The State

"Today people like to call Barack Obama and Bill Clinton intellectual presidents. They aren’t, in comparison to the likes of Woodrow Wilson. He was a genius. He wrote this book, The State , as a young academic. It’s from a neglected and relatively radical period of his career. In the next decade, he took a much more conservative turn as president of Princeton. The book outlines a much more robust role for the executive branch and also what an activist state would look like. So you can see why Wilson has become the bête noire for Glenn Beck and the Tea Party. He wasn’t nearly as left wing as Teddy Roosevelt in his most progressive incarnation, but he is easier to demonise. He doesn’t have a stuffed animal named after him like Roosevelt . There is something distant and nerdy about him. Still, it’s ridiculous to hold him up as a poster child for socialism. He was criticised from the left for being a corporatist and he was criticised by the right for paving a path to socialism. But he actually represented a third way. If you want to trace American liberalism back to any sort of genesis, The State being published would be a good candidate. And if you want to trace it back to one politician, that politician is Wilson. Wilson racked up a lot of progressive accomplishments as governor of New Jersey. For instance, worker’s compensation. When he ran for president in 1912, his guru was Louis Brandeis, who advocated using antitrust laws to break up big business. As president, he created the Federal Trade Commission, he created the Federal Reserve Board, and he appointed Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. But the crucible of the Wilson administration was World War I. Progressives thought that the war presented a tremendous opportunity to remake the state as a much more active player in the economy and in society. The government grew tremendously during the war and progressives were installed in various new-fangled agencies. They thought that nationalism could be a vehicle for creating a liberal state, but instead they saw that the war unleashed animal spirits. There was hysteria and paranoia, labour and racial strife. A period of liberal disillusionment followed, during which the entire infrastructure that Wilson had managed to construct disappeared almost overnight. If you ask people “who was the quintessential liberal thinker?”, a lot of people would say “John Stuart Mill”. But when it comes to American liberalism, utilitarianism isn’t really that central. Pragmatism is a much bigger influence. Pragmatism was a political philosophy developed, largely at Harvard, by William James and John Dewey. Neither of those thinkers was heavily influenced by Mill."