Meanwhile Thomas Paine was literally a Pre-Marx Communist. And for nearly 200 years everyone knew that, he was disowned from being counted as a Founding Father by Patriotic Americans for most of the 19th and 20th Centuries during which time the only people who liked him were Marxists and other Socialists. But then Ronald Reagan started quoting Paine as if they agreed on anything and only then did even Paine become a founder the modern American right thought they could appropriate.
However the greater point of this post is the absurdity of the desire Americans have to see our current political debates as a neat linear continuation of the debates between Hamilton and Jefferson.
Alexander Hamilton was a big government Conservative while Thomas Jefferson was a small government Liberal. In modern American politics those terms seem like inherent contradictions, but the historical fact is the modern American way of thinking about that is the aberration. During the age of Revolutions the idea of being a small government Conservative was a complete and total oxymoron completely unprecedented in 6000 years of human history.
On the modern American political spectrum the closest group we have to modern Jeffersonians are the American Libertarians, but even that analogy has flaws. Plenty of Libertarians are aware of their overlap with Jefferson and like to then paint the Democrats and Republicans as merely an internal dispute among the Hamiltonians. However even that doesn't pan out.
The modern Democrats and Republicans in addition to each breaking with Hamilton in some way on where they disagree with each other are in fact in even greater conflict with Hamilton in the areas where they agree. Neither party wants the Presidency to be a lifetime appointment, neither wants to limit the right to vote to only wealthy land owners and both support legal immigration only disagreeing on how much leniency to give "illegal immigrants".
On some of those issues it may seem like many Republicans would like to take Hamilton's position but just know they can't get away with it currently. But their fundamental belief in "states rights" and "cutting taxes" make them firmly incompatible with Hamiltonian Federalism. The only modern parties that kind of agree with Hamilton on having a strong federal government are completely opposed to Hamilton in terms of what that government power should be used for.
I'm going to be consistent and not call Hamilton a Fascist since I am someone who criticizes when that term is used too loosely including by my fellow Leftists. There is at least one core ingredient of Fascism Hamilton was hostile to and that was Populism, Hamilton was disgusted by the very idea of trying to gain political support from the unwashed peasants. But his actual position on Immigration would get him called a Fascist by most of Tumblr and Breadtube.
There is no actual Hamiltonian party in modern American politics, and no that's not based on allowing any minor disagreement to rule someone out, every Party or Politician capable of gaining even 1% of the vote in a modern election has some major break with a core foundational principle of Hamilton's ideology. That's why he was the least celebrated Founding Father before a certain Rapper decided he weirdly identified with him as that Musical laments at the end.
However the United States is ironically the only nation where Hamiltonianism is completely dead. I would say Alfred Hugenberg was basically the Hamiltonian of Weimar Germany. The Party that has dominated Japan for most of it's post-War history the LDP is Hamiltonianism for Japan as purely as any party could be.
Now remember Anime is a Niche interest even in Japan. Most Art tends towards being at least a little left of the center of the culture that produced it, but Anime in particular makes most of it's money off less then 10% of the total population. So with few exceptions most Anime is made by people who's political leanings range from Jefferson to Paine. Though obviously none of them would use American figures to define their politics, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine and Lafayette don't even show up in any of the many Anime depicting The French Revolution (which Hamilton btw absolutely opposed long before the Terror gave him an excuse).
Update April 2021: I stumbled on this YT video which in fact already existed when I first wrote this.
That video is not the Libertarian perspective I criticized above, but rather part of the Genre of trying to make the Federalists sound like modern Democrats and the Jeffersonians sound like modern Republicans. The deception in this video is mostly lies by omission, and it generally misrepresents Hamilton more then it does Jefferson. Because yeah if Jefferson were alive today he probably would vote Republican at least during Primary season.
Hamilton wanted the Government involved in the Economy, in that sense he looks more like a modern Progressive. But he did NOT want that interference to be on behalf of the workers or the poor, he wanted the Government getting involved to help big business. He would absolutely be a Union buster if Unions were a thing yet. He was for higher Taxes then Jefferson was, but he didn't want it being the wealthy who were Taxed but the workers.
The Federalists were also in bed with the Congregationalists who really wanted the Federal Government to enforce their Puritan Christian Moral Values on everyone which made that party greatly feared by the South (which was believe it or not fairly irreligious back then, and nominally what they were was Anglican/Episcopalian with Presbyterians in Appalachia) and all of the religious minorities in the Northern Colonies.
Jefferson's "wall of separation" letter was to a Baptist Pastor (Baptists back then were still far from becoming the nation's largest Sect) in the context of promising to protect them from the Congregationalists. Hamilton meanwhile constantly used Jefferson's lack of devoutness against him in his public attacks. Hamilton was the only Founding Father who used Religion Politically the way modern Evangelical Republicans use it, even though Benjamin Rush was closer to agreeing with them Doctrinally (minus his belief in Universal Salvation). Hamilton would absolutely have called Obama a Muslim.
His position on Immigration was openly Racist, he wanted the Untied States to be a WASP Ethno-State. The Hamilton Musical presents Hamilton as an "immigrant" and stresses that repeatedly, but that was the most technical of technicalities. He was a WASP who was born in one overseas WASP colony and moved to another overseas WASP colony. No one would have thought of him as an Immigrant.
Another thing about that Musical that bugs me is how it tries to present the debate about getting involved in the post-French Revolutionary wars as analogous to the 2002-2003 Iraq War debate. Now I am a Pacifist on nigh universal principal, but Hamilton was taking this position for the wrong reason. And later when we got pulled into those wars on the other side of what Jefferson wanted the Federalists were the ones responsible for that, because Hamilton weirdly actually loved Britain in-spite of how he just successfully rebelled against it. So no he didn't actually want us out of the War, he just wanted to wait till he could get us in on Brittan's side.
Since we're dealing with Europe which then like in the 1930s-40s was geo-politically the center of the world. The debate over involvement in that war should perhaps be considered more analogous to the debate about World War 2 then Iraq. The French Republic abolished Slavery and Emancipated Jews, but Brittan under Pitt's government was determined to re-enslave the Hattians. Jefferson did change his tune on supporting the Republic when the Terror got out of control under Robespierre, but Hamilton and his modern selective fanboys paint The Revolution itself as inseparable from that madness.
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