More vaguely Roosevelt argued that laissez-faire economics had been superseded by a new, more efficient gospel of administrative supremacy. Edmund Morris, who in Theodore Rex was manifestly hypnotized by his hero’s sound and fury, argued that “the outdated system of laissez-faire . . . was accelerating out of control.” So, at any rate, Roosevelt believed. Rather than use government to promote freer, more competitive markets, he used it to promote government itself. The state, not the market place, was his ideal. In the Roosevelt lexicon “bourgeois” was a pejorative.

Yet if Roosevelt was not a capitalist, neither was he deeply or sincerely a Progressive. He was a man of the state. Robert La Follette perceived the falseness of his reformist strutting: “Theodore Roosevelt is the ablest living interpreter of what I would call the superficial public sentiment of a given time, and he is spontaneous in his reactions to it.” Teddy’s Progressive agenda was driven not by principle but by political opportunism and a heightened sensitivity to the mood of the moment. The deviousness with which he negotiated the shoals of public opinion might have passed for wisdom, had it not been so patently pressed into the service of self-glorification.

		Steyn: The Superbower Blase: A Medicaid Buy-Off Sanders: Blanche Lincoln’s Balancing Act Costa: Saturday Night Fever Miller: The Man Who Would Kill Lincoln Hibbs: Just Bite Her Already Goldberg: We Need Your Help Spruiell: Welcome to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Editors: End It, Don’t Amend It Goldberg: Palinophobes Hate First, Ask Questions Later Murdock: Medicare: A Glimpse of the Future? Krauthammer: Travesty in New York Charen: Holder’s True Motive Lowry: Barack Obama’s Chump Diplomacy Spakovsky: Criminalizing Health-Care Freedom Anderson: Roadmap to Victory

In advertising his hero-worship of Teddy, Sen. McCain exhibits a little too blatantly an aspect of his own psyche that would best be kept under wraps. He, too, has been accused of political narcissism. If he wants to reassure conservatives, he needs to persuade them that, unlike Roosevelt’s, his own policies will be grounded in something more solid than expediency and a canny reading of the whimsies of the moment.

* * *

There is another problem with McCain’s attempt to induct Roosevelt into the conservative pantheon. T.R.’s contempt for what he called the “gold-ridden, capitalist-bestridden, usurer-mastered” aspects of American life, his admiration for the élan of the warrior, did not reflect a conservative temperament, as conservatism is understood in America. True, the warrior virtues are, in the last resort, what keep us free. But it is possible to take one’s admiration of the iron-jointed, supple-sinewed hero (he who catches the wild goat by the hair and hurls his lances in the sun) too far, especially in a country like ours, a commercial and as a rule pacific nation.

In disparaging the “timid and short-sighted selfishness” of the “bourgeois type,” in cultivating the mystique of the warrior, an adoration of strength and muscle-tone, Roosevelt revealed his psyche to be tropically rank with that morbid second-growth of romanticism which Wagner and Bismarck, Treitschke and Nietzsche, did much to nourish in the latter decades of the 19th century.

In his 1915 book Händler und Helden (Merchants and Heroes), the German prophet-economist Werner Sombart offered a précis of the degenerate philosophy of late romanticism. Sombart glorified the heroic aspirations of the Germans, which, he maintained, were of a higher order than the piggishly commercial credos of the English (and by extension the Americans).

The union of the romantic yearning for the heroic-archaic and the socialist craving for an anti-capitalist utopia (to be administered by a vanguard of élite technocrats) which Sombart’s thought embodied led to those cults of blood and bureaucracy which spelled disaster, not only for Germany, but also for Russia and China, and for the many smaller countries which followed their examples.

The inbred, déclassé romanticism of Sombart was alive in the swampier places of the sage of Sagamore Hill’s soul. Teddy read the German romantics with enthusiasm and interpreted them to an American public; he shared their affection for the police power; he could rattle the saber with the best of them. There was something distinctly Bismarckian in his reactionary progressivism, which bears affinity to the pathology of “liberal fascism” identified by Jonah Goldberg.

* * *

All in all, John McCain would do best to talk more about Ronald Reagan, and less about Theodore Roosevelt. And while he is at it, he might come up with a new “favorite book,” one that isn’t, like For Whom the Bell Tolls, a maudlin lament for a socialist bridge-bomber.

— Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made.
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