A video clip recently featured on Illinois Review extolling Teddy Roosevelt as a "progressive conservative" has stirred some offline discussion about whether Republicans should be so proud of TR and his political ideology after all. Indeed, Roosevelt is criticized in Jonah Goldberg's new book "Liberal Fascism" as a fascist. Goldberg's conclusions were highlighted on the American Vision blog, where Gary DeMar writes:
Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is an eye-opener. We’ve been taught that fascism is a foreign-born ideology that spawned the political aspirations of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. In reality, fascism has had a long history in America. The political philosophies of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are textbook examples of fascism. Do you find this hard to take? Here’s what Goldberg says on the subject:
Wilson revered [Otto von] Bismarck as much as Teddy Roosevelt or any of the other progressives did. . . . Bismarck’s motive was to forestall demands for more democracy by giving people the sort of thing they might ask for at the polls. His top-down socialism was a Machiavellian masterstroke because it made the middle class dependent upon the state. The middle class took away from this the lesson that enlightened government was not the product of democracy but an alternative. . . . As Wilson put it, the essence of progressivism was that the individual “marry his interests to the state.”1
The type of fascism that was being promoted by these early American “Progressives” is what we might call today “smiley-face-fascism” in that there are no jack-booted troops marching through the streets or calls for the suspension of habeas corpus. Bismarck’s social policies are very much like our own and those of anther fascist.
So, should TR be listed as a model Republican?
