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No elaborate catechism is required to determine whether someone is a conservative. A single question, as simple as it is infallible, suffices: For whom would you have voted in the presidential election of 1912?That year, a former president and a future president ran against the incumbent president, who lost, as did the country, which would have been much better off giving another term to William Howard Taft. Instead it got Woodrow Wilson and the modern imperial presidency that had been prefigured by Taft’s predecessor and second major opponent in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt. Taft won fewer electoral votes (eight, from Utah and Vermont) than any other incumbent president; Roosevelt carried six states, Wilson 40 . . .. . . Wilson was the first president to criticize the American Founding, particularly for the separation of powers that crimps presidential supremacy. Roosevelt believed that presidents are free to do whatever the Constitution does not forbid. Taft’s constitutional modesty held that presidents should exercise only powers explicitly granted by the document . . .. . . Taft correctly compared Roosevelt to the first populist president (whose portrait would be hung in the Oval Office in 2017 by a populist president): “There is a decided similarity between Andrew Jackson and Roosevelt. He had the same disrespect for law when he felt the law stood between him and what he thought was right to do." The 1912 strife between conservative and progressive-populist Republicans simmered until Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 sealed conservatism’s ascendancy in the party. This lasted 36 years, until it was supplanted by its antithesis, populism, 104 years after Taft resisted Roosevelt. This, for a while, prevented Americans from having only a populist Republican party to oppose a progressive Democratic party — an echo, not a choice.
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Topic: Taft, the Anti-Populist (Read 310 times)
