by Mike Gray

Wilson gave the finest sermon for what humans are capable of if they are not human. — George Clemenceau

Woodrow Wilson’s brand of oblique racism—publicly professing one viewpoint while pushing policies that affirm its opposite—has been the modus operandi of most “progressives” for nearly a century.

At Accuracy in Academia, Malcolm A. Kline has written about Wilson’s hypocritical stance on segregation:

Few presidents are as revered as Woodrow Wilson in academia. He was, after all, the last academic elected to America’s highest office.

Beyond that, much ink is spilled and many lectures devoted to his policies which many professors are enamored of, chiefly the progressive income tax at home and the League of Nations abroad … [however] we should highlight a Wilsonian trend in policy that is relevant to both his national and international outlook—segregation.

A kinder, gentler racism would almost inevitably be part of any “progressivist” program, or what Jonah Goldberg has called “liberal fascism”:

The side of fascism [Goldberg] attributes to American liberalism is not that associated with the works of George Orwell or the racism and genocide of the Holocaust. It is much less brutal, “smiley-face fascism,” as he puts it. He asserts that liberals hold political principles which are similar to those found in many fascist regimes. They have a desire to form a powerful state which coordinates a society where everybody belongs and everyone is taken care of; where there is faith in the perfectibility of people and the authority of experts; and where everything is political, including health and well-being. Apparently, the Nazis were strong promoters of organic foods and animal rights, fought against large department stores, and promoted antismoking and public health drives.

“The Nazi war on smoking would make Michael Bloomberg’s heart jump,” Goldberg jokingly said.

According to Goldberg, fascism has a long history in American politics, spanning back to Woodrow Wilson. . . . [From Amanda Busse’s 2008 blog entry on Accuracy in Academia]

Maintaining order being Job One for any fascist state, things and people would need to be put in their proper places of subordination. Far from being the champions of liberty and independence for persons of color, today’s “progressives,” through massive spending for entitlement programs, are able to keep up the pretense that they’re “just here to help.” Thus, blacks, yellows, and browns are kept “in their proper places” through bribery; and so potentially disruptive elements are confined to the “progressive plantation,” their votes secured via a process that would result in prison time for anyone not wrapping himself in the flag and hiding behind the protective shield of elective office.

Malcolm Kline also recently noted:

Although it may be a minority viewpoint among scholars, some intellectuals do not think that talk show host Glenn Beck’s criticism of President Woodrow Wilson goes far enough. “There would have been no Wilson if there had been no Lincoln,” Professor Marshall DeRosa said at a conference at Catholic University on September 5, 2010. “America has always been imperialist,” he alleged.

Yet what Abraham Lincoln, a president known for his breath-taking political pragmatism and “the greatest articulator of civil religion” [Jeffrey Polet], did contrasts sharply with Wilson’s actions:

For one thing, Lincoln not only freed the slaves but desegregated the nation’s capital and government. Wilson resegregated both, half a century later.

“We must sacrifice all that we are and all that we have to redeem the world and to make it fit for free men like ourselves to live in,” Wilson said in a 1918 speech at the Baltimore armory. Apparently, he really wanted black Americans to suck it up.

Unlike the pragmatic Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson was a persistent and consistent ideologue for the “progressive” cause, which requires of us, as Clemenceau observed, “what humans are capable of if they are not human.”