Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Book Review: The Dilemma of Progressivism
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however, inasmuch as Taft ultimately furthered rather than retarded the
advance of the progressivism that abandoned the “natural rights and constitutional
self-government as understood by the founders” (156). While Taft
opposed his predecessor’s (Roosevelt) stewardship theory of executive power
and his successor’s (Wilson) progressive historicism, he nevertheless failed in
the face of the political dynamics of the United States. His defeat by Wilson
in 1912 represented, therefore, the political rejection of the standard of the
founding, the rejection of George Washington as referee. Where Lincoln had
prevailed over Jefferson Davis (embodiment of Stephen A. Douglas’s “popular
sovereignty”), Taft could not prevail over Wilson (who embodied John
Dewey’s “the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy”). We conclude,
therefore, that the account of these three presidents is an account of the
enlarged influence of progressivism in United States politics in the context of
articulate deliberations of the principles at stake.
The three accounts are wonderfully detailed and richly elaborated.
Roosevelt is characterized as a statesman of genuinely liberal impulses,
who sought to save the founding from conditions sufficiently changed since
the founding as to require the instrumentalities of strong, central administration
of government in order to preserve the “spirit of the founding,” if
not its forms (89-91). Wilson is characterized as a statesman of towering but
wandering intellect who embraces moral chaos as an opportunity to display
political virtuosity (“democratized Nietzscheism”: 212-13). William Howard
Taft is the man who, through patient and careful deliberations, as executive
rather than as jurist, dialectically disclosed the deficiencies of his colleagues
but eventually advanced their projects above his own.
How must Washington judge them? Each bowed at the
shrine of self-government, but none advanced the cause of self-government.
The sub-title of this work, “How Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson Reshaped the
American Regime of Self-Government,” suggests, therefore, that Washington
would identify them as saboteurs, who failed to confirm the authority
of self-government as falling upon the shoulders of each citizen, and who
therefore endangered all.
In this sense Morrisey describes the collapse of the regime
of self-government, and the description is all the more effective inasmuch as
it derives the diagnosis of collapse from the arguments of the protagonists
themselves (Taft above all). When viewed against the prospects of success
illustrated in the prior volume, Self-Government, The American Theme, this