Bashing Woodrow Wilson

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Thursday, March 11. 2010

It's about time people began piling on the arrogantly naive goo-goo prissy academic Woodrow Wilson. See George Will today:

Wilson was the first president to criticize the Founding Fathers. He faulted them for designing a government too susceptible to factions that impede disinterested experts from getting on with government undistracted.

Undistracted by the people, that is. Like the EU. Also, from Jonah at NRO - quoted there:

Wilson, once a professor of political science, said that the Princeton he led as its president was dedicated to unbiased expertise, and he thought government could be "reduced to science." Progressives are forever longing to replace the governance of people by the administration of things. Because they are entirely public-spirited, progressives volunteer to be the administrators, and to be as disinterested as the dickens.

God save us Americans from such disinterested expert mandarins. We are the mandarins, and they are our servants! Makes me wonder who came up with the wacky notion of political "science"?

Here's some real Political Science:

Posted by Bird Dog in Our Essays, Politics at 14:08 | Comments (10) | Trackbacks (0)

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After months negotiating with him at Versailles, Winston Churchill said that the problem with Wilson was not so much that he was always slipping the ace up his sleeve, but rather that when you called him on it, he insisted it was God who put it there.

#1 Rick in NC on 2010-03-11 16:39 (Reply)

Possibly the most annoying manifestation of that whole experts-know-best syndrome was that weird Technocracy Movement that lasted up to WWII.

Indeed, I think the monstrous technocratic excesses of the Nazis nicely put paid to the notion that scientists and other "experts" knew best how to run things.

#2 JJM on 2010-03-11 17:03 (Reply)

Wilson was a twit and easily in the bottom five presidents in my book.

#3 phil g on 2010-03-11 17:19 (Reply)

"He [Wilson] faulted them [your Founding Fathers] for designing a government too susceptible to factions that impede disinterested experts from getting on with government undistracted."

Er, wasn't that the whole idea of your constitution?

Talk about not clear on the concept.

#4 JJM on 2010-03-11 17:27 (Reply)

All I know is short people got no reason to live.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NvgLkuEtkA

#5 Jim on 2010-03-11 18:08 (Reply)

The story of Wilson during the span of time between the November 1918 cease-fire and the treaty of June 1919 is utterly astonishing. He had promised Germany --as part of the 1918 cease-fire agreement --no territorial concessions and no monetary reparations.

By June of 1919, the allies in the negotiations had not lived up to Wison's oh-so-high standards, so he had quit the game and retired to sulk, leaving the pissed off Brits and French to operate without the Wilsonian guideline.

Ergo, Germany --now without arms --was forced to make exactly those concessions --and long/short, the way was opened for Adolf Hitler to capitalize on among other things, that broken Woodrow Wilson promise.

#6 buddy larsen on 2010-03-11 18:08 (Reply)

Anyone interested in world history since WWI should read Paris 1919 by Richard Holbrooke. It is a remarkable guide to international relations for the last 90 years.

The peace conference created the political distortions that led to WW2 and still plague international affairs today.

Of course we would just have different problems if the conference had turned out differently.

Like sausage making, the process was messy and unappealing. And unlike sausage making, the results proved poisonous.

#7 KTWO on 2010-03-11 18:25 (Reply)

This American History major despised Wilson for many reasons. About the only thing I like about him is the authority and independence he gave to John Pershing.

#8 NJSoldier on 2010-03-11 20:32 (Reply)

I am reading Chesterton on War and Peace, centering around both the "scientific government"and "German punishment" ideas mentioned here.

The possibility of reducing government to a science administered by elites was indeed popular, and was shared by not only German racialists, but socialists, New England WASPs, and the British intelligentsia. Chesterton and Belloc were among the few intellectual voices against it. Shaw and HG Wells were much for it.

As for Versailles, Chesterton took a quite opposite view of what I had always been taught about German humiliation. It was GKC's belief that we let the leaders and intellectuals off with too little humiliation - just enough to infuriate, but not enough to induce humility. By punishing the country entirely in the land and dollars realm, we punished the common man more than the leaders. Chesterton thought some executions of Prussians were in order, but less stringency toward the people. He is quite persuasive that this false humanity on the part of the Allies was a great cruelty.

#9 Assistant Village Idiot (Link) on 2010-03-11 22:14 (Reply)

"He is quite persuasive that this false humanity on the part of the Allies was a great cruelty."

Great sentence on the great GKC, who was able to bring the Roman Catholic principle of the principle itself, into both modern poetry and modern politics. Into modernity itself --a hostile landscape lit by few people of his persuasion and caliber.

#9.1 buddy larsen on 2010-03-12 00:45 (Reply)

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Thursday, March 11. 2010

Bashing Woodrow Wilson