Everything old is new again:
As President Obama travels to John Brown's old stomping ground in Osawatomie, Kansas where Theodore Roosevelt made his New Nationalism speech in 1910, Newt Gingrich has announced that he is a Theodore Roosevelt Republican.
If you asked Theodore Roosevelt what kind of Republican he was, he would — and did — tell you that he was a proud standard bearer of the Hamiltonian tradition in American politics.
Ron Paul, who would have fought TR tooth and nail as much as he is currently fighting both President Obama and ex-Speaker Newt would agree. Gingrich, Obama and TR are all Hamiltonians, and Ron Paul thinks they are all dead wrong.
As we gear up for 2012 and beyond, American attention is increasingly returning to the oldest battle in our political history: the battle between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians that split George Washington's cabinet down the middle and established our first party system.
[. . .]
The long Hamiltonian ascendancy in the United States has brought many benefits. It is in my judgment neither possible nor desirable to go back to the weak farmer's republic that Thomas Jefferson thought he was building in the 1790s. At home and abroad a healthy Hamiltonianism is an essential building block of American prosperity and security.
But there is also no doubt that the Hamiltonian-social democratic synthesis of the twentieth century is not adequate for the times in which we live. Corporatism has bred the kind of cronyism and corruption Jeffersonians have always feared. The alliance of the wealthy and the elite with strong state power is creating class divisions and class conflict. The remoteness of the federal government from popular control (to be one of 300 million citizens is to have no effective control over the governing power) threatens to hollow out Americans' sense of self reliance and independence while keeping most people at a great remove from any real exercise of political power.
Some of the problems we face are due to essential defects in Hamiltonianism, against which a Jeffersonian revival is our only safety. The unchecked Hamiltonian ascendancy of the twentieth century has led to a lopsided America. A revival of the Jeffersonian element in American political thought and practice is essential to our national health.
I've talked to a lot of people -- especially conservatives -- who are troubled about Gingrich's ascendancy but don't quite know why. I think this essay gets to the heart of it. Both Gingrich and Obama are strong-federal-government Hamiltonians. They would use federal power in different ways for different goals, but they both love the idea of government's ability to do "great" (i.e. momentous) things. "Big government" isn't quite the monolith we sometimes suppose it to be; it can encompass a wide range of philosophical subsets.
I appreciate the author's point that going back to Jefferson's small-town-America vision isn't possible considering the size and complexity of modern-world issues and that what is needed is softening of Hamiltonianism brought about by a "revival of the Jeffersonian element." But that kind of incremental change is the losing battle conservatives and libertarians have been fighting for decades. Power tends to accumulate and concentrate -- that's a simple fact that has governed politics for all of recorded history.
Chipping away at power -- and trying to diffuse it with checks and balances as the founders did -- is necessary but ultimately frustating. That's why purist Jeffersonians like Ron Paul sometimes come along and advocate just blowing the whole thing up as the only solution. Their zeal is welcomed -- and thank goodness they show up in presidential politics from time to time to keep the debate alive -- but it also makes them seem a little wild-eyed and impractical, which is why they usually get only 2 or 3 percent of the vote.
Anyway, interesting and recommended read with good historical perspective.
