The Theodore Roosevelt that I thought I knew was the trust-busting, Bull Moose rebel – a liberal reformer with the interests of the people foremost on his mind. In Unreasonable Men, Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics, my mythical Teddy (a myth I believe others have shared) is forcibly upended.

Wolraich gives us Roosevelt as a wary aristocrat.  He is sharp and largely fair-minded, yes, but he is undeniably part of the elite and is unapologetically wary of the mob.  Roosevelt did not see the wisdom of crowds.  He saw the wisdom of leading crowds.  He did not consider himself a man of people.  He saw himself as among the best society had to offer and saw his involvement in politics as something of a duty owed to the dimmer lights among him.  He was also, in many cases, smarter and better equipped than the elite around him.  Just as, during the financial crisis, President Obama stood between Wall Street and people with their pitchforks out, Roosevelt did fairly often find himself in the position of trying to save rail road, steel and financial tycoons from the inevitable results of their own excesses.  In many ways, Obama has walked a middle-line the way Roosevelt did for most of his career – saving the mob from its appetites and the elites from theirs.  This is one of the reasons why the book is so important now.

With high-minded self-regard, Roosevelt missed the birth of progressive populism.  Robert La Follette, a Senator from Wisconsin, led an insurgency within the Republican party, against the “stand patters,” a group of conservatives led by Nelson Aldrich in the Senate.  Roosevelt tried to navigate the dispute without ever giving too much to either side and the result was, as the journalist Lincoln Steffens (for awhile a Roosevelt confidante) described: “[Roosevelt’s] record of victories is long and splendid, but incomplete.  He leaves the enemy in possession of the field.”

Well, that sounds like a familiar summary.

Not only was Roosevelt’s legislative record incomplete but he ceded much of the political battlefield as well.  La Follette was a real barnstormer.  In an era where many people did not even know how their representatives voted on key legislation, La Follette took this knowledge right to the people.  He supported primary elections to reduce the power of party bosses and he backed challengers to stand patter Republican incumbents, even when prospects for victory were dim. Roosevelt and the Republican establishment seemed not to realize that a viable political movement was gaining traction.

Well, that sounds familiar, too.

In The New York Times earlier this week, New York Senator Charles Schumer, who heads the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and is thus as much a party stalwart as he is a Senate stalwart, complains that the primary system should be changed so that the types of candidates from the left and right who have defeated incumbents like Joe Lieberman and Eric Cantor will not be able to mount effective challenges.  It is not fair, Schumer says, that the minority of voters who choose to participate in primaries should be able to decide who goes to Washington and who doesn’t.  He even supports open primaries so that voters from the other party can step in to help turn back extremist challengers.

There is a lot wrong, philosophically, with what Schumer is arguing.  Participatory democracy tends to reward those who participate so the argument that a “minority” of voters directs the primary process seems shallow. Maybe there’s a reason that incumbents can’t get out the vote.

There we get to something more important, and to the heart of Wolraich’s book – the Tea Party insurgency is the modern analogue to La Follette and the progressives, even if the Tea Party’s goals are opposite, its tactics and even messaging are familiar to anyone who has read Unreasonable Men.   In the face of that, Schumer would monkey with the rules around primary elections as if gaming the system to stop the insurgency is an effective counter to a group of people who, like it or not, are out there winning the hearts and minds of the voters who matter.  They are getting their people to the polls.  They are telling their story.  They are building something that will serve them decades from now while Schumer ruminates publicly about primary elections (sounding as if he could use a challenger from the left to get his attention).

Wolraich has told us about this before.  His first book, Blowing Smoke is about how the conservative movement built itself up over decades, eating small defeats while building the foundations of a cultural juggernaut.  The unreasonable men of the progressive movement did the same thing.  Now, the Tea Party is doing it.

Read the book, it’s history as current events. Very rewarding.