@ JEM:
He was attacked and resisted from both right and left, and both for having gone too far and for not having gone far enough. Most of those arrested, in particular the relatively few imprisoned under provisions of the federal acts, were from the "left," Debs most famously.

In this discussion, as in your exchanges with movieman above, we run into familiar problems in dealing with conservatism in the U.S. The libertarian "right" is very different from the cultural "right." They sometimes can be seen to overlap or intersect - as under the divinely ordained natural rights discussion - but many on the traditional/cultural right are much less concerned with the niceties of constitutional interpretation and libertarian moral philosophy. They may instead give much greater priority to the protection of a cultural inheritance, to a larger set of established mores, and to organic concepts of nation or race.

A second, partly overlapping way of looking at it is the difference between relative or evolutionary conservatism - Burke or even Wilson - and values conservatism, which relies on the assertion of transhistorical absolutes. Libertarians assert one set of transhistorical values, and libertarian constitutional conservatives further assert that they are embodied in the Founding. Cultural conservatives assert different if sometimes overlapping transhistorical values that are no more or less "moral," but which tend to precede and supersede any political process or constitutional forms. If what matters most to you is salvation, whether you get there through the electoral college or popular vote, a mixed economy or the free market, is probably secondary, if relevant at all. So Mike Huckabee talks the free market constitutionalist talk, but is justly suspected of being ready at a moment's notice to override his constitutionalism with his higher faith.

So, back to Wilson, most, but not all, of the people conventionally associated in his own time with the political right were big believers in law and order, and uncompromising enemies culturally, politically, and otherwise of the IWW and other radicals.

@ narciso:
Not sure what you mean by a "sentiment" in re the War Industries Board and Creel Committee. Both were explicitly war-related operations, and the fact that they disappeared along with the war and its exigencies, along with the fact that Wilson himself exited stage right without requiring, say, a conqueror from another land taking Washington DC away from him, defeats the "fascist tyranny" case no matter how you try to advance it - unless you take the position, which JG comes close to, that anything other than absolute libertarianism is "fascistic tyrannical." That means that we have always lived and always will live under fascist tyranny. Fascist tyranny turns out to be a description for all politics and government - and that is why I referred to LF as defining evil down.

JEM wrote:

But Wilson’s practices domestically were nothing like FDR’s even when the threat was greater during WWII than WWI. In JG’s reply to CK’s criticisms, he listed in summary some pretty nasty domestic policies of Wilson’s that make the War on Terror security measures we have taken look lame.

I commented on this argument in the LF re-reading, the Defense of Wilson, and in the post here. It was a different era: Among other things, there was an active and militant radical/revolutionary movement in the US of Wilson's day. Furthermore, many of the policies that you and Goldberg attribute to Wilson didn't originate with him or his administration, while his own policies were milder than what powerful forces, including most but not all to his "right," were demanding. For a nostril-opening sniff of the atmosphere, check out the New York Times editorial that narciso linked on the "defense" thread: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9F0CE3DB1F3FE433A25751C2A9629C946996D6CF

As also previously argued (just catching you up here, JEM), the notion that WWI policies of any kind may have made WoT policies look tame isn't very impressive when you consider that, just for this country, WWI represented about 1,000 times a bigger deal, in an epoch with very different general ideas about dissent and the niceties of law enforcement procedures.

@ narciso:
Certainly a similar game, if not the same one. Turnabout might be fair play, but it still rests on distortion and can lead to bad results - especially when small initial aiming errors can land your political artillery shells on civilians or allies rather than the real enemy.

@ MovieMan0283:
We used to have some regulars at this site who would have willingly taken up the argument with you with some enthusiasm. For reasons open to speculation, they don't post here as often as they used to. (The fellow who actually inspired me to pick LF up again has said that real life has overtaken him.)

I think that what it comes down to is that you could attempt a book called CONSERVATIVE FASCISM, and fill up a few hundred pages doing what Goldberg has done, more or less, highlight those aspects of historical fascism that overlapped with historical conservative/rightwing movements - and make as good a case. In a way, that wouldn't contradict Goldberg's thesis, though it would contradict him wherever he argues not merely that fascism also had similarities with some leftist movements, but where he goes a step further as in your example.

Matt X wrote:

I dont’ see anything that buttresses your case that the use of the word “socialist” and Marxist to describe Obama is hurting the conservative movement.

Never attempted to make such a case. You were the one who brought up the terms in this connection. I think cheapening the terms marginally hurts the conservative movement, though I'm not a big fan of "how many socialists can dance on the head of a pin?" stuff. JG wrote a Commentary article on this question, and seemed to want to call Obama a Neo-Socialist, which might work for fans of the MATRIX movies and worsen those numbers that I believe narc has slightly mis-reported.

