Rewinding Woodrow Wilson

re-litigating the long 20th century

I’m still trying to untangle the Big Beautiful Bill, which I read — well, “read,” with tactical skimming — before the Senate garbled it. But so far, it echoes: It reflects the premises of Project 2025, that scary thing that Democrats kept screeching about like lizard people, Hitler Hitler something something. If you don’t remember, this is what Project 2025 offered as a Bottom Line Up Front summary of intent:

1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.

2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.

3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.

4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

And it looks to me like….that. Or at least the starter kit for building that. Self-governance, the family, sovereignty and borders, the right to live freely. I know that there are Trump voters who have a list of disappointments, and I understand that list. But I think we’ve now had a series of opening salvos in a generational effort to gradually restore the American republic to pre-Progressive Era promise of ordered liberty, and I think a great deal of it points in the right direction. It’s imperfect, but successfully libertarian in some ways and successfully conservative in some ways. It repudiates the core of the capital-P Progressive project.

In a famous speech, Woodrow Wilson promised to be a scold and a social engineer:

I was once a college reformer, until discouraged, and I remember a classmate of mine saying, "Why, man, can't you let anything alone?" I said, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going downhill"; and I borrowed this illustration from an ingenious writer. He says, "If you have a post that is painted white and want to keep it white, you cannot let it alone; and if anybody says to you, 'Why don't you let that post alone,' you will say, 'Because I want it to stay white, and therefore I have got to paint it at least every second year.'" There isn't anything in this world that will not change if you absolutely let it alone, and therefore you have constantly to be attending to it to see that it is being taken care of in the right way and that, if it is part of the motive force of the world, it is moving in the right direction.

Wilson promised that government wouldn’t leave anything alone — that the federal government would “attend” to the society it would manage, pushing it steadily in the direction it regarded as the right one.

In a ghostwritten revamping of campaign speeches — what politicians call a “book” — Wilson tacitly rejected the Castle Doctrine — a man’s home is his castle, private and free — because we modern folk don’t live like old-fashioned rural families in farmhouses anymore. Here’s all of pg. 27, and think about everything that this framing implies:

We’ve made progress: For example, government authority extends to your home, which is now a shared and collectivized thing. An official routinely “goes up the stairway” where you live: progress.

So the Big Beautiful Bill, on my reading so far — I’ll listen to people who want to talk me out of this — seems above all to restore the division of public and private, and to begin the reduction of federal power. Elsewhere, the Trump administration has announced the final verdict on USAID: “As of July 1st, USAID will officially cease to implement foreign assistance.” The administration has closed a whole government agency, a big one, that was expensive, powerful, and a core project of the technocratic managerial class. After a century-plus in which federal growth and new agencies were offered as proof of political success and good intent — Nixon and the EPA, Carter and the Department of Education, Bush and Homeland Security — an administration is announcing proudly that they got rid of some government.

So the Center for American Progress, for example, announces that the BBB is a nightmarish horror show that RUINS EVERYTHING, and some of their examples are that the federal government will treat Planned Parenthood as a private organization and stop feeding it tax money for a while, that the bill provides tax benefits to people who contribute to private school voucher programs, incentivizing the expansion of non-government education for children, and that Russ Vought gets more money for staffing on a project to identify ways to keep shrinking the federal bureaucracy. I mean, don’t threaten me with a good time, right?

It’s early, the bill is enormous (I would prefer single-subject bills), and the way the thing works in practice is very much up in the air. But my first read is that Donald Trump has won the first round of the Donald Trump-Woodrow Wilson cage match, and Project 2025 was a real foundation for a practical restoration of restraint and the acknowledgement of the private freedom to think and act outside the policing of the federal social engineers. My take so far is that the BBB is about rebuilding the world of the private and the individual.

I welcome your thoughts on it.