By Dan McLaughlin
Wednesday, February 04, 2026
First Things editor R. R. Reno made an unusual
choice recently to write an
ode of sorts to Woodrow Wilson. As the author of “The Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson” (an ongoing series), it is my sworn duty to respond.
But respond to what? As often seems to be the case with “postliberal”
arguments, Reno is vague and euphemistic in exactly how he wishes to present
Wilson as a role model other than to promote a general sentiment in favor of
strongman government. We need “solidarity,” he writes, and “our history has . .
. been marked by periods during which illiberal methods were employed to renew
and buttress solidarity,” a process in which “Woodrow Wilson played a central
role.” Wilson and FDR “sought to renew American solidarity, which required
taming and restraining certain kinds of freedom, especially freedom of
contract. (Roosevelt intimidated the Supreme Court to secure the overturning of
Lochner.) In a word, Wilson and FDR administered strong doses of
illiberalism.” This is, in unspecified ways, a good thing because the past gave
us the present, and this makes it good. And we ought therefore to repeat the
past:
We are living in a similar
period. Immigration, economic vulnerability, globalization—the American people
are anxious. Once again, a powerful, energetic executive presses against
liberal norms, as did Wilson and FDR. I don’t wish to commend any of the particular
measures taken by the present administration, although some strike me as wise
and necessary. My point is more fundamental. . . . We’ve been here before as a
nation, and we have had statesmen who addressed liberalism’s failures so that
the American ideals of liberty could be renewed and reshaped for new
circumstances. In 2026, we would do well to study the methods of Wilson and FDR
and weigh their achievements as well as failures. For we need something of
their innovation and daring to navigate our present crisis.
What methods of Wilson and FDR, other than intimidating
the Supreme Court with threats of Court-packing, does Reno have in mind? The
Palmer raids? Jailing dissenters? Segregating the federal government? Forcible
sterilizations? German and Japanese internment? Covering up the president’s
incapacitation? Or simply bureaucratic micromanagement of American commerce?
Reno’s account of Wilson’s “innovation” is not entirely
accurate. He allows that “conservatives accuse Wilson and Roosevelt of favoring
the direction of society from above, inaugurating an illiberal tyranny of
technocrats,” and “there’s something to these criticisms” given Wilson’s
academic writings attacking the American constitutional system. But, he assures
us, “when Wilson entered politics . . . he did not attain his goal by altering
the Constitution.” In a formal sense, this is untrue. The Constitution was
amended three times during Wilson’s presidency — plus a fourth, regarding the
income tax, being supported by Wilson and ratified after his election. Granted,
the direct election of senators also passed Congress in 1912, before Wilson
took office, and the last two (women’s suffrage and Prohibition) passed with
only tepid support from Wilson. But there is no question that the first two of
those amendments worked irrevocable structural changes to our system.
More to the point, Wilson and FDR changed the American
constitutional system less by formal amendment than by usurpations that the
judiciary and Congress either connived in or were cowed into accepting. The
vast administrative state, the great expansion of federal power, and the
shriveling of basic economic liberties against the federal leviathan resulted
in a government that would have been shocking to the people who wrote and
ratified the Constitution. By the end of the era of Wilson and FDR, the country was unrecognizable in many ways, and many American
traditions were put to rout. To imitate this is a species of envy utterly
unmoored from the sense of responsibility that we ought to feel toward what we
leave to our posterity.
Reno argues that “none of [Wilson’s] signal achievements
were reversed when Republicans assumed control of government in 1920.” While it
is sadly true that he succeeded in entrenching a lot of his economic policies,
there’s also some survivorship bias in defining Wilson’s “signal achievements”
only as those things that didn’t get undone. (Wilson himself considered the
League of Nations more important, and Congress repealed the Sedition Act of
1918 before he even left office.) And if we are going to regard Wilson as a
role model for Trump-era Republicans, it is worth noting that Wilson was able
to attain permanence for the income tax, the Federal Reserve, the Clayton
Antitrust Act, and the Federal Trade Commission because they were enacted into
law by Congress — not handed down by executive orders. Wilson’s abuses
of executive power were more easily undone by Warren G. Harding. Harding also
spent much of the first two years of his term dealing with the economic
wreckage (notably runaway inflation in the aftermath of a world war and a
pandemic) that Wilson left behind.
Choosing Wilson as a model also ignores the fact that the
American people hated Wilson’s works. He was elected in a three-way race
and never won a national popular majority. In 1918–20, Republicans gained 16
Senate seats, 87 House seats, and eleven governorships, dealt Democrats the
biggest margin of defeat in the history of the popular-vote era, and consigned
Wilson’s party to twelve years in the wilderness, from which nothing short of
the Great Depression could rescue them.
All of this, Reno appears to argue, was worth it because
Wilson offered more “solidarity” among Americans. Really? The Red Scare, a wave
of domestic terrorism, a huge upswing in lynchings and other racial violence
including the notorious attack on Tulsa’s Greenwood district, and the political
resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan all happened on or shortly after Wilson’s watch.
There was a reason why so many Americans flocked to Harding’s simple message of
restoring “normalcy.”
George Orwell understood why appeals to nebulous social values such as
“solidarity” are necessary to prop up what collectivism really looks like in
practice:
In our time, political speech and
writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things . . . can indeed be
defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face,
and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus
political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and
sheer cloudy vagueness. . . . Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name
things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some
comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say
outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good
results by doing so”. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
“While freely conceding that the
Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined
to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to
political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and
that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have
been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”
The inflated style is itself a
kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow,
blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.
The temptations of the strongman’s power, and his ability
to overawe the mere liberties of the ordinary citizen, will always be with us.
They will often come couched, as Orwell reminded us, in appeals to a high level
of theoretical generality. But that is all the more reason to resist them.
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