John McCain has said more than once that he admires Theodore Roosevelt, but as George Will points out today, there’s really not much to admire in TR’s record or rhetoric:
Roosevelt was an individualist who considered the individualism of others an impediment to the social unity required for national greatness. Having read Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” at age 14 and having strenuously transformed himself from an asthmatic child into a robust adult, he advocated “warrior republicanism” (Hawley’s phrase). TR saw virtue emerging from struggle, especially violent struggle, between nations and between the “Anglo-Saxon” race and lesser races. Blending “muscular Christianity,” the “social gospel” — which sanctified the state as an instrument of moral reclamation — and Darwinian theory, TR believed that human nature evolved toward improvement through conflict.
This dark vision of progress through strife made him advocate concentrated national power to serve his agenda, which was radically more ambitious than the Founders’ vision of limited government maintaining order, protecting property and otherwise staying out of the way of individual striving.
Like Winston Churchill, who said that mankind had entered “the region of mass effects,” TR said that “this is an age of combination” — of vast interlocking economic entities. Big was, he thought, beautiful and, anyway, inevitable. So government, and especially the presidency, must become commensurate to the task of breaking American individualism to the saddle of collective purposes. Here TR and “Country First” McCain converge.
And that’s not the only similarity between Roosevelt and McCain:
TR, who a critic said “keeps a pulpit concealed on his person,” almost wore the word “corruption” threadbare before pastor McCain came along to make it the centerpiece of his political lexicon. TR, like McCain, rejected James Madison’s vision of politics driven — and freedom preserved — by peaceful conflict between competing factions.
McCain’s signature legislation (McCain-Feingold) restricts what he calls “quote ‘First Amendment rights’ ” in the name of taming “special interests.” It expresses a TR-like rejection of Madisonian politics, a rejection McCain echoes when equating consensus — about the public interest, as McCain understands it — with patriotism. But another name for the “partisanship” McCain deplores is . . . politics.
We really don’t need another President that puts the group ahead of the individual, do we ?
