Alexander Hamilton's World

We build monuments to Jefferson but live in Alexander Hamilton's world. The realignment in politics is a direct result of the infatuation with this Founding Father and the abandonment of Jefferson.

My least favorite founder is Alexander Hamilton. His vision of the United States was one of empire and a more powerful entity than any of her European cousins. He advocated for a monarch and central banking and ultimately created the groundwork for the strange, degrading empire we find ourselves in now. Make no mistake, the Broadway show is a lot of fun to watch and the music and storytelling is decent, but venerating his vision of America is not something I am all that interested in.

There’s an old adage that what you focus on expands. The more energy you place towards something, the more you start to look like the outcome you are putting time and effort towards. I believe that the realignment in politics that has happened over the last 40 years has a lot to do with how our modern political class has come to view two very distinct characters, who at the time of their political heights, were diametrically opposed foes.

I believe our modern realignment comes from who people might embrace philosophically in the founding generation. Who’s vision for America are we pursuing…Jefferson’s or Hamilton’s?

I was recently reading a fabulous book by Brion McClanahan called “How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America”. McClanahan is a robust historian, who pushes hard into modern historical takes about American history. His work always is thought provoking and he’s willing to tackle hard topics including the legacy of the South, the Civil War or the War for Southern Independence as he describes it, and he is particularly good at dissecting the founding era and breaking apart myth from actuality. In an early chapter of the book he was discussing how this battle for an American ideology is conflicted between these two herculean figures of the late 18th and early 19th century. He pointed out that for most “liberal” minded people Jefferson has always been the hero. Jefferson’s veneration of the individual and his deep John Loch influence regarding Natural Rights had always seemed to find a home in the Democratic Party and liberal ideology.

McClanahan describes that naturally, Republicans wanted their own Founding Father to venerate and they gravitated towards Hamilton for a multitude of reasons. Chief among them were Hamilton’s desire for a strong military, capitalistic dominance, centralized banking and a very strong central government. These were things that Republicans from the 80’s and 90’s could grab onto.

George Will, a central figure in “Conservatism” during the 80’s and 90’s has a famous quote about Hamilton. He was discussing how there are beautiful monuments around Washington D.C. to founding era heroes like Jefferson and he said:

“If you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.”

As McClanahan points out in multiple places in this section of his book, conservative commentators placed a great deal of effort at a public relations campaign to claim Hamilton as their own. They lauded his desire for the strong America that they wanted alignment with.

When Ron Chernow wrote his celebrated work on Hamilton, liberal minded people took a deeper look into the life of Hamilton and soon enough he was the new darling of the political left. They gravitated towards his story as an immigrant with a hardscrabble life, and his subsequent rise as intellectual giant and author - his sexual indiscretions fit their fancy too. Hamilton was the American that should be aspired for by the intellectual and political class.

Jefferson meanwhile went quickly out of favor. His keeping of slaves degraded nearly all accomplishments and liberal bona fide’s he had once held, and Jefferson was tossed aside for this rediscovered founding father. Hamilton was put into the cultural conscious by Lin Manuel Miranda’s smash hit, and the rest as they say is “history”.

But is it any wonder that today’s modern liberal loves the state as much as they do? The veneration of Hamilton and the discarding of Jefferson creates the perfect atmosphere for a strong central government, because what you focus on expands.

Hamilton is the least oriented to liberty of the founding generation. Consider these remarks from him that came at various points of his political career:

“The Convention probably foresaw what it has been a principal aim of these papers to inculcate that the danger which most threatens our political welfare is, that the State governments will finally sap the foundations of the Union.”

“The local interest of a State ought in every case to give way to the interests of the Union. For when a sacrifice of one or the other is necessary, the former becomes only an apparent, partial interest, and should yield, on the principle that the smaller good ought never to oppose the greater good.”

“The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge right or make good decision.”

“A national debt if it is not excessive will be to us a national blessing; it will be powerful cement of our union. It will also create a necessity for keeping up taxation to a degree which without being oppressive, will be a spur to industry.”

“The state should use human “passions” and “make them subservient to the public good.”

Hamilton, therefore, believed that the federal government must be “a Repository of the Rights of the wealthy.”

“The declared object of the foregoing proceedings, is to obstruct the execution and compel a repeal of the laws, laying duties on spirits distilled within the United States and upon Stills; There is just cause to believe, that this is connected with an indisposition, too general in that quarter, to share in the common burthens of the community; and with a wish, among some persons of influence, to embarrass the Government.”

Listening to these quotes in succession you can hear in Hamilton’s tone and words, his desire for an elevated federal government, his general disdain for the electorate and his protectionism of the Government as an institution. While his words may be more couched in the “liberty speak” of his day, make no mistake that Hamilton desired to see the federal government be the centerpiece of power in the United States. Hamilton believed that without a strong central government, a powerful military that could control even a nation’s own people, and a banking system that tied the monied people to the interests of the government, the only possible results were chaos and an elevation of powerful singular states like Virginia and the Carolinas. In the end, his ill-temper got the best of him in duel that left the political landscape open for a Jeffersonian era - but as we see it today, Hamilton’s world is the one, as Mr. Will said, "we live in.”

This realignment in politics has coincided with the new found admiration for a Founding Father that was the largest advocate for strong centrality and concentrated power. His desire for an economic empire that was feared because of its stronghold on money and military is the empire we find ourselves in. The cultural embrace of Hamilton has also coincided with a modern political realignment - those that want the strong, authoritarian state, and those who crave a more Jeffersonian vision of Federalism.

George Will and Dick Cheney the neocons, still love Hamilton the man - and so now does Barack Obama and Kamala Harris because of the cultural sensation. As President Obama famously said during his White House address after the cast performed the cultural phenomenon there:

“In fact, Hamilton I’m pretty sure is the only thing that Dick Cheney and I agree on.”

And from that same event, you can hear the embracing of the story that the neocon ideologues want to believe about America. Obama said out loud then why things are realigning in politics initiated by the veneration of Hamilton over Jefferson in the 21st century :

“But he identified a quintessentially American story. In the character of Hamilton -- a striving immigrant who escaped poverty, made his way to the New World, climbed to the top by sheer force of will and pluck and determination -- Lin-Manuel saw something of his own family, and every immigrant family. And in the Hamilton that Lin-Manuel and his incredible cast and crew bring to life -- a man who is ‘just like his country, young, scrappy, and hungry' -- we recognize the improbable story of America, and the spirit that has sustained our nation for over 240 years…It is a story for all of us, and about all of us.”

Politics is downstream of culture. Nowhere is that more evident than the conversion of Democrats to strong advocates of a totalitarian style government akin to the vision of Alexander Hamilton.