The progressive era was the beginning of the United States having a nation that considered its people as so much cattle. Progressives had little use for constitutional restraints upon government power. They wished to give presidents godlike power; the president should be an elected monarch.
The first president to treat himself as a god among men was the vile racist Woodrow Wilson. The chronically dishonest Wilson pretended that the United States had no preference as to who won World War I. Wilson censored the news, preventing Americans from knowing about the hundreds of deadly acts of sabotage conducted against factories by German agents. In 1916, he had the temerity to run for reelection based on keeping the U.S. out of the war, only to enter the war on the pretense of outrage over German submarine attacks. Wilson then indulged his grandiose delusions by creating fourteen platitudes, and reshaping Europe according to his own whims.
Next came Franklin Delano Roosevelt, America's answer to Henry VIII. A truly revolutionary president, Roosevelt seemed to think he had the right to occupy the White House forever. His economic schemes were often ruled unconstitutional; Roosevelt's answer was packing the Supreme Court with syncophants who would allow him to do anything he wished. To this day, the decisions of New Deal era justices allow the Court of King's Bench to justify unlimited distortions of the Commerce Clause.
Of course, Oh Blah Blah was the ultimate destination for the United States. No American president ever embodied the spirit of Louis XIV better than our forty-fourth president. Not only did Obama think he had the power to enforce only those federal laws he fully agreed with, his Justice Department was fully politicized. And who could forget the way he ignored the War Powers Act of 1973 in order to engage us in Libya and Syria! "I am the State," thundered Louis XIV, and Obama agreed entirely.
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