Sublime

John Podesta, the liberal political activist who later became Obama’s senior adviser, recalled that in the early days after the election “there was a sense of triumphalism, that Bush had crapped out, that he’d be Hoover and Obama would be Franklin Roosevelt and dominate. There was a feeling that the pendulum had swung and a new progressive era had

Reagan made free-market economics sound like the ally of the ordinary American, and government the enemy.

Interestingly, there was more than a little optimism in the wake of World War I, and diplomatic efforts to shape what was to be the postwar world began while fighting was still under way. Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth president of the United States, prioritized the creation of a standing international organization (which became the League of

The young idealist entered public service in the very year in which there came to crest a movement—Progressivism—that was based, to an extent greater perhaps than any other nationally successful American political movement, on an idealistic belief in man’s capacity to better himself through the democratic process.

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