We’ve been
looking at Woodrow Wilson and his role in eliminating the vestiges of what was
once known as “Lincoln Republicanism,” i.e.,
a political philosophy that viewed government as being of the people, by the people,
and for the people. The Progressive
Party was pretty much the last gasp of the type of Republicanism that replaced
the Whig Party and ran Abraham Lincoln for president back in the day.
Underscoring
this, we recently came across an article from December 1854 in a Democratic
Party journal, The United States Review,
“Whig Principles: What’s Left of Them.”
It was clear that the Whig Party was on the skids and the only way to go
was down further. There was no
disagreement on that point among either Whigs or Democrats. The Democrats were a trifle snarky about how
they said it, but the fact itself was beyond dispute.
The problem came
in with what they viewed as the causes of the Whig downfall. The article listed eight:
·
Protectionism
·
Socialism
·
Prohibition
·
Vegetarianism
·
Woman’s Rights
·
Spiritualism
·
Abolition of Black
Slavery [emphasis in original]
·
Isms in General
Of these alleged
causes of the downfall of the Whigs, the only substantive ones were
protectionism and abolition of slavery.
The others were straw men intended to make the Whig stand on the
abolition of slavery look as ridiculous as socialism, prohibition,
vegetarianism, women’s rights, and spiritualism allegedly were. The fact that these things were not really
Whig political doctrines, and that at least as many Democrats held the same or
similar opinions, was conveniently ignored.
Protectionism
versus free trade was dismissed in a few short sentences with the observation
that no one with any sense or sanity opposed free trade. Socialism — which the Whig Party opposed, by
the way — was analyzed in some depth with a high degree of accuracy. The only problem was that Whigs as a party
condemned socialism, while many Whigs as well as Democrats supported it
personally.
The real issue,
of course, was slavery. Every argument
was trotted out, whether states’ rights, the natural inferiority of blacks,
economic necessity, threats of violence from abolitionists, the claim that
black slaves were better treated than Northern factory workers, etc., etc., etc.
What the article
particularly ridiculed, however, was the claim that “the negro” is as fully
human as a White (for some reason, “the negro” was never capitalized, but
“Blacks” and “Whites” were). As the
article put it, “the negro” is “[m]ost certainly not [emphasis in original] — ‘most certainly and aromatically not’ cry all who have susceptible
olfactories in whatever part of the world” (apparently “the negro” was presumed
to stink at least as much as this argument), and so on (and on, and on, blah,
blah).
 |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. |
Any arguments to
the contrary (Uncle Tom’s Cabin was
mentioned twice) were “very cooly” dismissed and thrown out the window as
unworthy of consideration. The fact
remained firmly locked in the mind of the slave owner — and this was the real
argument — that the economic survival of the United States depended on
slavery. Period. No other factor had any weight whatsoever.
So what has this precis of Democratic policy in 1854 got to do with
Democratic policy in 1912? Quite a lot,
actually. Woodrow Wilson’s philosophy of
government of increasing State power as much as possible was, in essence, no
different from that of the antebellum slaveowner who believed that economic
necessity and the natural inferiority of the lower classes of all colors
mandated increasing the power of the slaveowner as much as possible.
Even commentators
favorable to Wilson are not able to put a positive spin on his style of
leadership, although they speak of it (and of Wilson) in glowing terms, e.g., “genius,” “brilliant,” “incomparable.”
The language brings to mind the manner in which historians and other experts
speak of the Tudors.
 |
| Albert Sidney Burleson |
With the possible
exception of its founder, Henry VII, the Tudor dynasty had a fatal
susceptibility to flattery. They combined this with a talent for imposing
sweeping social changes to gain personal ends to the detriment of civil,
domestic, and religious society. The effect, if not the intended goal, was to
bring everything under the control of the State. The new economic magnates who
displaced the old aristocracy in turn controlled the State.
