Quoted in Folsom, New Deal or Raw Deal?, p. 35. See in general Folsom, ch. 3; Peter Temin, Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Gene Smiley, Rethinking the Great Depression (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2002); and Richard Vedder, “Explaining the Great Depression,” Claremont Review of Books 10, no. 2 (Spring 2010), pp. 44–48. The economic data on underconsumption are analyzed with devastating effect in Thomas B. Silver, Coolidge and the Historians (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1982), pp. 124–36.

42. Folsom, New Deal or Raw Deal?, ch. 10; and on the inherent barriers to redistribution, see Voegeli, Never Enough, ch. 3.

43. See Howard Zinn, ed., New Deal Thought (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. xvii.

44. Cf. Voegeli, Never Enough, pp. 97–102.

45. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 414–15; quotation at 415.

46. Roosevelt would never count on such motives alone, of course. Hence his famous remark on requiring every worker to pay Social Security tax on every paycheck: Those taxes “are political all the way through,” he said, because “with those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.” Quoted in Folsom, New Deal or Raw Deal?, p. 117.

47. Irving Kristol, “Ten Years in a Tunnel,” in Frisch and Diamond, eds., The Thirties, pp. 20–24. James MacGregor Burns looked forward to a Children’s Bill of Rights as well as an Artists’ Bill of Rights, for example. See James MacGregor Burns and Stewart Burns, A People’s Charter: The Pursuit of Rights in America (New York: Vintage, 1993).

48. Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937 volume, p. 135.

Chapter 4: Lyndon B. Johnson and the Politics of Meaning

1. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pp. 36-37; Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964–1980 (Roseville, CA: Prima, 2001), p. xxx.

2. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pp. 29–32. His “Sixties” extended well beyond the decade, which was not unusual.

3. Ibid., pp. 31, 34–35.

4. Ibid., pp. 27, 38, 155, 224–25, 253.

5. Hayward, The Age of Reagan, p. xxiv.

6. Richard N. Goodwin, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), pp. 258, 269–70.

7. William E. Leuchtenburg, “Lyndon Johnson in the Shadow of FDR,” in The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism, ed. Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), pp. 185-213, at 185, 204-05; Goodwin, Remembering America, p. 259.

8. Lyndon B. Johnson, Special Message to the Congress Proposing a Nationwide War on the Sources of Poverty, March 16, 1964, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26109#axzz1oOQAXaMV; Remarks at the University of Michigan, May 22, 1964, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26262#axzz1oOQAXaMV. Milkis, “Lyndon Johnson, The Great Society, and the Modern Presidency,” in Milkis and Mileur, ibid., pp. 1–49, at 7, 9–11, 40.

9. Johnson, Remarks at the University of Michigan, May 22, 1964.

10. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Coping: Essays on the Practice of Government (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 8; Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action and the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1969), p. 99; emphasis in the original, as quoted in Hayward, The Age of Reagan, pp. 11, 17. Samuel Beer quoted in Milkis, “Lyndon Johnson . . . ,” p. 29.

11. Johnson, Remarks at the University of Michigan, May 22, 1964; Goodwin, Remembering America, pp. 278–81.

12. Johnson, Remarks at the University of Michigan, May 22, 1964; Goodwin, Remembering America, pp. 425–26; Milkis, “Lyndon Johnson . . . ,” p.33.

13. Johnson, Remarks at the University of Michigan, May 22, 1964; Goodwin, Remembering America, pp. 425–26; Milkis, “Lyndon Johnson,” p. 33.

14. Goodwin, Remembering America, p. 426; Johnson, Special Message to the Congress Proposing a Nationwide War on the Sources of Poverty, March 16, 1964. Cf. Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), p. 242.

15. Richard T. Ely, Social Aspects of Christianity, and Other Essays, new and enlarged ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1889), pp. 123–24.

16. Simon N. Patten, The New Basis of Civilization, p. 208.

17. William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper Perennial, 1963), p. 345; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 446–84.

18. Goodwin, Remembering America, pp. 272–78.

19. See Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, (New York: Knopf, 2002) pp. 136–38, 587, 589–90.

20. See Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, pp. 161–72.

21. Hayward, The Age of Reagan, pp. 82–85.

22. Johnson, Commencement Address at Howard University: To Fulfill These Rights, June 4, 1965.

23. Hayward, The Age of Reagan, p. 86.

24. Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., “The Legacy of the Late Sixties,” in Stephen Macedo, ed., Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 21–45, at 42–43.

25. Hayward, The Age of Reagan, pp. 87–95.

26. See John Adams Wettergreen, “Bureaucratizing the American Government,” in Gordon S. Jones and John A. Marini, eds., The Imperial Congress: Crisis in the Separation of Powers (New York: Pharos Books, 1988), ch. 3.

