But still, he was far from a Marxist or a Communist. And he never abandoned his racist views. So anywhere you put him on the political spectrum is bound to be an oversimplification.
Wilson's views were a hodgepodge. He'd call himself a liberal on the question of rights and liberties, but he was horrible on civil liberties. He saw himself -- or his supporters painted him -- as a decentralist Jeffersonian, but he brought in bureaucratic control of the economy like no one else.
Europeans have trouble understanding Wilson's moralism and utopianism, but I suspect he would have fit in better in one of the states he helped create than in the US. He supported national self-determination -- that's clear. It's one thing he really believed in during his later years. His confusions about other things are those that Poles or Czechs or Hungarians went through when they tried to figure out just what they wanted government to do and not to do.
The New York Times blog had a discussion of why Wilson is now such a bogeyman for Beck and other conservatives nowadays. People say what you'd expect them to say. I suspect the answer is that he has all the negatives and not many positives.
Wilson was the archetype of the professor in politics, the liberal intellectual, who has done so much mischief in government over the years. He wasn't a popular hero, like FDR, and didn't see the country through an economic crisis. He also can't claim to have decreased racial discrimination, as LBJ could.
So anywhere you put him on the political spectrum is bound to be an oversimplification.
It is always tempting to attempt to peg people from long ago like Wilson or TR somewhere on our current political spectrum. But it really does not work.
Of Wilson, my humble opinion of him is that he was the Jimmy Carter of his day. As stated by another Freeper in an earlier post, Wilson always considered himself the smartest and best intentioned guy in any room he was ever in. He had an arrogance about him, and the old hard core 'real politics' guys at the Versailles conference after realizing the large ego the man had, proceeded to eat his lunch and have their way with him all the while making him think he was leading them.
Like Carter, he was a babe in the woods full of lions, tiger and bears.
God save us from fools like him.
As a side conversation, what is your thoughts on the US even entering WWI?
I tend to think we should have never played that game at all, and left Europe to its fate. Considering the disaster that 'peace' brought about a generation later when we really had no good choices, it would have probably been better to allow them all to wear themselves out and settle it rather than any of the corrupt bastards being able to claim victory or be embittered by defeat.