Old Nationalism

Yesterday, President Obama gave a speech in Osawotomie, Kansas, and among otherwise dull and uninteresting rhetoric, he claimed to be following in the footsteps of that conservative Republican, Teddy Roosevelt.  It was in Osawotomie in 1910 that TR gave his famous "New Nationalism" speech in which he declared, among other things, that there was a "general right of the community to regulate" both the earning of income and attainment of private property "to whatever degree the public welfare may require it."  As Ronald Pestritto has shown, TR was by no means a conservative in any sense of the word, and in fact, he worked to overturn much of what the Founders had set in place.  Here is Pestritto:

The fact that conservative politicians such as John McCain and writers like William Kristol and Karl Rove are attracted to our 26th president is strange because, if we want to understand where in the American political tradition the idea of unlimited, redistributive government came from, we need look no further than to Roosevelt and others who shared his outlook.

Progressives of both parties, including Roosevelt, were the original big-government liberals. They understood full well that the greatest obstacle to their schemes of social justice and equality of material condition was the U.S. Constitution as it was originally written and understood: as creating a national government of limited, enumerated powers that was dedicated to securing the individual natural rights of its citizens, especially liberty of contract and private property.

On TR's rejection of the enumerated powers of the Constitution:

In his "Autobiography," Roosevelt wrote that he "declined to adopt the view that what was imperatively necessary for the nation could not be done by the President unless he could find some specific authorization to do it." The national government, in TR's view, was not one of enumerated powers but of general powers, and the purpose of the Constitution was merely to state the narrow exceptions to that rule.

This is a view of government directly opposed by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 84. Hamilton explains there that the fundamental difference between a republican constitution and a monarchic one is that the latter reserves some liberty for the people by stating specific exceptions to the assumed general power of the crown, whereas the former assumes from the beginning that the power of the people is the general rule, and the power of the government the exception.

Far from Roosevelt being the shining example of a true conservative, he was a progressive who rejected the principles of the Founding and helped set in motion what would become the administrative state.  Unlike his constant self-comparisons to Abraham Lincoln, Obama's use of the politics of TR is really much more on point.