The Deadly Perils of Predatory Idealism
How would people react if, on the third time their broken-down car was towed to the same repair shop for the same problem, the swaggering mechanic told them: “Sure — the engine doesn’t work today but — follow me on this — next year, you will drive from coast to coast, and get 90 miles to the gallon!”
Yet if a politician promises to fix the world, people applaud and follow him regardless of previous crashes.
Woodrow Wilson revolutionized the political exploitation of idealism. In his 1917 speech to Congress calling for war against Germany, Wilson proclaimed that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” He described the U.S. government as “one of the champions of the rights of mankind” and stated the goal of the war was to “bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”
Wilson endlessly invoked the ideal of liberty as he seized nearly absolute power over Americans, including the power to conscript millions of Americans to fight wherever he chose (including Siberia) and to commandeer entire industries.
While Wilson is today hailed as a visionary, in his own time, he became loathed as a demagogue. The more people embraced the ideals he proclaimed, the easier it became to defraud them. Americans’ idealism was fanned by ruthless censorship of any criticism of the government’s war effort.
The 1919 Paris peace talks shredded Wilson’s pretensions and made a mockery of the cause for which he sent more than a hundred thousand Americans to their death. One of Wilson’s top aides, Henry White, later commented: “We had such high hopes of this adventure; we believed God called us and now we are doing hell’s dirtiest work.” Historian Thomas Fleming, the author of The Illusion of Victory, noted, “The British and French exploited the war to forcibly expand their empires and place millions more people under their thumbs.” Fleming concluded that one lesson of World War I is that “idealism is not synonymous with sainthood or virtue. It only sounds that way.”
The 1920 presidential election was a referendum on Wilson-style idealism. As H. L. Mencken wrote on the eve of the vote, Americans were tired “of a steady diet of white protestations and black acts; they are weary of hearing highfalutin and meaningless words; they sicken of an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious.” Mencken explained why a typical voter would support Warren Harding: “Tired to death of intellectual charlatanry, he turns despairingly to honesty imbecility.”
Herbert Hoover’s subjugation idealism
Herbert Hoover, who campaigned as the Mastermind of the Age when he was elected president in 1928, invoked idealism to perpetuate subjugating foreigners to U.S. rule. When Congress enacted a bill to provide for the independence of the Philippine Islands, Hoover vetoed it in early 1933 because “We have a responsibility to the world … to develop and perfect freedom for these people.” Hoover rejected Congress’s bill because “it does not fulfill the idealism with which this task in human liberation was undertaken.” As long as the United States had not given Filipinos “perfect freedom,” it was entitled
to keep them under its thumb. Hoover’s assertion that idealism spurred the U.S. policy is difficult to reconcile with the killings of scores of thousands of Filipinos who resisted the
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
