Glenn Beck explodes at his media critics: Don’t you have more important things to do?

Theodore Roosevelt’s autobiography, Chapter X, excerpt from a longer paragraph recounting his time as President:

For the reasons I have already given in my chapter on the Governorship of New York, the Republican party, which in the days of Abraham Lincoln was founded as the radical progressive party of the Nation, had been obliged during the last decade of the nineteenth century to uphold the interests of popular government against a foolish and illjudged mock-radicalism. It remained the Nationalist as against the particularist or State’s rights party, and in so far it remained absolutely sound; for little permanent good can be done by any party which worships the State’s rights fetish or which fails to regard the State, like the county or the municipality, as merely a convenient unit for local self-government, while in all National matters, of importance to the whole people, the Nation is to be supreme over State, county, and town alike. But the State’s rights fetish, although still effectively used at certain times by both courts and Congress to block needed National legislation directed against the huge corporations or in the interests of workingmen, was not a prime issue at the time of which I speak. In 1896, 1898, and 1900 the campaigns were waged on two great moral issues: (1) the imperative need of a sound and honest currency; (2) the need, after 1898, of meeting in manful and straightforward fashion the extraterritorial problems arising from the Spanish War. On these great moral issues the Republican party was right, and the men who were opposed to it, and who claimed to be the radicals, and their allies among the sentimentalists, were utterly and hopelessly wrong. This had, regrettably but perhaps inevitably, tended to throw the party into the hands not merely of the conservatives but of the reactionaries; of men who, sometimes for personal and improper reasons, but more often with entire sincerity and uprightness of purpose, distrusted anything that was progressive and dreaded radicalism. These men still from force of habit applauded what Lincoln had done in the way of radical dealing with the abuses of his day; but they did not apply the spirit in which Lincoln worked to the abuses of their own day. Both houses of Congress were controlled by these men. Their leaders in the Senate were Messrs. Aldrich and Hale. The Speaker of the House when I became President was Mr. Henderson, but in a little over a year he was succeeded by Mr. Cannon, who, although widely differing from Senator Aldrich in matters of detail, represented the same type of public sentiment. There were many points on which I agreed with Mr. Cannon and Mr. Aldrich, and some points on which I agreed with Mr. Hale. I made a resolute effort to get on with all three and with their followers, and I have no question that they made an equally resolute effort to get on with me. We succeeded in working together, although with increasing friction, for some years, I pushing forward and they hanging back. Gradually, however, I was forced to abandon the effort to persuade them to come my way, and then I achieved results only by appealing over the heads of the Senate and House leaders to the people, who were the masters of both of us. I continued in this way to get results until almost the close of my term; and the Republican party became once more the progressive and indeed the fairly radical progressive party of the Nation.

Teddy Roosevelt considered himself to be no conservative but a Progressivist and a radical one. It is far more than just this section, but seen from his earliest times to the end of the autobiography. To say that he wasn’t one goes against the very fiber of what TR told he was. Without the tools to analyze monopolies he was a ‘trust buster’, and yet modern economic analysis puts the length of a non-State supported monopoly at 15 years. IBM’s mainframe business ran a bit over that, as has MicroSoft’s PC O/S business, yet the first is gone and the second is giving way to internet devices, cellphones and a plethora of other devices that must interoperate beyond an operating system thus cutting into revenue for MS. Preventing businesses from buying up competitors is a good thing, yes, but they can’t do that indefinitely as the markets of any good or product has resources to reach to new venues and it is only when an oligopoly comes into being to set prices across a swath of firms that we must worry as no firm that grows large can remain nimble or to quickly adjust to changing markets. The Progressives demonized single monopolists, yet do nothing against oligopolies and then seek monopsonist route for government as single buyer, and none of these lead to greater liberty for us all.

Glenn Beck can be criticized on many grounds, but he has accurately reported on Teddy Roosevelt’s own writings, speeches and publications. There is much that I do admire about TR, he was truly a great man. He forgot that the power is in the office, not the man, and that once accrued to government such power is nearly impossible to remove without a major upheaval in society. I refuse to vote for Progressives in either party… and in supporting ‘sound fiscal policy’ that supports Progressive ends of government, that now includes much of the Republican party. A conservative party would be dismantling the government machine, not trying to run it ‘well’. And I have no trust in government to ‘help’ the common man, just treat all equally… and it no longer does that and hasn’t for decades.

ajacksonian on October 6, 2009 at 7:56 AM