Contra Jill Lepore in the New York Times, you don’t need to watch Glenn Beck to dislike Woodrow Wilson. Nor do you need think there’s any connection between one “professor-President” and the chap currently occupying the Oval Office. Radley Balko lays out the standard libertarian case against Wilson here and, frankly, it makes a pretty convincing argument that, even by the lofty standards of the field, Wilson was one of the most unpleasant men ever to hold the Presidency. And that’s before you consider Jim Crow and his penchant for launching extra-constitutional wars…
Well, as Radley says, historians tend to approve of Presidents who “do stuff” which in turn means they approve of Presidents who exceed their constitutional authority.Lepore is correct that some of these libertarian objections are actually points of similarity between Wilson and modern conservatives. But I think a more interesting question than Why does the right hate Wilson? is, given all of this, along with his belief in white racial superiority and opposition to women’s suffrage, why do presidential historians seem to like him so much?
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