[Marxism] George W. Bush discovers Woodrow Wilson

[Louis Proyect]

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003638
September 30, 5:13 PM  —Publisher's Note
The Presidency in Wartime: George W. Bush discovers Woodrow Wilson
By John R. MacArthur

Excerpted from Chapter 10 of You Can’t Be President: The outrageous 
barriers to democracy in America, published by Melville House. John R. 
MacArthur is the publisher of Harper’s Magazine.

To understand what war—hot or cold—does to American democracy, examine 
the last three years of the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, 
from 1917 to 1920. Wilson’s reputation today remains essentially 
positive, even glorious. This professor-turned-politician is remembered 
for the most part as a visionary who was martyred in the cause of world 
democracy and peace. A self-styled idealist who called World War I “a 
war to end all wars,” Wilson claimed that America was fighting to make 
the world “safe for democracy,” not for any crass political motives. For 
these reasons, millions of high school students have been taught more 
about Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his failed crusade for American entry 
into the League of Nations than about George Washington’s or Dwight 
Eisenhower’s prescient, regrettably unheeded farewell addresses, which 
argued for restraint in foreign policy and against the dangers of a 
large, permanent military establishment.

But the Woodrow Wilson of dramatic oration and lofty principles was also 
an intolerant demagogue whose repressive policies and personal ambition 
sullied his stated aspiration to save the world from war and corruption. 
Long before there was McCarthyism, there was Wilsonianism, with its own 
“red scare” tactics and assaults on civil liberties that may have made 
Joe McCarthy envious. Although he had always insisted he was trying to 
avoid war, as early as his December 7,1915, State of the Union Address 
to Congress, Wilson was hinting at the war-fevered crackdown to come:

     The gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been 
uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, 
I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous 
naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who 
have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our 
national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of 
our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they 
thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, 
and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue…. A little 
while ago such a thing would have seemed incredible. Because it was 
incredible we made no preparation for it. We would have been almost 
ashamed to prepare for it, as if we were suspicious of ourselves, our 
own comrades and neighbors! But the ugly and incredible thing has 
actually come about and we are without adequate federal laws to deal 
with it. I urge you to enact such laws at the earliest possible moment 
and feel that in doing so I am urging you to do nothing less than save 
the honor and self-respect of the nation. Such creatures of passion, 
disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.

What was incredible, and ugly, was the ferocity of Wilson’s 
antidemocratic impulse. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in his 
book Secrecy, Wilson’s “plea… astonishes still, as much for its passion 
as for what it proposes… No president had ever spoken like that before; 
none has since.”

(clip)