My friend and colleague Charles Coulombe, a writer familiar to this website’s regular visitors, will attest that in 1992 when Bill Clinton was first elected, I predicted to him that nobody better would become President in the future. In other words, the future was bleak in that regard. Sure enough, Clinton has been succeeded by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both of them chosen by voters not once but twice, as was Clinton himself. Now we seem fated to get Clinton’s wife for President in 2016.
The prediction I voiced to Coulombe was no real prediction. It was based on the simple understanding that a people who would choose such a one as Bill Clinton as their leader were already so sunk in moral squalor that their electing somebody better afterward was no more likely than that a ruling class, once they have lost belief in their right to rule, will continue to do so. Nothing short of the conversion of the people could change the picture, and men convert, generally speaking, only one soul at a time. It may have been different when the conversion of a king would be followed by the conversion of his people, as a father’s conversion will be followed by that of his family, but there aren’t many kings around these days.
Actually there is nothing new about Americans choosing as President a man who would lead the country in directions no country should go, and then choosing him again. The supreme example is Woodrow Wilson, first elected in 1912 and reelected in 1916. If there is another single individual more responsible than he for the shape today of the United States, its political institutions and American society, it is hard to think of who it could be. Consider some of what came to pass during his time in office, all of it with his active support.
The Federal Reserve was established, giving private bankers a stranglehold on the nation’s financial and economic life and laying the foundation for today’s symbiosis of Big Money, Big Business and Big Government; a graduated income tax was introduced, an indispensable step, according to Marx, toward socialism (although in practice it always weighs less heavily on a nation’s elite); the popular election of U.S. senators was begun (they were formerly chosen by state legislatures); women were given the vote (leaving it aside that the republic’s Founders envisioned a limited franchise, not a universal one, the push for women’s suffrage was simply the driving wedge of a larger movement for so-called women’s rights, among which is now embedded in law the “right” of a woman to kill her preborn babies); Jim Crow laws were rigidly enforced, producing a racial divide that not even the civil rights revolution of the 1960s could bridge and that is becoming less acute only now as one side of it disappears, the nation’s whites contracepting and aborting themselves out of existence; the ground was prepared for Prohibition, precursor, though the thing itself was repealed, of today’s nanny state.
What drove Wilson? What was he like? In politics he was a Democrat and a “progressive”. If his racist bent seems to belie his progressivism, the fact is that nobody in the leadership of any faction of American politics, progressive or otherwise, was concerned with civil rights for African-Americans in 1912. Besides, Wilson also despised recently naturalized citizens. The majority were still European but no longer Protestant as had been most earlier immigrants. They “have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life,” he said.
As for the man, he was austere, aloof, cold. He had no real friends and wanted none. He felt no need for them. He was sufficient unto himself, and when it came to what he wanted there wasn’t much difference between his self and God. “Self-righteous” is what we usually call persons who think they have an inside track to God, but on this score a recent biographer goes so far as to describe Wilson as possibly “unhinged” (A. Scott Berg, Wilson). On the night of his election victory in 1912 he declared to his campaign manager: “I wish it clearly understood that I owe you nothing. God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal could have prevented that.”
Given his view of himself (and his relation to God) it is hardly surprising that Wilson would never feel bound by a constitution. As he acknowledged privately when elected governor of New Jersey two years before becoming President, “I shall not be a constitutional governor because there is one thing a man has to obey over and above the State constitution, and that is his own constitution.” So it was that when he ran for President, he preached a “New Freedom” the way Obama incanted “Change”. It would be freedom from the constraints of the U.S. Constitution.
He preferred England’s unwritten one. Indeed, he preferred all things English, expressing the wish to his wife, before he went into politics, that they could live in the island nation. His anglophilia was intense.
If that led him at the end of his life to choose the Episcopalian so-called National Cathedral in Washington for his final resting place, it also had its role in his doing the worst thing he did as President: lead the U.S. into the European civil war that became the First World War, or Great War, once the U.S. was involved. That was in April, 1917, after being reelected the previous November on the slogan “He kept us out of war.”
It wasn’t that the war was unpopular when it was declared. Americans were as enthusiastic for it as Europeans had been when it began for them in 1914, and as Americans more recently would be again (we now forget) when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.
The spark that lit the war was the assassination by a Serbian terrorist in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, one hundred years ago this month, of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Everybody knows that. What most fail to notice (as if they would care!) is that when the war resulted in the dissolution of the Empire, it meant the extinction of the world’s last Catholic world power. That dissolution was demanded by Wilson as a condition for peace. Why did he demand it?
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, author and National Review columnist when the magazine was worth reading, offered a brief explanation in his book Leftism Revisited. (I quoted his words on this website on another occasion, but they bear repeating.) To the liberal, anglophile Wilson “Austria was far more wicked than Germany. It existed in contradiction of the Mazzinian principle of the national state, it had inherited many traditions as well as symbols from the Holy Roman Empire (double-headed eagle, black-gold colors, etc.); its dynasty had once ruled over Spain (another bête noire); it had led the Counter-Reformation, headed the Holy Alliance, fought against the Risorgimento, suppressed the Magyar rebellion under Kossuth (who had a monument in New York City), and morally supported the monarchical experiment in Mexico – the very name evoked memories of Roman Catholicism, of the Armada, the Inquisition, Metternich, Lafayette jailed at Olmutz, and Silvio Pellico in Brunn’s Spielberg fortress. Such a state had to be shattered, such a dynasty had to disappear.”
Perhaps I can be even briefer than Kuehnelt-Leddihn: As a Catholic world power, the Empire was a power that would continue to impede the worldwide spread of liberalism. Its extinction was necessary in order (in Wilson’s own famous phrase) to “make the world safe for democracy.”
Three footnotes: 1) Chivalry was still alive in 1914. When Austria and Serbia went to war, the chief of staff of the Serbian army was vacationing at a spa in Austria. Emperor Franz-Josef provided his personal railway car so the general could quickly and comfortably get home to take command of his troops. It’s a detail of World War I, at its beginning, that speaks volumes.
2) There are persons who see the Virginia-born Wilson, especially on account of his racism, as the product of his Southern upbringing. The man repudiated his heritage. “I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy!” he proclaimed when a student at Virginia Law School in 1879.
3) I said we seem fated to get Hillary Clinton for President in 2016. I know there are good folks who convince themselves every four years that the country’s downward spiral will be arrested with the next election, that somehow a majority of voters will be persons like themselves who will see the need for a President who will “turn the country around.” One year they fantasized Pat Buchanan making it to the White House. More recently it was Ron Paul. The vessel into which most of them probably pour their hopes at this time is Rand Paul. I see him quite simply as sounding too serious about reducing the size of government and halting our foreign interventions for him to be allowed the GOP nomination. As for other possibilities, Chris Christie is finished. Marco Rubio would come off looking like a little boy on the debate stage with Hillary. As for Jeb Bush, who should have been President instead of his brother, the brother’s smirk is still too vivid a memory for that dynasty to prevail over the Clinton one. Hillary will be a perfect successor to Woodrow Wilson on the one hundredth anniversary of his reelection.
