Wilson's view of politics could be summarized by the word "statolatry," or state worship (the same sin with which the Vatican charged Mussolini). Wilson believed that the state was a natural, organic, and spiritual expression of the people themselves. From the outset, he believed that the government and people should have an organic bond that reflected the "true spirit" of the people, or what the Germans called the Volksgeist. "Government is not a machine, but a living thing," he wrote in Congressional Government. "It falls not under the [Newtonian] theory of the universe, but under the [Darwinian] theory of organic life." From this perspective, the ever-expanding power of the state was entirely natural. Wilson, along with the vast majority of progressive intellectuals, believed that the increase in state power was akin to an inevitable evolutionary process. Governmental "experimentation," the watchword of pragmatic liberals from Dewey and Wilson to FDR, was the social analogue to evolutionary adaptation. Constitutional democracy, as the founders understood it, was a momentary phase in this progression. Now it was time for the state to ascend to the next plateau. "Government," Wilson wrote approvingly in The State, "does now whatever experience permits or the times demand."8 Wilson was the first president to speak disparagingly of the Constitution.
Wilson reinforced such attitudes by attacking the very idea of natural and individual rights. If the original, authentic state was a dictatorial family, Wilson argued in the spirit of Darwin, what historical basis was there to believe in individual rights? "No doubt," he wrote, taking dead aim at the Declaration of Independence, "a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle." If a law couldn't be executed, it wasn't a real law, according to Wilson, and "abstract rights" were vexingly difficult to execute.
Wilson, of course, was merely one voice in the progressive chorus of the age. "[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many," declared the progressive social activist Jane Addams. "Now men are free," explained Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading progressive theologian of the Social Gospel movement, in 1896, "but it is often the freedom of grains of sand that are whirled up in a cloud and then dropped in a heap, but neither cloud nor sand-heap have any coherence." The remedy was obvious: "New forms of association must be created. Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life." Elsewhere Rauschenbusch put it more simply: "Individualism means tyranny."9 In a sense, the morally inverted nonsense made famous by Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s — "oppressive freedom," "repressive tolerance," "defensive violence" — was launched by the progressives decades earlier. "Work makes you free," the phrase made famous by the Nazis, was anticipated by progressives who believed that collectivism was the new "freedom."
America is today in the midst of an obscene moral panic over the role of Christians in public life. There is a profound irony in the fact that such protests issue most loudly from self-professed "progressives" when the real progressives were dedicated in the most fundamental way to the Christianization of American life. Progressivism, as the title of Washington Gladden's book suggested, was "applied Christianity." The Social Gospel held that the state was the right arm of God and was the means by which the whole nation and world would be redeemed. But while Christianity was being made into a true state religion, its transcendent and theological elements became corrupted.
These two visions — Darwinian organicism and Christian messianism — seem contradictory today because they reside on different sides of the culture war. But in the Progressive Era, these visions complemented each other perfectly. And Wilson embodied this synthesis. The totalitarian flavor of such a worldview should be obvious. Unlike classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil, or simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn't want to behave, let alone "evolve." Your home, your private thoughts, everything was part of the organic body politic, which the state was charged with redeeming.
Hence a phalanx of progressive reformers saw the home as the front line in the war to transform men into compliant social organs. Often the answer was to get children out of the home as quickly as possible. An archipelago of agencies, commissions, and bureaus sprang up overnight to take the place of the anti-organic, contra-evolutionary influences of the family. The home could no longer be seen as an island, separate and sovereign from the rest of society. John Dewey helped create kindergartens in America for precisely this purpose — to shape the apples before they fell from the tree — while at the other end of the educational process stood reformers like Wilson, who summarized the progressive attitude perfectly when, as president of Princeton, he told an audience, "Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life...[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can."10
If the age of parliamentary democracy was coming to an end — as progressives and fascists alike proclaimed — and the day of the organic redeemer state was dawning, then the Constitution must evolve or be thrown into the dustbin of history. Wilson's writings are chockablock with demands that the "artificial" barriers established in our "antiquated" eighteenth-century system of checks and balances be smashed. He mocked the "Fourth of July sentiments" of those who still invoked the founding fathers as a source for constitutional guidance. He believed the system of governmental checks and balances had "proven mischievous just to the extent to which they have succeeded in establishing themselves as realities."11 Indeed, the ink from Wilson's pen regularly exudes the odor of what we today call the living Constitution. On the campaign trail in 1912, Wilson explained that "living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of Life...it must develop." Hence "all that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle."12 As we've seen, this interpretation leads to a system where the Constitution means whatever the reigning interpreters of "evolution" say it means.
A more authentic form of leadership was needed: a great man who could serve both as the natural expression of the people's will and as a guide and master checking their darker impulses. The leader needed to be like a brain, which both regulates the body and depends on it for protection. To this end, the masses had to be subservient to the will of the leader. In his unintentionally chilling 1890 essay, Leaders of Men, Wilson explained that the "true leader" uses the masses like "tools." He must not traffic in subtleties and nuance, as literary men do. Rather, he must speak to stir their passions, not their intellects. In short, he must be a skillful demagogue.
"Only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses," Wilson wrote. "They must get their ideas very absolutely put, and are much readier to receive a half truth which they can promptly understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen all at once. The competent leader of men cares little for the internal niceties of other people's characters: he cares much — everything — for the external uses to which they may be put...He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates...It is the power which dictates, dominates; the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader."13 A cynic might concede that there is much truth in Wilson's interpretation, but he would at least acknowledge his own cynicism. Wilson believed he was an idealist.