OUT ON A LIMB: There’s No Defending Woodrow Wilson.
Frum’s article, “Uncancel Woodrow Wilson,” appears in the March 2024 issue of the Atlantic. How perverse a choice is it to write on this now? Consider that the last thing the magazine published was a special issue dedicated to the topic “If Trump Wins,” warning of peril to the American system and the civil liberties of our people from a man who would come to the Oval Office with a dictatorial temperament and contempt for the constraints of our Constitution. Frum himself contributed a screed against the menace of such a president:
If he wins the election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United States will be a perjury. A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. . . . For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.
How terrible to contemplate a president who loathes the Constitution and is bent on permanently subverting it. And worse, imagine one who might win the job without a popular majority at his back, owing to an opposition divided by a third-party challenge:
If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition. Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three elections, Trump has become president for the second time.
If the nation indeed stands at such a precipice, you and I might think it the worst possible occasion to laud Woodrow Wilson. But you and I are not David Frum.
Back in 2013, Frum himself wrote:
Wilson was also the most disdainful racist to hold the presidency since Andrew Johnson in the 1860s. Wilson’s administration sought to remove black Americans from all but the most menial federal employment. Those who could not be removed were required to work in spaces screened from public view and to use segregated lunchrooms and toilets. When a black newspaper editor led a delegation to Washington to protest the introduction of Southern Jim Crow into the national government, Wilson — a slaveholder’s son — retorted that segregation “was not humiliating, but a benefit” to black people.
Wilson led the United States into the First World War in April 1917, justifying his decision in characteristically idealistic language: “to make the world safe for democracy.” Only five months before, he had won reelection on an antiwar platform: “he kept us out of war.”
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Yet these same admirers also quietly came to see Wilson as the very model of how not to be president: as a dogmatist, a chatterbox, and, ultimately, a loser. When it came their turn to decide issues of war and peace, they praised Wilson — then did just the opposite. That seems likely to be the lasting verdict of history, too.
So why the change of heart, and why now?