Chris Bray writes for the Federalist about a disappointing presidential library.
From a distance, it looked extremely promising, designed to blend in with a magnificent American landscape in what appeared to be a declaration of moral modesty and ideological restraint: a promise to focus on America. …
… When you look back from the land to the building, you keep seeing the contours of the land. It’s like the place is telling you to look at America.
The crowd read the signals the same way I did, because they showed up ready to hear an American story centered on respect for the place and its people.
And then, unfortunately, we entered.
Here’s the story: America was very bad, and then Theodore Roosevelt rolled up his sleeves and got to work on fixing it through bold progressive reforms. He was a man of great virtue and strength, because he spent his life holding government positions. This is the highest human calling. Living in service, Roosevelt saw the great dangers of private enterprise, and he spent his life fighting the greed of the corporations. He made the federal government much bigger and more powerful, so in the end he really did achieve greatness. He was the man in the arena, and the arena is government. That’s the thing that matters, the place where good men spend their worthwhile lives.
The library of a Republican president refers without an apparent second thought to the need to reconstruct society through government intervention in order to defeat “class interests.” How would Bernie Sanders put that differently?
And so the story of Teddy Roosevelt is a good one, because it’s about “stronger federal government.”
The language of 2026 is all over the place, and the effect is that you see Teddy Roosevelt over and over while you keep hearing the ghost of Elizabeth Warren in the background.