@ Matt X:
O'Reilly on oil prices was and has been painful and embarrassing. However, the fact that he qualifies as a populist in some respects doesn't mean Beck or anyone else isn't, despite whatever stylistic differences. Don't know who characterized Steyn or Goldberg that way, or for that matter lumped them in with the hard right. I do believe some of their rhetoric tends to imply an unbridgeable gulf between them and everyone to their left, as in Steyn's repeated and influential claim that O-care = End of the World as We Know It. It's not the particulars of the analysis so much as the openly stated, finalizing intentions that make it "hard" - regardless of the analyst's demeanor, attitude or history, or even of his self-image.

Panties in a bunch on Marx and socialism - nyah. But the currency of the charge gets devalued. For the large number of Americans who don't even know which came first, World War One or World War Two, calling Obama a Marxist or a socialist may simply normalize the terms for them. To some of the rest of us who have studied Marxism and socialism, it obscures what Obamaism is, which in some ways is more dangerous, today, precisely because it is or was more attractive to the broad American public.

@ MovieMan0283:
HBO should do a movie on the League Fight.

Matt X wrote:

I think in the greater scheme of things, Woodrow Wilson is probably one of the most “boring” presidents to talk about.

Well, you'll have to let JG know. He believes his Wilson chapter was the best part of his book, and he's made a million or several off of "getting Woody." He also thinks it's critically important to conservatives to get at what Progressivism was and is. Beck also seems to think so. I kind of agree with them. If I've made it just a teensy bit harder for one or two cons to go off half-cocked at the mere mention of the "P" word, then my life's work of arrogant snark has not been completely in vain.

@ Matt X:
Business model? Sheesh. I have a business - disconnected from this blog. I know about business. Business is a good friend of mine. Pardon me, commenter, but this is no business.

I didn't "attack Steyn." I criticized his approach to a particular issue in strong terms, and I stand by my criticism, and as far as I can tell he seems somehow to have recovered from the devastating blows I landed on him...

I could respond to the rest, but I'd just be repeating prior comments/posts. Maybe you haven't gotten to them yet. Maybe they were too long-winded. If you're not interested in this topic, there are lots and lots of alternative entertainment, information, and opinion sites on the web.

Also, FYI, Wilson was a Dem. I know you don't care, but no need to get yourself tripped up in future.

@ Matt X:
Insult? A) you be one to talk, and B) lotso folk on the hard right would be proud to be identified as such. Some seem to wake up every morning and perform an hour of starboard-hardening exercises before they even turn on their computers to blast Crime Inc. (aka The Obama Administration) at Free Republic or wherever. If you told them they were soft right they'd punch you out right through their computer monitors with their right hands.

Getting dainty about terms like that, when people are throwing around "Maoist" and "cancer" and "fascist" and "traitor" and "Hitler" to describe the other side, or defending the people who do, is almost touching in its childlike lack of self-consciousness.

Hard right, hard left, who cares? I think Rush is pretty smart, but I've been critical of him. Hannity: I'd put him at medium hard: Far enough to right to appeal to and represent the hards, but of a moderate demeanor and civil. I've watched him off and on for years and have a hard time bringing to mind a single interesting thing he's ever said. I've wasted much more time on Beck, whom I consider a much more interestingly dreadful phenomenon, and who once reached down from the media heights to mischaracterize something I wrote on air - that's just how famous I am, whoop-tee-doo for me. You can search this site or HotAir for my opinions on Beck in what they used to call folio installments.

As I indicated in the post - possibly during a part you tuned out on because it was too long and off-putting - I think Party of No-ism was justifiable in 2009, and back in 2008 I was all for rightwing popular front against the Dem wave. Times change: There hasn't been a whole lot new to say on Ø, the Ø-ers having mostly shot their wad, conservatives appearing to be "in the ascendancy" and with a chance for power and therefore responsibility, so it's a lot more important to speak now or forever hold your piece.

Got it?

@ MovieMan0283:
Though you're right about people on the left and within the pseudo-elite whose responses to LF did them no credit. I think one of the reasons JG deigned to respond to a whiny little off-putter like me, aside from the fact that he's a congenial person willing to take on all reasonably civil comers, is that so much of the response from critics has been derisive and dismissive rather than engaged with the topic, which, greatly to his credit, he treats as more important than who spat the best wad at the other kids.

No, no, movieman, Matt X is right. I'm a long-winded sub-Frum, and I dared to question the huge and much better-liked Mark Steyn on his trite, idiotic, and politically insane fantastically insightful taxes rap.

And there's nothing, nothing I care more about than where others place me on the ideological spectrum. And nothing that the nation and the world should be more concerned about.

