The real radical

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

The theme of last week’s Democratic Convention was that this election is a choice, forward in a [mildly] progressive direction or backward to the policies of the most recent Republican administration which led the nation into ruinous wars and financial catastrophe.

The choice, however, is even more stark than that. Conservatives aren’t aiming just for a replay of the bad old days of George W. Bush. They want to take the country much, much further back.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from the pen of a reputed moderate and erudite conservative: George F. Will. Anticipating that in his acceptance speech President Barack Obama would attack GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan as a [right-wing] radical hell-bent on eliminating every social program, from Social Security to Medicare, Will attempted a preemptive strike in a column in which he denounces Obama as “The Real Radical” (The Washington Post, September 5).

What makes Will’s column instructive (and distinguishes it from the ranting of the lunatic right-wing fringe that claims Obama is a Kenyan socialist Muslim wolf in sheep’s clothing who will expose his fangs once he wins a second term and does not have to face the electorate ever again) is what it reveals about how deeply reactionary is the mindset of even the most Establishment, bow-tied, blow dried contemporary conservatives.

For Will’s beef is not just with Obama but with the whole strand in American politics that he brands as “progressive” and that harkens back a full century to the presidency of that notorious leftist and fountainhead of American radicalism: President Woodrow Wilson!
In Will’s version of American history, there have been four progressive presidents who have, in essence, betrayed the Constitution by extending the reach of government beyond the limits the Founders intended: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama.

Will grounds his critique on the work of someone he identifies as “a distinguished political philosopher,” Charles Kesler of Claremont McKenna (who has ever heard of Kesler or Claremont McKenna, which sounds more like a law firm than an academic institution?), author of “I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism.”   

Will writes that “Progress, as progressives understand it, means advancing away from, up from, something. But from what?

“From the Constitution’s constricting anachronisms. In 1912, Wilson said, ‘“The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of governmental power.’” But as Kesler notes, Wilson never said the future of liberty consisted of such limitation.

“Instead, he said, ‘“every means. . . by which society may be perfected through the instrumentality of government”’ should be used so that ‘“individual rights can be fitly adjusted and harmonized with public duties.”’

What in the world is wrong with that? The Constitution is an enduring and remarkable blueprint for governance. But from the outset the Founders themselves implicitly rejected a view of the Constitution akin to the fundamentalists’ attitude toward the Bible as the literal word of God, a fetish never to be revised or reinterpreted in accordance with public sentiments or changing times.

Thus the first thing the Founders did with the Constitution was to change it by immediately adding not one but ten amendments: The Bill of Rights. And surely a nation founded on the proposition, in Jefferson’s words, “that all men are created equal,” but saddled with a Constitution that, among other things, accepted slavery and counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning Congressional seats, was a nation in contradiction with itself.

Resolving that contradiction has been an uneven, slow and unfinished process, one driven almost exclusively by those progressives – themselves ridden with their own limitations and contradictions – which Will demonizes as betrayers of the country’s foundational text.

The Wikipedia entry for Woodrow Wilson – controlling for a century’s worth of change, for instance substituting same-sex marriage for women’s suffrage and immigration reform for racial segregation – reads remarkably like what could be written about Barack Obama:     

“In his first term as President, Wilson persuaded a Democratic Congress to pass major progressive reforms. Historian John M. Cooper argues that, in his first term, Wilson successfully pushed a legislative agenda that few presidents have equaled, and remained unmatched up until the New Deal. This agenda included the Federal Reserve Act,Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act and an income tax. Child labor was curtailed by the Keating–Owen Act of 1916, but the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1918. He also had Congress pass the Adamson Act, which imposed an 8-hour workday for railroads. Wilson, after first sidestepping the issue, became a major advocate for the women’s suffrage. Although Wilson promised African Americans ‘fair dealing…in advancing the interests of their race in the United States’ the Wilson administration implemented a policy of segregation for federal employees. His administration initiated a requirement of attaching applicant photographs to federal job applications. The practice aided in discrimination and it was finally ended in 1940.”

But the kill shot that demolishes Will’s argument and exposes the deeply reactionary path to which his logic leads is this question: Why start the progressive tradition to which Obama is allegedly heir with Woodrow Wilson? All of Wilson’s progressive reforms, plus FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and Obama’s reform of health care combined pale in comparison with the most momentous transgression by the federal government against the “limiting anachronisms” of the Constitution: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Thus, following Will’s categories and logic, the real, foundational radical in American history is not Wilson, who came to the presidency of the United States via the presidency of elite Princeton University. The first real radical president in American history, the genuine article, is Abraham Lincoln, the log cabin Republican. But even a real reactionary like George F. Will can’t afford to go there.