27. Hayward, The Age of Reagan, p. 7. See Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States (New York: Norton, 2009); Morris Fiorina, Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); John Marini, The Politics of Budget Control: Congress, The Presidency, and the Growth of the Administrative State (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1992).

28. Hayward, The Age of Reagan, p. 67.

29. The Port Huron Statement, in Kramnick and Lowi, ibid., pp. 1290-1301, at 1290-96. Cf. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 194-216.

30. Cf. Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom, pp. 95-96.

31. See Mary Parker Follett, The New State (New York: Longman, Green, 1918), p. 138.

32. Hugh Heclo, “Sixties Civics,” in Milkis and Mileur, ibid., pp. 53-82, at 54-55, 64-65, 69, 71.

33. Jimmy Carter, Speech on Energy Policy and National Goals, July 15, 1979, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=32596&st=&st1=#axzzlpVsf889c.

Chapter 5: Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism

1. Athena Jones, “Obama: Change Comes from Me,” MSNBC, November 26, 2008; Remarks in Columbia, Missouri, October 30, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=84665&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Bret Stephens, “Is Obama Smart?” Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904140604576495932704234052.html; Sarah Parnass, “Obama Biography: ‘I’m LeBron, Baby,’ ” ABC News, June 13, 2011, at http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/06/obama-biography-im-lebron-baby/; Interview with Steve Kroft, 60 Minutes, CBS, December 9, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57341024/interview-with-president-obama-the-full-transcript/.

2. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, pp. 45–67. See also James W. Ceaser, Glen Thurow, Jeffrey Tulis, and Joseph M. Bessette, “The Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11, no. 2 (Spring 1981), pp. 158–171.

3. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, pp. 27–59, 95–116, 189–202.

4. Wilson, “Cabinet Government,” in Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, volume 5 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 389–90, and vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 500, and “Leaders of Men,” quoted in Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, pp. 126, 129–30.

5. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address, “I See-One-Third of a Nation Ill-Housed, Ill-Clad, Ill-Nourished,” January 20, 1937, in Rosenman, ed., Public Papers and Addresses, 1937 volume, pp. 1–5; Bill Clinton, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1997, http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres65.html; Obama, Commencement Address at Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, June 4, 2005, at http://obamaspeeches.com/019-Knox-College-Commencement-Obama-Speech.htm.

6. The scientific study of divine and human political visions reached its peak in the Middle Ages. See the discussion of prophecy in Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, vols. 1–2, trans. Schlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

7. The verses come from O’Shaughnessy’s “Ode,” in his collection Music and Moonlight (1874). The whole poem, a celebration of poets and dreamers as the legislators of mankind, is worth reading.

8. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, in Rosenman, ed., Public Papers and Addresses, vol. 1, pp. 11–16.

9. Article II, section 1, of the Constitution begins: “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

10. See Clinton L. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), chs. 16–18.

11. See Obama, Remarks Following the Iowa Caucuses, January 3, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76232&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Remarks Following the New Hampshire Primary, January 8, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=62272&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36.

12. Obama, Dreams from My Father, p. xvii. Much light has been shed on the fictional strains in the book by David Remnick’s biographical researches in The Bridge and by Stanley Kurtz’s in his Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (New York: Threshold Editions, 2010).

13. Ezra Klein, “Obama’s Gift,” January 4, 2008, http://prospect.org/article/obamas-gift.

14. Obama, “Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on Job Growth,” September 8, 2011, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=96661&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36.

15. As William Kristol pointed out, the military “weeds out those not up to the task” and imposes “tough and demanding training,” not to mention “fitness and discipline and good character.” Military life is therefore quite unlike modern liberalism. “But welfare state liberalism is all about scratching each other’s backs; nanny state liberalism is all about rubbing each other’s backs; and entitlement state liberalism is all about stroking each other’s backs. None is about protecting each other’s backs—let alone driving away our enemies and turning around bravely to face the future.” William Kristol, “Obama: Follow the Example of the Military?,” January 25, 2012, http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-follow-military-example_618484.html.

16. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., “What Obama Isn’t Saying,” Weekly Standard, February 8, 2010.

17. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes that in a democracy “no law is ever final, no battle truly finished.” James Kloppenberg comments, “which is why philosophical pragmatism and deliberative democracy go hand in hand. Principled partisans of pragmatism and democracy are committed to debate, experimentation, and the critical reassessment of results”—except when they’re not. Or perhaps Obama is not as pragmatic as he and Kloppenberg think. James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 169–70.

18. Obama is presumably dating the goal of national health care to its mention in the Progressive Party platform of 1912.

19. Obama, Remarks to the American Medical Association National Conference in Chicago, Illinois, June 15, 2009, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=86285&st=&st1=#axzz1mEsej8iI; Remarks at a Virtual Town Hall and a Question-and-Answer Session on Health Care Reform in Annandale, Virginia, July 1, 2009, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=86368&st=&st1=#axzz1mEsej8iI.

