In a recent article for the Atlantic, Republican columnist and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum responded to what he perceived to be President Woodrow Wilson’s unfairly declining reputation. In an attempt to “un-cancel” Wilson, whose legacy Frum feels has been wrongly maligned by members of the twenty-eighth president’s own Democratic Party, Frum reached across the aisle to extend qualified praise to Wilson, holding him up as a “great domestic reformer.”

Both Wilson’s greatest admirers and his most strident detractors today recognize that his legacy is about more than the man himself. Our analysis should be as well: we should try to comprehend what his presidency can tell us about the coalitional forces in Democratic Party politics. Understanding how and why Wilson’s loose “progressive” coalition failed offers lessons for the fractious political tendency that goes by the same name today.

Back then, as now, the Democratic Party was a conflicted big tent of centrist business elites, avaricious war hawks, working-class Americans, and technocratic reformers. With vague and contradictory gestures to organized labor and wary capital, Wilson’s Democrats promised a revitalized and reformed America. They did not deliver.

Wilson himself was contemptuous of democracy and mass politics. His technocratic philosophy, alliances with business, and deep-seated racism led directly to the US invasion of Haiti and the failure of his post–World War I peace plan. Domestically, President Wilson did achieve some progressive reforms — because he was pushed by workers outside of Washington, as well as progressives inside the capital more aligned with those workers than he was. Yet Wilson’s tepid support for labor and his outright hostility toward radicalism constrained these accomplishments and kept him from cultivating a coalition that could sustain them after his presidency was over.

Today we don’t need another Woodrow Wilson. We need another political movement like the one behind his limited successes, and a president willing to be pushed forward by such a movement rather than push back.

Technocratic Progressivism

Abraham Lincoln once described American democracy as “by the people, for the people.” Wilson was not so sure about that first part. Born into America’s disintegrating First Republic in Virginia in 1856, Wilson came of age during Reconstruction, in which federal power countered white supremacy in the South in order to realize the postwar promises of black civil rights. White elites called this chaos and anarchy.