Matt, I'm sorry for slobbering all over your beautiful and pure conservatism and taking up your valuable time with my self-indulgent efforts. Would you like your money back?

@ Zoltan Newberry:
Both Meg and Poizner have pretty much convinced me that they're say-anything mainstream finger-in-the-wind cons, but still preferable to Jerry Brown. The younger Jerry Brown might have beaten either of them, but he's gotten more conventional left, and rumor has it that he's borderline non compos mentis.

@ narciso:
We didn't have much environmental enforcement actually, and, as a lifetime resident of Southern California, L.A. and environs, I have a hard time completely condemning Air Quality Management as it's been implemented. More to the point, Beck and to a lesser extent Goldberg, and many of their fans much more so, want to enjoy the thrill of railing against Big Government "junk" without ever admitting the trade-offs. Most will lambaste the insufficiently pure anti-statists, yet when tested on a specific point, they retreat to "whatever, to the right of you."

@ narciso:
We have a bit of a problem in forcing some of our extreme rhetoricians to face the implications of their own words. Beck, for instance, likes to have things both ways: He'll toss off a line, beseeching his audience to recognize the moral need for the "least possible government," and then he'll turn around and ridicule his critics for suggesting that he's calling for reduced education, law enforcement, environmental enforcement, workplace safety, etc. In the radical libertarian utopia, who would be around to bar children from laboring? I betcha if you look around you can find someone, maybe at Reason, ready to recite how wonderful labor was for many children and their families.

MovieMan0283 wrote:

An element of Goldberg’s anti-progressive schtick that irks me (I can’t speak to Beck’s, which I haven’t really examined) is his tendency to brush off all the accomplishments of the era.

Beck is basickly a melodramatic and irresponsible JG on this subject, IMO.

If you take the theoretical position that progressivism is a kind of societal illness, the name for the Enemy, then, yes, it becomes a lot more difficult to point to this, that, or the other progressivism and say "well that one's okay." Why? How? Who ever heard of a good malignant cancer? That's a big part of what I've been trying to say. Others - frequently at this blog especially when we first started getting into this subject - have tried to argue that child labor was already being phased out, or women's suffrage isn't really progressive (alternatively maybe not a good thing), or political machines and railroad trusts did lots of good things. Some truth to some of that - of course. We don't have to go all the way over to the other side and declare Progressivism wholly holy.

Mostly, I think they're stuck on the intellectual's fetish for intellectual work: It's easier to take apart the flaws of progressive writers and theorists, who in my view were imperfectly and often self-interestedly abstracting and reducing the matter, most of which had advanced on its own before and without them, than to look at the full range of Progressive Era reforms, which mostly proceeded "upon no general plan, but in detail."

bob wrote:

He compared this dynamic to Milton’s relationship to Shakespeare.

Milton wrote some great stuff. I wouldn't want to stay home without it. We can be glad Shakespeare cleared away so much of the underbrush for him.

The ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE was very influential when I was studying criticism. Didn't prevent Bloom and a bunch of others from continuing their work.

I generally think that "death of x," "exhaustion of y," "it's all been done" themes are as overdone, if inescapable, as "appearance vs. reality" and "restoration of great chain of being" and "overdone" themes in criticism. "I am a latecomer in the world!" is how Nietzsche parodied the "voice of irony." Many of the High Modernists were writing out of a perception that they were too late on the scene, their civilization was exhausted and done for, there was nothing new to do, just "shore fragments against [their] ruin." They were proceeded by one of my favorite art movements, the Aesthetes and Decadents, who were generally surer than anyone that the only theme left was maximally decorous dissipation and extinction.

And it's too early to predict, if not too early to be fascinated by, the potential impact of cognitive science on ideas of the self. Maybe, as we strip away the false accoutrements of the self accessible to finely mixed narcotic cocktails, we'll arrive at sweet and ineluctable reason, just like Locke wanted. Or maybe, when you consider that humanity functioned for millennia in diverse locales and contexts with little or no concept of the self, or with highly intricate and/or deterministic views, we shouldn't be terrified - yet. If I should be, then I can be glad I'm not very young, and, as always that I'm a Beta, Alphas having so much responsibility, Gammas being so stupid. Or maybe we should move On Tyranny up on our reading lists - from the descriptions it looks very relevant.

@ narciso:
Would just add that Ryan's approach still stands to my mind as one of the best examples of what I called it before - "real progressivism." It represents a vision for the improvement and rationalization of the progressive state - smaller (vector) not small (scalar) - in its fiscal/budgetary aspects. It might be accurate, in fact, to term what Reaganist conservatives offer as "smaller-than-otherwise government conservatism," but, aside from being a bigger mouthful, it doesn't offer up simplistic "stop the world I want to get off (at no cost)" fantasies.