Flattery allowed
others to manipulate the Tudors virtually at will. The power of these others
was, in many cases, derived from their growing wealth, often based on a
redistribution of “the patrimony of the poor” confiscated from the Catholic
Church.
The similarity to
Wilson is striking. As Arthur Link noted in his book on the Wilson
administration,
Wilson’s temperament put a heavy strain on his administrative
talents. Because he valued loyalty and flattery over hardheaded frankness and
cold and sometimes unpleasant logic, his advisers either told him what they
thought he wanted to hear or else remained silent.
Soon after the
inauguration, Albert Sidney Burleson (1863-1937), the new Postmaster General,
subverted Wilson’s minimal reforming zeal. Burleson, “a superb professional
politician,” easily persuaded Wilson that the support of the old Democratic
reactionaries in Congress was much more valuable than what could be mustered by
the progressives and populists who, led by Bryan, had gotten Wilson elected
over Roosevelt.
 |
| Robert Lansing |
In short, Wilson
was guided by personal faith rather than reason, his own subjective will rather
than the objective intellect. This took the form of a supreme confidence in his
own infallibility, a mark of modernists and positivists in every age. As Robert
Lansing (1864-1928), who replaced Bryan as Secretary of State, related in his
diary,
When one comes to consider Mr. Wilson’s mental processes,
there is the feeling that intuition rather than reason played the chief part in
the way he reached conclusions and judgments. In fact arguments, however
soundly reasoned, did not appeal to him if they were opposed to his feeling of
what was the right thing to do. Even established facts were ignored if they did
not fit in with this intuitive sense, this semi-divine power to select the
right. . . . In the case of Mr. Wilson, it explains many things in his public
career, which are otherwise very perplexing.
In the first place it gave a superior place to his own
judgment. With him it was a matter of conviction formed without weighing
evidence and without going through the process of rational deduction. His
judgments were always right in his own mind, because he knew that they were
right. How did he know that they were right? Why he knew it and that was
the best reason in the world. No other was necessary.
 |
| Louis Freeland Post |
Nothing could
better illustrate Wilson’s concept of government and the role of the State —
and of the direction in which the country was heading. As ordinary people lost
not only capital ownership, but any hope of access to the means of acquiring
and possessing property in capital, the wealthy élite were able to control more and more of everyday life, whether
directly through their virtual monopoly on wage system jobs, or indirectly
through their control of the State. Significantly, Louis Freeland Post
(1849-1928), Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of Labor, was a georgist.
The plant that
took root in America with the Dred Scott case was now bearing its inevitable
fruit. All rights were assumed to be inherent in the State, which doled them
out to people as those in power saw fit or as they found expedient.
We have already
noted that, as is manifest from his doctoral thesis, Wilson derived his
political philosophy from that of Walter Bagehot. What many people may not
sufficiently appreciate is the degree to which Bagehot’s philosophy, both
political and economic, derived from that of the totalitarian political
philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes has
usually been considered as the chief proponent of the divine right of kings. It
is, however, more accurate to describe Hobbes’s philosophy as the divine right
of the State, with the State itself
construed, in Hobbes’s term, as a “Mortall God” (Hobbes’s spelling).
 |
| Thomas Hobbes |
To Hobbes, the
specific form of government is ultimately irrelevant. If sovereignty is vested
in a king, the king rules by divine right. If power is vested in parliament,
then that body rules by the same justification. Presidents, dictators, first
citizens, emperors — it does not matter what they are called, as long as they
have power; power is self-justifying.
To Hobbes,
government must be based not on consent of the governed, but on force. This is
because most people understand only coercion. Fear of punishment is what holds
society together. The State is held together by the strongest, whose will all
others must accept. All other forms of society, including Church and the Family,
are subsumed into the State, for there is no meaningful distinction between “the
State” and “society.”
Resistance to
authority can never be justified; the will of the sovereign, like that of the
slaveowner, is the supreme law of the land. All sovereignty is vested in
government, whatever specific form that government takes, not in the people.
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