Roosevelt House: Patricia O'Toole- The Moralist: 'Woodrow Wilson and The World He Made'

Source:Roosevelt House- A Patricia O'Toole book event about Woodrow Wilson. 

"Roosevelt House as we welcome acclaimed historian Patricia  O’Toole and mark the publication of her already acclaimed new book, The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made. O’Toole, the prize-winning biographer of  Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams, will be in conversation with David Nasaw, the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at CUNY Graduate Center and the author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, among other books.

O’Toole and Nasaw will discuss the life and legacy of one of the most high-minded, consequential, and controversial U. S. presidents, and explore O’Toole’s argument that the Wilson presidency offers a cautionary tale about the perils of moral vanity and American overreach in foreign affairs. The speakers will also address the paradoxes that mark Wilson’s career: he was a progressive who enjoyed unprecedented success in leveling the economic playing field, but he was behind the times on racial equality and women’s suffrage. As a Southern boy during the Civil War, he knew the ravages of war, as president he refused to lead the country into World War I until he was convinced that Germany posed a direct threat to the United States. Once committed, he was an admirable commander-in-chief, yet he also presided over harsh suppression of political dissent, and, as president, the re-segregation of the federal government.

Welcoming remarks by Roosevelt House Director Harold Holzer.

Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, May 15, 2018."

From Roosevelt House

If you want to call Woodrow Wilson a Liberal or even a Liberal Democrat, that's fine but should at leas know what those terms mean:

From Wikipedia

"Liberal democracy, is a liberal political philosophy and form of government that operators under the principles of classical liberalism."

President Woodrow Wilson, was someone who believed in liberal democracy ( perhaps not for all like African-Americans, American-Indians, and women ) and all the liberal values ( except for qual justice and equal rights ) that come with liberal democracy. Like representative democracy, checks and balances, the rule of law, open society, a market economy, property rights, equal justice, equal rights, human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, political freedom for all people. ( Again, except for the groups that I mentioned ) Not exactly the values that so-called liberals ( closeted Socialists, in actuality ) tend to advocate for when they seem to be more interested in central government control over society on behalf of the people, as they would argue.

Woodrow Wilson is literally one of the architects of the liberal democratic order: a group of developed nations that see it as their role to defend and advocate for human rights and individual freedom around the world and speak out and act against nations and leaders that don't believe in those liberal values and instead advocate for authoritarianism and central government control over the people. And that this coalition of democracies, both liberal and social work in coalition to protect themselves from authoritarians who are threats to their freedom and sovereignty and to help other countries who want democracy and freedom for themselves achieve those values as well.

Woodrow Wilson, was in power a 100 years ago and his politics of liberal democratic values, to go along with progressive economic values, along with being essentially a Neo-Confederate when it came to race relations and treatment of non-European-Americans in society, aren't represented by anyone today. We still have Liberal Democrats. We still have Progressives. And we still have Neo-Confederates who are known as Nationalists today on the Right. But we don't have a political faction or even individuals in America that you could call a Wilsonian who represents all of Woodrow Wilson's politics, because it's a 100 years later and and American politics is a lot different, but also when someone tends to be Center-Left ( let's say ) on economic and foreign policy, they also tend to be liberal or progressive on social issues as well.

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