Over the course of the last week, some of President Trump’s most ardent and vocal online supporters have engaged in a bit of cognitive dissonance, praising the former president for his foresight and wisdom in calling for a federalist solution to one of the nation’s most intractable problems while simultaneously singing the praises of the one man who likely did more than any other American to crush the nation’s federalist history and culture.
Specifically, President Trump called for the question of abortion to be handled by the states, for the federal government to relinquish its power over the issue and enable government at a level closer to the people to enact their wishes. This solution is problematic for a variety of reasons, including, most notably, the Founders’ declaration that “Governments are instituted among Men” to secure the rights embodied in the “self-evident” truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
That notwithstanding, Trump is almost certainly correct in arguing for a return to federalism to address many of the country’s most pressing and divisive issues. Not only was this the course agreed upon at the nation’s founding, but it also seems likely to be a sagacious solution to the ever-increasing threats posed by institutional “bigness”: Big Government, Big Business, Big Tech, Big Finance, etc. The growth of the federal state and the centralization of authority consequent to it—as well as the growth of other institutions that are empowered by the federal state’s reach—have been almost inarguably destructive to every aspect of the nation’s well-being. As the great Russell Kirk put it, “All those gifts of variety, contrast, competition, communal pride, and sympathetic association that characterize man at his manliest are menaced by the ascendancy of the omnicompetent state of modern times….”
It is ironic, then, that while Trump was out defending the virtues of federalism and while his supporters were praising him for doing so, many of those same supporters were also singing the praises of the nation’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. While it is true that Roosevelt served in office as a Republican, that’s not to say that he was, in any way, a conservative. There is a reason, after all, that the above-mentioned Russell Kirk, who was born three months before Roosevelt died, is considered the “godfather of American conservatism.” Conservatism as a coherent force did not really exist in American politics before the 1950s. Teddy Roosevelt, for his part, was, quite literally, a Progressive. His famous third-party run for the presidency in 1912 was under the banner of the Progressive Party. Temperamentally and ideologically, he had a great deal more in common with his distant cousin, Franklin, than he did with Ronald Reagan or any conservatives of the modern era.
In truth, Roosevelt is one of the three people in American politics most responsible for laying the foundation for the “omnicompetent” federal state—along with Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly.
When he was inaugurated, after the assassination and death of President McKinley, Roosevelt promised that he would “go slow” with his reform agenda—largely since no one had voted for it—but he couldn’t help himself. Within months, he was railing against “the rich,” complaining endlessly about “the trusts,” and insisting that it was his responsibility to fix the faults in the Founders’ Constitution. In his first annual message to the nation, Roosevelt derided the Constitution and the federalism so prized by its framers, declaring that they had been woefully mistaken when they “accepted as a matter of course that the several States were the proper authorities to regulate, so far as was then necessary, the comparatively insignificant and strictly localized corporate bodies of the day.” He forgave the Founders personally (and ever so graciously) but nevertheless insisted that “The conditions today are wholly different” than they were in 1788, “and wholly different action is called for.” “The old laws and the old customs, which had almost the binding force of law,” he continued, were no longer sufficient “to regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth.” Most tellingly, he suggested that fate had empowered him to act on the people’s “sincere conviction that combination and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled; and in my judgment, this conviction is right.” He insisted that he would, in other words, have to make himself—and the government more broadly—the partner of American business to see that the concentration of wealth was properly used to advance the general welfare.
These then are Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive legacies: a belief in the inadequacy of the Constitution, a belief that government can and should be the arbiter of economic success (opening the door to corporatism), and the inauguration of the nation’s perpetual and ongoing class war, in which “the rich” and “the industrialists” (i.e., businessmen) are deemed enemies of the people.
It is worth noting that whatever one thinks of Roosevelt, his ideology, or his reforms, the necessity of his crusade was questionable at best. Despite the Panic of 1893 and the subsequent depression, the American Gross National Product (GNP) grew at a roughly 4.5% rate from 1890-1907. During much of the same period, the decade leading up to Roosevelt’s presidency, prices either remained flat or fell (1894, -3.7%; 1895, -3.8%). The “trusts” may have been a social and political issue for the nation but were hardly an economic concern. One would be hard-pressed to make the case that these so-called enemies of the people were enemies of anyone other than Roosevelt himself.
The ongoing fascination of some segments of the political right with Theodore Roosevelt is honestly quite baffling. The late Senator John McCain also idealized Roosevelt, aligning himself with the image of the “Bull Moose.” The Bull Moose, of course, was the official mascot of the Progressive Party, and the “Bull Moose Party” was just a nickname for the Progressives.
In short, President Trump’s supporters should be glad and pleased that their guy has embraced federalism, but they should also be careful not to saddle him with the legacy of a man who did everything in his power to undermine the Constitution and its federalist spirit. Not only are the positions at odds with one another, but the latter bodes ill for his endeavor to Make America Great Again.