George W. Bush, Tony Blair e Woodrow Wilson

Num momento em que o "idealismo Wilsoniano" está na ordem do dia, vale a pena ler (ou reler) o artigo 'W' is for Wilson?, de James Pinkerton:

George W. Bush and Tony Blair are out to change the world. If they have their way, the future will be more democratic but also more big-spending statist -- including, inevitably, here in the US.###

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For neoconservatives, most of them ex-Democrats, Wilsonianism is catnip, recalling the days when their ancestral party stood for robustly remaking the world. But more traditional conservatives and libertarians might reflect for a moment on just who Wilson was, asking themselves whether they really want the 43rd President to walk in the 28th President's footsteps.

Wilson was a religious perfectionist who won World War One, but then lost the peace at the Versailles conference in 1919 and then, later that same year, lost the politics of his hoped-for New World Order when the US Senate refused to join the League of Nations.

Yet for those with a limited-government orientation, Wilson's domestic record is equally noteworthy. During his first term, the president was merely a liberal Democrat; he ushered in the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Trade Commission, and a small federal income tax. But after he was re-elected, in 1916, he swung far to the left. World War One, declared just a month after his second inauguration, was his rationale for Big Government, followed by Bigger Government. Citing the war emergency, he raised the top income tax rate from seven percent to 77 percent; yet when the war ended in 1918, he refused to lower that punitive and counter-productive top rate.

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Perhaps Wilson's contemporary, H.L. Mencken, was too harsh when he declared, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." Or maybe he had it exactly right.

In any case, Mencken is dead, and alas, there's no contemporary figure able to replicate his incisively libertarian vituperation. And so in the absence of effective criticism from the right or the left, Bush will likely join Blair in the creation of a new welfare-warfare paradigm across the globe. The US will provide the grand ideology of freedom, enforced by a costly Pentagon, while the UK will further coax Americans to pay for the world's wellbeing. This new course for the 21st century will certainly be expensive, it will probably prove heartbreaking, it might possibly evince moral clarity -- and it will definitely not be conservative.