Posts
Opposing Statism: The Incomplete Conservative Argument
Until recently, I had never been satisfied with with conventional explanations of the steady rise of American statism. Within the conservative pundit class there seems to be general agreement (or, at least, emphasis) that beginnings lay in the presidencies of Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson and the rise of the Progressives. To be sure, anti-Jeffersonian policies flourished in their administrations as it later did with F.D.R., Lyndon Johnson. But the nagging question for me was how, after the Founding period, did this trend -- more or less suddenly -- emerge? Say with Theodore Roosevelt...? So recent? What about the Hamiltonians, the Federalist Party? Some of our conservative voices, Glenn Beck, for example, will talk about Alexander Hamilton (a good start), but then they seem compelled to leap over a big chunk of history to the late Nineteenth Century. Why is that? What are they avoiding?
