T.R. was no conservative.

Ron Prestritto reminds fellow conservatives that Teddy Roosevelt, who eventually left the Republican Party to run in the Progressive Party, was hardly a fellow conservative:

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.

It was the Republican TR, who insisted in his 1910 speech on the “New Nationalism” that there was a “general right of the community to regulate” the earning of income and use of private property “to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” He was at one here with Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who had in 1885 condemned Americans’ respect for their Constitution as “blind worship,” and suggested that his countrymen dedicate themselves to the Declaration of Independence by leaving out its “preface” — i.e., the part of it that establishes the protection of equal natural rights as the permanent task of government.

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.

TR turns this on its head.

Read the whole thing. T.R. was certainly an appealing fellow and with his men’s man mistique — Rough Riders and all — it’s easy to see how conservatives would get caught up in it. But T.R. and Woodrow Wilson really did establish modern liberalism as we know it. Indeed, what I never realized until I read it in Jonah Goldberg’s book, was that Benito Mussolini learned and borrowed heavily from Wilson in establishing Italian fascism, which far from being a right-wing ideology, established the national workers movement which both Hitler and Stalin would in turn mimic. Nazi is, after all, shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.