More than two decades of academic writings critical of the political ideas of the Progressives leaves one with the impression that Progressivism's victories were so decisive, especially in American intellectual and academic culture, that overturning its ideological postulates is a hopeless task – something akin to Richard Epstein's cri de cœur, How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution (2006). Granting that liberalism is inherently hostile to traditional ideas of American constitutionalism, more than a century of historicist and pragmatic understandings of law and the Constitution suggests that the battle has been won, confirming the arguments of James Kloppenberg in Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (2011), which grounds Obama's electoral victories precisely in these leading ideas of American Progressivism. And despite major electoral repudiations of liberalism/Progressivism, starting with Ronald Reagan in 1980, one is hard put to find academic writings that ground those repudiations in a continuous tradition of political thought. Two recent collections, Joseph Postell and Johnathan O'Neill, eds., Toward an American Conservatism: Constitutional Conservatism during the Progressive Era (2013), and the book reviewed here, seek to reconstruct the beginnings of a living countertradition.

The Bailey and Mileur collection is exceptionally coherent in both focus and argument, caused in part by the fact that, together, they wrote or cowrote six of the book's ten chapters. As Bailey puts it in the “Introduction,” we can grant the governmental legacy of Progressivism (e.g. executive dominance over a more bureaucratic and technocratic state) and grant its political legacy as well (e.g. weakened parties, candidate-centered campaigns), but we should not concede the many institutional issues left in limbo:

Progressive reformers in states and localities had long advocated and successfully implemented various schemes to bypass or overrule authorized officials, most prominently through the popular recall of elected officials and legislation initiated by petition and popular vote. Political party institutions were undermined by state-mandated and regulated primary elections, voter registration, short ballots, and staggered and nonpartisan elections.

Beginning with an essay on James Madison's arguments for constitutional adoption and his later defense of political parties as democratic adjuncts to republican institutions, the next five chapters explore Progressive Era arguments against direct democracy and in defense of strong national political parties. Significantly, four of the five critics examined (Columbia's Nicholas Murray Butler and political leaders William Howard Taft, Joseph G. Cannon, and Elihu Root) were staunch Republicans (Princeton's Henry Jones Ford was a Democrat). None were laissez-faire reactionaries; all favored enhanced national regulation of the new industrial economy. They saw direct democracy in large political units as a means of enhancing the power of ambitious elites and money in campaigns and of decreasing access to political voice that local party organization afforded the average citizen. More tellingly, direct democracy substitutes large-scale manipulation of mass popular will for the deliberation required to coordinate separate party and governmental institutions in pursuit of common ends. Tellingly, Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate in the election of 1912, shared many of these same arguments. As Mileur sees it, Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party was an alliance of elite Mugwumps in the East and middle-class Populists in the West whose electoral failure (replicated in the Progressive states of Oregon and Wisconsin) was mirrored by long-term ideological success.

Two features of the book's main arguments require amplification. Four of the five critics adhered to a variant of Burkean “Anglo-Saxonism” – a view of constitutional development that honored decentered and adaptive adjustments (e.g. common-law courts) – convincingly outlined in John Phillip Reid's The American Constitution and the Origins of Anglo-American Liberty (2005) and given a Burkean pedigree in J. G. A. Pocock's Politics, Language, and Time (1989).

A second amplification regards political parties. Unlike Woodrow Wilson, who, like Martin Van Buren, defended locally based, electorally driven, and patronage-driven parties as the one defense by the common man against national political, judicial, and cultural elites, Republican critics of direct democracy considered here were more concerned to defend the capacities of national parties in government than to deliberate and discuss public policy. In light of the fact that the expansion of Progressive “democratic” reform was shadowed by a parallel contraction in the electorate, the writings of these critics deserve a serious rereading.