@ bob:
Just read the neurocapitalism article. Much of it rang very true to me. Not sure I see the connection to "Goldberg's here and now," tho.

narciso wrote:

Are you already, dumping on Paul Ryan,

Well, turnabout's fair play. His actions have confirmed for me the suspicions awakened by his TARP, bailout, and coporate reform votes that he lacks great personal character.

Ryan has some good ideas, but I haven't noticed the neo-Minute Men and neo-Annie Oakleys offering him more than what the kindergarten teacher offers a particularly enthusiastic finger painter. They've helped open a space for him to be heard... a little. He may have been right to seek support - and a backbone transplant - from the populist right, I've said as much, but I'm not sure where it's heading, if anywhere. I see him and Sarah and others so far declining the opportunity to educate the Tea Partying masses.

As for Newtie: One tactic among many. There was some fiscal retrenchment- Newt would certainly claim as much - and otherwise it was hard to build the will for much more when the budget was heading into surplus. Needless to say the 2010s are shaping up to be a rather different period from the 1990s.

@ narciso:
The contradiction between small government conservatism and neo-imperialist gigantism remains, and must hit, maybe sooner rather than later, one or a series of breaking points. The Reagan coalition, 30 years on, still can't explain how we're supposed to have democracy, neo-empire, and small government at the same time. Consistency leads you to Ron Paul - who comes across as insane not because his approach is incoherent, but because it's utopian. The apparent constitutionalist conservative consensus - to the left of Paul, to the right of everyone else - seems to be trillions for defense, and not a dime for social services and public administration. The radical constitutionalist militarists seem to expect us to believe that we can democratically manage an elephantine military-industrial complex with an ant-like state.

@ bob:
As you point out, modernism already entailed deconstructive elements, and the observation makes a bit of a hash out of the notion that "post-modernism" is really all that "post." The paradoxes multiply: A movement that turns on a critique of progressive movements presenting itself as progress. It has no argument for itself except under the terms it pretends to reject - so is either a fraud or a passive aestheticism (nihilist in its moral, quietist in its political dimensions). If there's no difference between authenticity and fraud, high and low, and reaction and progress, then we might as well randomly walk back into neo-classicism or romanticism or popular art or Soviet Realism or American Idol. That the everyday experience of most consumers of culture somewhat approximates this approach only seems to relieve us of judgment: That I watch American Idol doesn't make me an American Idolist. Our environment is pervaded with aesthetic constructs: American Idol is expensive shrubbery, or one of those tapestries at the Palace of Versailles against which the nobility would relieve themselves during breaks in the conversation.

You rightly point to the social conservatives as effectively anti-modern, and make a good point about the Cold War. On the other thread I suggested that American conservatism is relative and European conservatism is (or was) absolute. Or maybe I could use the vector terminology: That's an oversimplification in the sense that scalar conservatives exist in America, just as American-style vector conservatives exist in Europe. But if I'm right, and the Founding was progressive (as well as statist), then maybe that's the difference: Under overarching progressivism, conservatism is either relative - nothing to conserve but a progressive vector, to be nurtured, carefully cultivated, properly and conservatively channeled - or untenable, leaving the absolute conservatives with a choice between withdrawal from politics or a revolution that, lacking roots in or access to a feudal (pre-progressive) system of political rights and privileges, would tend to follow fascist patterns.

@ MovieMan0283:
You're right - thanks! Must have gotten lost during one or another proofing, and absolutely needed to be included, and is now embedded.

@ fuster:
I 'm thinking that's probly the longest comment, and one of the most acerbic, which is saying something, you've ever deposited here, at TOC, or at Contentions.

The former Contenders whom I would take to be your main targets have been making themselves scarcer of late. Goes without saying it's their choice, if they'd prefer not to defend or test their contentions - or, unimaginable as it sometimes seems to me, they actually have lives.

If you graphed the ideological positioning of this blog as the resultant of commenter and author vectors, we've clearly been moving closer to the center on the conventional left-right spectrum. I of course would acknowledge that I've been providing some directional force. I'm not sure that I've been pushing more than I've been pushed - both by the dialogue and also by external events and impressions.

narciso wrote:

Without Wilson you don’t have FDR,

Really? Perhaps then it was for the best that James Roosevelt never learned the truth.

The Haitian invasion was typical for American policy during the period. To me it seems rather unlikely that any American president would have been much less activist or interventionist than Tommy was. A more adventurous or militarily self-confident or aggressive leader would have gotten in even deeper somewhere - probably in Mexico - it's anybody's guess to what results.

But the idea is to focus less on the personality than on the conditions and circumstances that summoned him forth and defined his choices.