20. See, e.g., Sally C. Pipes, The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare (Washington: Regnery Books, 2012) and The Truth About Obamacare (Washington: Regnery Books, 2010); Grace-Marie Turner, James C. Capretta, Thomas P. Miller, and Robert E. Moffit, Why Obamacare is Wrong for America (New York: Broadside Books, 2011); and preceding Obamacare but still relevant, David Gratzer, The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care (New York: Encounter Books, 2008), and Regina Herzlinger, Who Killed Health Care? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007).

21. Obama, Remarks on House of Representatives Passage of Health Care Reform Legislation, March 21, 2010, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=87654#axzz1lvulJr36.

22. Nancy Pelosi, Remarks at the 2010 Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties, March 9, 2010, http://www.democraticleader.gov/news/speeches?id=0249; David Cho et al., “Lawmakers Guide Dodd-Frank bill for Wall Street Reform into Homestretch,” June 26, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/25/AR2010062500675_pf.html; Chris Good, “Baucus Defends Health Care, Didn’t Read the Entire Bill,” August 25, 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/08/baucus-defends-health-care-didnt-read-the-entire-bill/62030/.

23. John Adams Wettergreen, “Bureaucratizing the American Government,” ibid.

24. As noted above, Obama was originally opposed to the individual mandate. A friendly observer hailed his pragmatic statesmanship: “Offering an ambitious health care plan, he would not require adults to purchase health insurance. His goal is to make health care available, not to force people to buy it—a judgment that reflects Obama’s commitment to freedom of choice, his pragmatic nature (an enforcement question: Would those without health care be fined or jailed?), and his desire to produce a plan that might actually obtain a consensus.” Cass R. Sunstein, “The Empiricist Strikes Back,” New Republic, September 10, 2008. Hadley Arkes argues trenchantly that the deepest objections to the president’s health care law arise from its violations of natural rights, in “Natural Rights Trump Obamacare, or Should,” First Things, December 2011, pp. 41–46.

25. Cf. George F. Will, “Government by the ‘Experts,’ ” Washington Post, June 10, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/government-by-the-experts/2011/06/09/AGpU1KPH_story.html.

26. See Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1992).

27. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, p. 53.

28. Lincoln, Letter to H. L. Pierce and Others, April 6, 1859, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), vol. 3, p. 376; Jefferson, Letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, and Letter to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 1501, 1517. For a commentary, see Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), ch. 2.

29. Cf. Steven Hayward, “The Liberal Republicanism of Gordon Wood,” Claremont Review of Books 7, no. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 27–30; and Kloppenberg, Reading Obama, pp. 41–44, 52–54. See Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), and for his second thoughts, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993).

30. Obama, “A Hope to Fulfill,” Remarks of Senator Barack Obama at the National Press Club, April 26, 2005, http://obamaspeeches.com/014-National-Press-Club-Obama-Speech.htm; Remarks Following the Wisconsin Primary, February 19, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76558&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Remarks in St. Paul, Minnesota, Claiming the Democratic Presidential Nomination Following the Montana and South Dakota Primaries, June 3, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=77409&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on the State of the Union, January 24, 2012, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=99000#axzz1lvulJr36; Kloppenberg, Reading Obama, pp. 89–110, 139–40.

31. Obama, Comments at Presidential Debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, October 7, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=84482&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36.

32. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pp. 55, 92.

33. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, p. 95.

34. Obama, “A More Perfect Union”: Address at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, March 18, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76710&st=&st1=#axzz1lvulJr36; cf. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama, p. 209, and cf. 212: “When Wright froze American racism into a fixed feature of the national culture, he was betraying two principles Obama embraced: democracy and historicism.”

35. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama, pp. 209–12.

36. Ibid., pp. 78–80.

37. Martin Luther King, Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet Classic, 2000; orig. ed., 1963), pp. 70–72, 76–77. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, p. 93.

38. Obama, “A More Perfect Union”: Address at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, March 18, 2008; Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pp. 93–96. Obama echoes, and radicalizes, Woodrow Wilson’s distinction between the Founders as time-bound theorists and as competent statesmen.

39. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pp. 97–98.

40. Ibid., p. 98.

41. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

42. See, for example, Walter Russell Mead, “Beyond the Blue Part One: The Crisis of the American Dream,” American Interest, January 29, 2012, http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/01/29/beyond-blue-part-one-the-crisis-of-the-american-dream/.

43. Yuval Levin, “Beyond the Welfare State,” National Affairs, Spring 2011, pp. 21–38, 30, 32.

44. Clive Crook, “A Tainted Victory,” Atlantic, March 22, 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/03/a-tainted-victory/37811. Quoted in William Voegeli, Never Enough, foreword to the paperback edition (New York: Encounter Books, 2012).