rip william rehnquist
Out of context: Reply #16
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- JazX0
Historically speaking, there have been worse presidents than Bush and Nixon, it's just not on as grand of a scale.
Lincoln: Wether for good or bad, the first Republican President, ruled the nation through the bitter years of the Civil War as almost a virtual dictator, and limits imposed by the Constitution were ignored.
Another of the Founding Fathers of the United States, John Adams' name will forever be linked with the Alien and Sedition Acts.
- Woodrow Wilson
- Franklin Roosevelt
- Abraham LincolnLincoln was the great evil genius of the nineteenth century in America. He was not merely the worst American president of that century; he was the worst American. And Roosevelt was the Lincoln — and the worst American — of the last century. Wilson, for his part, was the most important link between the two.
Lincoln swept away what remained of the decrepit and morbidly inflated federal Republic, and created the imperial United State. The dust of history's battles often takes a while to settle, and a hundred years later people on their way into the dustbin of history were still wailing about "states' rights." But as Shelby Foote and other historians have pointed out, before Lincoln came to power Americans said, "The United States are ..." and, after Lincoln, they began saying, "The United States is ..." That was a fatal change in people's mental image of the nation-state that ruled them, and it reflected the underlying reality all too well. (My own coinage — "United State" — is only a gesture toward politico-grammatical correctness.)
Wilson inherited the continental empire Lincoln secured and the infant foreign empire forged by McKinley and guarded by Theodore Roosevelt. By injecting the United State into the first installment of Europe's great civil war, Wilson ensured the nation's role as indispensable partner and presumptive heir of the British Empire. By injecting the United State into the second installment of that civil war, and blasting the Japanese Empire's own expectations of inheritance, Franklin Roosevelt consummated the imperial succession.
Lincoln and Wilson were fascists before fascism was cool, and Roosevelt was the great fascist champion of anti-fascism. Lincoln implemented the Whig/Republican program, Wilson the national-liberal or "Progressive" program, and Roosevelt the updated program of liberal corporate statism. Crucially assisted by their foreign wars (and Lincoln's invasion of the seceded South was a foreign war), all three men racheted up the power of the Central Government and, in so doing, enhanced the power of their sponsors in the ruling class. Lincoln, indeed, initiated the transformation of a mercantile and creditor class that enjoyed important, but limited, exploitative privileges into a true ruling class.