Monday, October 11, 2010

Hating on Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson's been getting a lot of attention lately because Glenn Beck has been holding him as a straw man to attack modern progressives. Of course, there's lots of reason to hate Wilson--he was an extreme racist and a moralistic bastard mostly. This discussion from leading historians and Wilson scholars show Beck's hypocrisy and distortions in attacking Wilson--both in the sense that Wilson was a right-wing moralist, that Beck's attacks on Wilson are precisely because nobody knows anything about him (as opposed to FDR or LBJ), and that he's cherrypicking the bipartisan nature of Progressivism by attacking Wilson and not Theodore Roosevelt.

But then again, no one expects integrity from Beck. What surprises me is that no one mentioned the real shocker in all of this--that Wilson was a hero to the administration of George W. Bush because of his moralistic and totalizing foreign policy. Is Beck rejecting the Wilsonian foreign policy so beloved by neocons? I doubt it. More likely, Beck would easily come around if a Republican president again invoked Wilson. Because of course, Beck is an opportunistic hypocrite.