Roosevelt Republicans

...Unlike God, however, Wilson was so far short of omniscient that he did not even know the geography and demographics of one "country" he abstractly stitched together-Czechoslovakia...

...Republican statesmen do not have to think that the road to progress runs through whatever new Eden the latest White House manifesto or Washington think-tank study conjures up...

...He played designated savior in 1919, when a million Parisians chanted, "Wilson, Wilson," and French prime minister Georges Clemenceau said, "I do not think there has been anything like [Wilson's reception] in the history of the world...

...What's missing is an understanding of the crucial differences between the two presidents: Theodore Roosevelt would feel comfortable with parts of today's religious right, but Woodrow Wilson was an ancestor of the modern religious left...

...Marvin Olasky is professor at the University of Texas and senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation...

...Who dares fail to try...

...by satisfaction of inborn instincts...

...Dionne, that the choice is between reactionary fuddy-duddyism and the progressive impulse that took form during the presidencies of the two major Progressive Era presidents...

...He relished governmental action in specific circumstances but argued that "the sphere of the state's action should be extended very cautiously, and so far as possible only where it will not crush out healthy individual initiative...

...He devoted himself to defeating the growing socialist movement of his time by showing that "Socialists and others really do not correct the evils at all, or else only do so at the expense of producing others in aggravated form...

...He is author of Fighting for Liberty and Virtue and ten other books...

...But the greater loss came among the Democrats, who during the Wilson administration began their transition from a grounded awareness of the limitations of politics to an airy utopian progressivism in which even the sky was not the limit...

...Here's a typical TR comment, from 1906: "The Eighth Commandment reads: 'Thou shall not steal.' It does not read: 'Thou shall not steal from the rich man.' It does not read: 'Thou shall not steal from the poor man.' It reads simply and plainly: 'Thou shall not steal.'" President Roosevelt busted a few trusts that he thought were stealing, but he saw government-imposed redistribution of income also as stealing: "No good whatever will come from that warped and mock morality which denounces the misdeeds of men of wealth and forgets the misdeeds practiced at their expense...

...Theodore Roosevelt embodied Biblical progressivism, the belief that societies can improve when individuals, through God's grace, work together to contain evil...

...God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me...

...Roosevelt saw himself as a defender of order against chaos, rather than the creator of a new order...

...men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do...

...When those who dreamed of a welfare state asked him for support, Roosevelt chastised them for "mere sentimentality" and noted, "It is eminently desirable that we should none of us be hard-hearted, but it is no less desirable that we should not be soft-headed...

...Wilson, on the other hand, preached utopian pro-gressivism, most notably in his claim that World War I was the "war to end wars...

...I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men to my side...

...Franklin Roosevelt and every Democratic president since then have said the same, as have their journalistic camp-followers...

...to lift everything that concerns our life as a Nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man's conscience and vision of the right...

...There was not one progressivism...

...The Republican Roosevelt's emphasis on empowering individuals-on having government promote the general welfare but not provide welfare to all who demand it-is needed as much at the end of this century as it was at the beginning...

...Part of the problem is wanting to look good in the Washington Post, but part is miseducation...

...Like their me-too predecessors in the 60s and 70s, "conservatives" who are thoroughly modern millennialists seem unable to take an independent stand and stick to it...

...Wilson ended his second inaugural address in a furious burst: "Men's hearts wait upon us...

...like all sins in this life, it could not be stopped, merely contained...

...The Republican Roosevelt's speeches consistently showed an emphasis on a clear and concrete application of Biblical commandments, not a subjective morality...

...his refusal to compromise in the slightest doomed the effort to make the United States a League member...

...Wilson, however, styled himself a new messiah and argued that under his leadership a new age could commence virtually on demand...

...men's lives hang in the balance...

...The progressivism that emphasizes individual dedication to both liberty and virtue has at least as strong a claim to the name "progressive" as that which makes a god of Government...

...The Theodore Roosevelt school of progressivism challenges such political oversimplification...

...Two dueling progressivist political theories grew out of and accompanied these different ways of interpreting Scripture...

...Not wanting to appear insufficiently progressive as the year 2000 approaches, they say they want what Bill Clinton wants, but in a way kinder and gentler to budget constraints...

...With his hubris at its height, Wilson even claimed direct divine inspiration for the League of Nations agreement: It came about "by no plan of our conceiving but by the hand of God who had led us into this way...

...Such exegesis allowed Wilson to liken his own mood swings to God's will, so that he could ostentatiously announce when inaugurated that feelings swept across his "heartstrings like some air out of God's own presence...

...He gave Government a task that required omnipresence: "to purify and humanize every aspect of our common life...

...there were dueling progressivisms...

...Roosevelt also was bull-headed, but his sense of God's sovereignty let him be reasonably patient until 1912, when he led progressive followers out of Republicanism and into the short-lived and decidedly unblessed Progressive party, singing, "Onward, Christian Soldiers...

...Impotent Republicans accept the notion propounded most recently by the Post's E.J...

...What all this meant in practice is that Roosevelt paid attention to what was close-at-hand and looked for gradual progress...

...He saw socialism as the political manifestation of covetousness...

...Even when debates showed that the League covenant was not inspired, Wilson seemed to consider it inerrant...

...Who shall live up to the great trust...

...For example, one Wilson sermonette turned a statement by Jesus about the centrality of objective truth- John 6:63, "the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life"-into a celebration of personal subjectivity: "The 'spirit' spoken of in the text [is] . . . the spirit which translates all law into privilege...

...Wilson sneered privately at "orthodoxy," told his daughter that hell was only a "state of mind," and as president of Princeton regularly twisted Bible passages during chapel talks...

...Woodrow Wilson insisted that the choice was between his religious left progressivism and a reactionary spirit...

...Wilson's inadequate understanding did not keep him from speaking of the League of Nations conference in apocalyptic terms, or from refusing to compromise with the Senate afterwards...

...Woodrow Wilson, however, read the Bible through the lens of a "higher criticism...

...In his first inaugural address he prophesied a new freedom for administrators within "the great Government"-capital G, like God...