The More Things Change, The More They Remain the Same

Today I finally finished the Kearns-Goodwin book, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. I enjoyed it as much as anything I've read in a long while, mostly for all the parallels between the issues then and now, e.g. the influence of big business and big money in politics, questions about regulating and/or breaking up the big trusts. And the biggest parallel of all, the breakup of the Republican party. 

Back then it was the progressives vs. the establishment party bosses as opposed to the tea baggers, but the similarities are marked. Committed progressives were willing to let Democrats win before they would compromise on their principle, just as tea baggers are today.

Some of the issues that the progressives fought for, and which made a lot of sense at the time, look somewhat different at this historical distance. I'm thinking specifically of the primaries as a means of choosing candidates as opposed to having those decisions made by party leaders. At least on the Republican side, we can see what that has led to: Michelle Backmann, Rick Perry and several other doofusses debating the theory of evolution. Well, actually they aren't having a debate because they all "think" alike, but this hardly seems like progress.

I don't know if Kearns-Goodwin had these parallels in mind when she wrote the book, but I can't help but believe she did. They are just too omni-present. I promise you can't read the book without thinking of the situation today at almost every turn. Even TR's justifications for going to war over Cuba sound eerily like GW's rationalizations for going into Iraq. (Fifty years after we saved the Cubans from Spanish oppression, they had to have a revolution to save themselves from us, or at least from our corrupt Cuban dictator friends. Whatever Iraq looks like in forty years, I'll wager it will be like nothing George and Dick promised us.)

One thing that delighted me throughout the book was the discovery of Taft. The book really fleshes him out (no, really, that is not a weight joke), and he seems like a remarkably erudite and also exceptionally likable fellow. It is dangerous to form an opinion of an historical figure from only one source, still I can't help but like the guy that Goodwin portrays. And, according to her, all of his contemporaries felt the same. For anyone as ignorant of Taft as I was, the book is worthwhile just to learn more about him. 

We currently are at the beginning of what I hope will become a real debate about allowing the Post Office to perform some limited banking functions again. That was one of the things that TR, Taft and the Progressives fought for and achieved in 1911 and which existed until it was repealed in 1967. Elizabeth Warren and others are working to bring it back. It is too bad that progressives have to keep fighting the same battles over and over again.

Another battle that TR and the Progressives fought and won was to keep corporate money out of elections. I'm not clear what Taft's position was, but I think he agreed. Now, as everyone knows, we have once again regressed and need to fight that same fight all over again, only now the abuses of big money in our elections are beyond anything the people of that earlier era could have imagined.

One difference between the two eras is that the voices of today's progressive journalists are being drowned out by the overabundance of nonsense and the fact that journalism as an institution is in a state of flux. Plenty of good investigative journalists are still around, but their work isn't having much of an impact.

When I see that we are not only fighting the same battles that progressives were fighting a century ago, because much of the progress that was made then has been rolled back and the abuses now are greater than ever, it seems to me that public funding of elections is one sensible solution to the abuses of money in politics.

I don't think any of us should hold our breath.