President Theodore RooseveltOverusing The Big Stick
America’s Delayed Adolescence in the Digital Economy
American Heresies and the Betrayal of the National Interest: A Conversation with Walter McDougall
What is American civil religion? And has it been distorted to the extent that it has undermined our nation's foreign policy? The eminent historian and scholar Walter McDougall, author of the new book, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy, joins this edition of Liberty Law Talk to discuss these questions.
Reducing a Mountain to a Molehill: The Media, Executive Power and Denali
Let the historians charting the growth of executive power take note of August 30, 2015, which is the day America became a nation in which Presidents could rename mountains and nobody asked how.
The American: Not Ugly, Not Quiet
George Nash, the dean of Herbert Hoover scholars, wrote about our 31st President most recently in the Wall Street Journal, commemorating the centenary of Hoover’s heroic World War I disaster-relief efforts in Europe. Nash described how, in 1914, a young and successful London-based mining engineer made his move “to ‘get in the big game’ of public life.”
Nash’s words capture a do-gooding impulse, but one that is mixed with personal ambition. This interesting alloy should be familiar. It puts Herbert Hoover in a long line of Americans in whom self-improvement and world-improvement seem inextricably tied—a line stretching back in our history, at least to Benjamin Franklin, and forward into our time.
Anatomy of a Juggernaut
The subtitle of Paul D. Moreno’s new book, “The Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism,” is the thrust of a growing body of revisionist scholarship on the Progressive movement. Moreno adds a valuable historian’s perspective to this scholarship, which is associated largely with the “Claremont school” of political science. He notes the central conceit of 20th century American history: the triumphalist portrayal of an ever-expanding national state, one that would finally offer authentic liberty—freeing individuals not only from inequality, but from the reactionary idea that human nature itself imposes permanent constraints. Moreno suggests that the Obama presidency has brought…
How to Secure America’s Peace
U.S. Soldiers at Camp Bucca in Iraq. Photo Credit: DAVID FURST/AFP/Getty ImagesOur historically literate founding statesmen elaborated a foreign policy to shield Americans’ exceptional way of life in a hostile world through the timeless principles of statecraft. For more than a century, their successors held to the Founders’ purpose and to those principles. America grew great. Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, a new generation of statesmen, consciously abandoning the Founders’ way of thinking, has turned U.S. foreign policy from shielding the American people against danger to improving or otherwise leading the rest of mankind. Imagining that everyone, everywhere shares their good intentions, they have conducted America’s international affairs…
Responses
Angelo Codevilla has been a legend in our house since the 1980s when my wife and I first encountered this Renaissance force of nature radiating virtú. Somehow Angelo manages a vineyard in California, a horse ranch in Wyoming, a large, loving family, a prolific academic career, and world travel without strain, indeed with unfailing ebullience.…
Angelo Codevilla’s analysis of the many problems associated with U.S. foreign policy provides an abundance of important insights. He is devastatingly on the mark when he contends that since the beginning of the 20th century, U.S. officials have transformed the Founders’ emphasis on shielding the American people against external dangers into an arrogant, unattainable objective…
There is much with which to agree in Angelo Codevilla’s thoughtful essay. To the extent that he and I differ, it is with regard to means and not ends. We both agree that U.S. foreign policy is in shambles, characterized by drift and incoherence. It is at best a-strategic at worst anti-strategic, lacking any concept…
Walter McDougall writes: “Congress and the American people…want to believe their ‘indispensable nation’ can be a ‘benevolent hegemon’ doing good on the cheap and doing well by doing good.” As a description of how Americans view our role among nations, this is arguable. But it is a fair summation of our foreign policy establishment‘s view…
Achieving America’s Peace: A Conversation with Angelo Codevilla
Angelo Codevilla comes to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his latest book To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations. Our conversation focuses on Codevilla’s main argument that American statesmen increasingly fail to understand the nature and purpose of statecraft: the achievement of peace. So what does it mean to achieve America’s peace? To do so, Codevilla insists, requires concrete evaluation of the means and ends necessary to protect American interests. This requires particular judgments about power, interests, and the practial reality we are confronted with. Our practice, for well nigh a century, has been to speak in…
The Imperial Mount Rushmore
Though it’s been a few weeks since it appeared, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Stephen Knott’s excellent piece on whether Woodrow Wilson destroyed the office of the presidency. The clamor about the imperial presidency is on the rise with many commentators (such as George Will) and Knott’s article gives us a better understanding of its rise, as well as its implications. Knott describes the “expectations gap” that has arisen due to modern conceptions of the presidency, where we expect the president to heal the planet, rather than work to enact reforms within the institutions of constitutional government.
In response to Professor Knott I would only mention that I think Woodrow Wilson may not even deserve top billing in terms of producing the rise of presidential power.
