His legacy is an American public that labors under the delusion that a President can run the nation as if it were a private company.
In the political sphere, Progressivism is a synonym for socialism, and for our sect called liberalism. Socialism necessitates collectivized power at the highest levels of the political state, leaving open a pathway to totalitarianism. Teddy Roosevelt was the first President to march along that pathway.
The founding generation were essentially unanimous in their understanding that humans are almost ungovernable, that human nature is far from the imagined perfection of the state of nature theorized in the 18th and 19th centuries by French predecessors of today's liberal-socialists.
As James Madison famously expressed it in Federalist No. 51:
But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, John Jay, and almost all the other founders, understood that the Constitution would be effective only in a society ordered by morality. Just as governments were subject to the higher law of nature, individuals were subject to the higher law of morality. Free political societies require the cosmic authority of religion to keep the people at least headed in the direction of virtue.
Socialism, in contrast, is an atheistic, materialistic religion that denies the existence of natural law and inalienable individual rights. Not the individual, but an abstraction called humanity is the unit of focus under socialism.
As we saw under socialism in Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's National Socialism, when there is no overarching restraint imposed by belief in God, the dignity of individuals, and the sanctity of life, there can be no limit on the class-based, arbitrary cruelty of political leaders. When a popular majority supports the political leaders, as in Russia of the 1920s and Germany of the 1930s, whole segments of the population may be liquidated for the "greater good."
Beginning in the 1860s in America, the Judeo-Christian morality and individualistic responsibility of the founding generations was progressively eroded by the importation of European theories of socialism and the all-powerful national state.
Herbert Croly was the founding editor of The New Republic, the most influential liberal-socialist journal throughout much of the 20th century. His 1909 The Promise of American Life presented the intellectuals’ argument for an all-powerful, collectivized, socialistic government. He declared that Jeffersonian individualism had produced a mediocre American society.
Looking longingly at the scientific and academic excellence achieved under Otto von Bismarck’s German Empire, Croly said that America needed a strong man who would take the bull by the horns, undeterred by the Constitution, and simply impose socialistic collectivism as Bismarck had done when he instituted the world’s first welfare state in 1881.
Croly and his fellow intellectuals, however, seemed unperturbed that Bismarck had bluntly announced that his welfare system was intended to make Germans so dependent upon the Prussian Kaiser’s rule that, as Bismarck put it in the Reichstag, Germans could simply be herded like cattle.
None of the intellectuals foresaw that socialism has an inherent tendency toward totalitarianism. They did not understand that imposing socialist uniformity and forcing everyone downwards to the lowest common level of economic equality necessarily must be at the expense of individuals' natural-law liberties embodied in our original Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Teddy Roosevelt, and later to some extent Woodrow Wilson, were the answers to academic intellectuals’ prayers.
A damn-the-Constitution activist, Teddy Roosevelt became President after William McKinley’s assassination by social-justice anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901. Without pre-approval from Congress, for example, Teddy committed the nation to the cost of building the Panama Canal and started a civil war in Central America to obtain territorial rights. When asked where in the Constitution he found authority for these actions, Roosevelt said that he knew what the situation required and simply did it, whether Congress would concur or not. The Constitution, of course, requires that the Senate advise and consent on treaty matters and reserves to Congress the exclusive right to authorize expenditures of Federal funds.
In the Bismarckian mold, Teddy Roosevelt was a President prepared to take the bull by the horns and overthrow the entrenched ideas of Jeffersonian individuality that stood in the way of intellectuals' conception of social justice and progress.
While he was not a devout believer in the religion of socialism, the effect of Teddy Roosevelt’s terms in office was to promote the liberal-socialist cause. Like all college-educated persons of that era, Roosevelt had been thoroughly exposed to the secular and materialistic doctrine of socialism, first as a Harvard undergraduate, then in public life. In his defense, it may be said that he confronted an America that was fundamentally different in the economic sphere from the America of 1776.
Surprisingly for a man who was well-educated in the classics, Roosevelt was heedless of the need to preserve the traditions of a government of laws, not of men. A clue was one of his favorite books, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which advanced the theory that the rise of Christianity was the cause of Rome's fall.
In power, Teddy was a headstrong man who consulted only his personal ideas of good, with indifference to legal precedent and the inherent rights of individuals under the Bill of Rights. It was the beginning of the “implied powers” doctrine that Teddy’s young cousin Franklin Roosevelt was to use twenty years later to impose a thoroughgoing system of socialism.
Teddy also set the pattern for our present-day expectation that the President is to be the dominant figure in national politics, grasping ever-greater measures of power at the expense of constitutional checks and balances. His legacy is an American public that labors under the delusion that a President can run the nation as if it were a private company. This, of course, is precisely the collectivized management and social-engineering demanded by liberal-socialists.
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