Hayward takes the approach of rating the presidents based on their job description, which is basically:
- Preside over the military as commander-in-chief
- Execute the laws passed by congress
- Ensure the laws passed are constitutional (if not, veto them)
- Nominate Supreme Court justices
Furthermore, the President must take this oath of office:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."Hayward's book is important because it reviews each of the presidents starting with Woodrow Wilson and grades them according to how well the performed the job description and upheld the oath they took when they were sworn in. He starts with Wilson in 1913 because it was Wilson who first significantly expanded the job of president beyond the job description laid out in the Constitution. Before Wilson, presidents performed their duty by commanding the military in times of war (e.g. Lincoln, Madison) or keeping the congress in check by vetoing unconstitutional laws (Hayward gives wonderful examples from Madison, Pierce, Buchanan and Cleveland).
I agreed with most of Hayward's ratings for the early presidents. But for the presidents since Reagan, I thought he had a Republican vs. Democrat bias which wasn't supported by the examples he provided. Since this book was published in the election year of 2012, I believe part of the purpose was to get people to vote against Obama and so the later rankings had a partisan bias. Below are my rankings based on his examples and my own understanding of history.
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| Presidents ranked according to how much they followed the Constitution in preserving liberty in America, including how much the government interfered with the economy. Arrows show the Four Waves of Liberalism according to Charles Kesler. |
Calvin Coolidge deserves an A+ because he worked hard to uphold the Constitution and keep the government out of the people's lives. He understood that America is founded on capitalism, and it is the job of the government to protect Americans so they can be free to produce. He famously said:
"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of our people will always find these are moving impulses of our life."I believe this is a big part of Tracinski's "What Went Right?" theory of bottom-up, implicit philosophy. If the people are "profoundly concerned" with the process of capitalism, they implicitly need to be concerned with individualism, reason and objective reality, the three underlying philosophical ideas supporting capitalism (more on this in a future post).
Reagan gets an A+ because he took a principled approach to decreasing the size and scope of government. Perhaps the biggest consequence of his principled approach was the fall of communism which, until Obama, deflated the liberal cause and slowed down the advance of the progressive's infringement on our rights.
The four presidents who rate an F in my analysis are also the four presidents who have brought about the Four Waves of Liberalism, according to Charles Kesler. The four waves are, briefly:
- Woodrow Wilson and the New Freedom: Wilson claimed the Constitution was out-dated and worked to expand the office of the president in violation of the Constitution. He initiated new controls on the economy with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act and the Federal Reserve System.
- FDR and the New Deal: Roosevelt, following Wilson's lead, went crazy with new expansions of government interference over the economy, including Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
- Johnson and the Great Society: Johnson wanted to use the Federal Government to correct all the evils he saw in society, which led to his War on Poverty, included Food Stamps, Medicare/Medicaid, and greatly increased federal funding for education.
- Obama and Obamacare: Barack Obama and the democratic majorities in the House and Senate rammed through the "Affordable Care Act," better-known as Obamacare, in a strictly partisan vote using back-room deals and threats to get the necessary votes. If Obamacare can be repealed, perhaps that will be the beginning of a trend to repeal the programs in the previous three waves of liberalism.
Overall, Hayward's book is well worth reading, if only to put the current attacks on liberty by the Obama administration into context. If America can survive the previous attacks from Wilson, FDR and LBJ, we can surely survive Obama.
Sean,
ReplyDeletethe problem with the notion of America surviving Obama is very simple: the attacks were not so much from Wilson or FDR or LBJ or Obama, they were, as Charles Murray conclusive demonstrates in his book Coming Apart, from the working classes of the US, and in later times more violently from welfare recipients.
Although this political radicalism can be traced to the Franklin Roosevelt era when many workers in the industrial Northeast were eager to see a much more radical system of socialism than even the New Deal (although it is true that unlike in Eurasia there was some counterweight to the socialist working class with movements like the Catholic Worker of Dorothy Day) it really came of age in the Reagan Era with the rise of the Boom Generation. When in 1984 Reagan came close to a “clean sweep” of 50 states, the Boomers who were not voting were taking their beliefs from AC/DC and Metallica. In fact the rigid nihilism preached in AC/DC’s songs is of itself much more radical than the income equalisation preached by earlier socialists, simply because if people are allowed to do anything they want to someone at the whim of their own feelings, equalisation must proceed much more radically than merely to protect the poor from the problems of not being able to afford necessities.