Utopian
rhetoric is so commonplace in our political life that we scarcely
question or even notice it. Part of Charles Kesler’s achievement in I Am the Change is to help us see that familiar utopianism in all its strangeness.
Consider a commencement address by newly elected senator
Barack Obama at Knox College in 2005. “So let’s dream,” said our future
president. Make sure that college is “affordable for everyone who wants
to go,” among other things, and “that old Maytag plant could re-open
its doors as an Ethanol refinery that turned corn into fuel. Down the
street, a biotechnology research lab could open up on the cusp of
discovering a cure for cancer.” How did we reach the point where a
politician could, as Kesler writes, “dangle before the citizens of
Galesburg, Illinois, home of Knox College, the prospect not merely of a
biotech research lab opening up down the street, but one that is on the
verge of curing cancer”?
The answer lies in the three waves of progressivism that
have washed over America in the last century. Kesler — a professor of
government at Claremont McKenna College, editor of the Claremont Review of Books,
and longtime ornament of these pages — has been studying this history
for his entire career. He illuminates it mostly through close and
characteristically wry attention to the words of the progressive
presidents associated with each of those waves: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. He identifies them as the leaders
of attempts to transform the country’s politics, economics, and
culture, respectively.
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