Joe Biden (and Kammy), meet Woodrow Wilson

America has seen this movie before!

Our high school history texts back in the 1960s heralded only the second Democrat elected President between the Civil War and FDR as a progressive hero. Founded the League of Nations, made the world safe for democracy, yada yada. WW2 happened anyway.

We know now that Woodrow Wilson was a racist, an autocrat, while still being — not so coincidentally — a progressive. “Black officials at Treasury and elsewhere — appointed by Wilson’s Republican predecessor, William Howard Taft — found themselves demoted or their positions eliminated,” writes Christopher Cox in his biography titled, economically, Woodrow Wilson. 

So relates book reviewer Barton Swaim. Which explains Wilson’s draconian clampdown on free speech during WW1, when critics of the war “or, in practice, of anything else” were censored or even jailed.

Wilson took dim view of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. … He preferred Britain’s parliamentary system, in which the party in power does what it wants with few restraints, to America’s system of checks and balances.”

The author’s real contribution posits that Wilson’s disdain of individual freedoms was not the exception but the rule of progressivism itself.

At the core of progressivism, both in its original form and in the present day, is the belief that most people lack the wisdom to govern themselves and require a class of educated elites to organize society according to a shifting set of ideals. Wilson’s warped ideas on race and sex weren’t departures from progressivism but variant expressions of it. — Wall Street Journal book review

How many times has your beleaguered bloggeur written that progressivism is rule by experts.

 Nothing to see here

Another relevance of Wilson to the current Democrat in the White House: Wilson’s staff and, especially, his missus, hid from the public the President’s physical and mental impairment in his last year in office, due to a stroke.

He could only concentrate for a few minutes at a time and watched movies every day. His press secretary wrote in his diary that the President “cannot know what is going on. He sees almost nobody and hears almost no direct news.”

You can visit Wilson’s private residence in Washington D.C. where he lived not quite three years after leaving the Presidency, as we did a few years back. You will see his movie projector set up in one of the preserved rooms. His favorite was the Birth of a Nation, which rewrote the rules of cinema but also cast the Ku Klux Klan as heroes. One of the movie’s title cards actually quotes Woodrow Wilson. It was the first movie to be screened in the White House.

Progressives who claim Joe Biden and his Veep as their own will argue that the President and Kamala Harris surely are not racist.

 Protected classes say ‘no thank you’

But progressivism, encouraged by Presidents Obama and Biden, dumbed down academic standards and defunded or otherwise hand cuffied the police. That and racial preferences (set asides, etc.) are being repudiated by a growing percentage of the very groups they were meant to (paternalistically) “protect.” Trump’s support among black voters doubled here in Wisconsin; the Republican won 45% of hispanic voters nationally.

Biden/Harris opened the borders out of a misguided progressive sensibility that they were helping “minorities.” The majority of voters rebelled against taking what amounts to DEI loyalty oaths to the doctrine that America is fundamentally racist.

→ Overt racial preferences, “this destructive progressive dogma,” is found in more than 80 federal entities.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Voters rejected the progressive political party’s nominee, in part because she was chosen precisely for her gender and race. (Although, to her credit, she did not harp on it.) As with Wilson, Biden yielded the presidency to a Republican. 

Is DEI over?