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By Root 231 0

or reestablishing constitutional primacy by corrupting the Constitution itself. Having emptied it of its original purpose, the Constitution would become the vessel into which the utopians pour their agenda. The president is to be as powerful as he can, the courts are to rewrite the Constitution at will, and the Congress is to rule over state legislatures without limits. The federal government, therefore, could never be tamed. Its utopian direction could not be effectively altered. The entire American enterprise would be corrupted. Montesquieu observed that “in a popular state there must be an additional spring, which is VIRTUE. What I say is confirmed by the entire body of history and is quite in conformity with the nature of things.… [I]n a popular government when the laws have ceased to be executed, as this can come only from the corruption of the republic, the state is already lost” (1, 3, 3). In despotic government, “virtue is not at all necessary to it.…” (1, 3, 8)

So perverse was Wilson’s language and thinking that “virtue” would be defined by its opposite—deceit. Wilson advocated nothing short of a diabolical counterrevolution, by means of contorting the instrumentalities of government, to undo the purposes of the American Revolution. He sought to supplant the basic character of American society and the nation’s founding with a supreme central government. The greater the liberty and flexibility of the federal government to act, the more debilitated the individual, for he is the focus of its designs. The individual is, in fact, lost in this scheme. Locke explained that “freedom from absolute, arbitrary power is so necessary to, and closely joined with, a man’s preservation, that he cannot part with it but by what forfeits his preservation and life together.…” (4, 22)

A few decades later, Wilson’s post-constitutional utopianism would serve as a blueprint for Franklin Roosevelt. Much like Wilson, before climbing to the presidency Roosevelt revealed his own contempt for the Constitution’s limits on federal power. He, too, conflated the nature of civil society with the tyranny of unbridled government. Roosevelt also insisted that although the utopian counterrevolution was supported by most Americans, its full realization was thwarted by divisions among the utopians and obstructions by an intransigent conservative minority. In his 1926 Whither Bound address, Roosevelt argued, “In the methods of our governing … we have come to accept, or at least to discuss without fear, problems and methods formerly mentioned only by wild-eyed visionaries.… Probably on any given problem of modern life, if a count or classification could be made, the out-and-out conservatives would be found to be in a distant minority. Yet the majority would be so divided over the means by which to gain their ends that they could not present sufficient unity to obtain action. This has been the history of progress.… Measured by years the actual control of human affairs is in the hands of conservatives for longer periods than in those of liberals or radicals. When the latter do come into power, they translate the constantly working leaven of progress into law or custom or use, but rarely obtain enough time in control to make further economic or social experiments. None of us, therefore, need feel surprise that the government of our own country, for instance, is conservative by far the greater part of the time. Our national danger is, however, not that it may for four years or eight years become liberal or even radical, but that it may suffer from too long a period of the do-nothing or reactionary standards. Certainly it would appear on the surface that a natural advantage lies with those among us who dislike to see change. It is so much more easy to accept what we are told than to think things out for ourselves. It takes courage, too, to disagree with our everyday companions; the obvious path is simpler to follow than one of our own making.”18

Roosevelt repositioned the utopians as enlightened, modern, and futuristic, and, conversely, presented the advocates