What Would Jefferson Do?

I've been teaching Jefferson and Hamilton in my American Political Thought class over the last week, and it amazes me just how similar the debates of that era often sound to those of ours. Despite the tone of relative moderation he takes in the Federalist Papers, Hamilton is clearly a closet monarchist. As Madison records his remarks at the Convention,

The extent of the country to govern discouraged him. . . . This view of the subject almost led him to despair that a Republican Government could be established over so great an extent. He was sensible at the same time that it would be unwise to propose one of any other form. In his private opinion he had no scruple in declaring, supported as we was by the opinions of so many of the wise and good, that the British Government was the best in the world: and he doubted much whether anything short of it would do in America.

Drawing on Hume's teaching on factions and Montesquieu's "small republic" theory, Hamilton never stopped doubting that "republicanism" could succeed, which is why he favored strong and unaccountable executive power, a position that the Bushies have enthusiastically embraced. In a letter to Col. Edward Carrington, Hamilton even accused Jefferson and Madison of having a "womanish attachment to France," a reminder that the wingnuts didn't just invent that strategy for use against Mssr. Jean Kerry. (As an historical aside, it is interesting that Hamilton inverts the traditional explanation for French foppery, since the English view of French "effeminacy" developed in the 17th century at least in part because of France's comparative lack of freedom and self-government, whereas the authoritarian Hamilton now derides that very pursuit in the Jacobin radicals he sees as Jefferson's true allies.) Looking back at those debates at the Convention and the widespread fears of British monarchy expressed by the vast majority of delegates, even those favoring a strong executive, it really is amazing that the Bushies could claim Hamilton's view of executive power as the strict constructionist consensus of the era.

Jefferson's response to Hamiltonian influence on the Washington and Adams administrations was to mobilize the electorate for radical change. In rereading Jefferson, I'm always struck by just how radical his views were. He's an unapologetic champion of popular sovereignty, individual liberty, scientific rationality, limited government, and the separation of church and state. His views on the redistribution of wealth would place him on the left of today's Democratic Party. For Jefferson, "the earth belongs in usufruct to the living: that the dead have neither power nor rights over it. The portion occupied by any individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, and reverts to the society." The dead had no rights, so there can be no natural right to inherit their wealth. Jefferson was especially proud of his bills to prohibit entail and primogeniture: "These laws, drawn by myself, laid the axe to the foot of pseudo-aristocracy." He believed fervantly that "legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property." What are the Bushies doing this week? Well, for one, they're firing half of the IRS staff that investigates estate tax cheats.

True, Jefferson had his famous flaws and contradictions. He was deeply sexist, and, although he hated slavery, he was also a racist, at least until late in his career. He never freed his slaves. In an anticipation of Clinton, he gave us our first presidential sex scandal, though it did no more damage to his popularity than it did to Clinton's. As conservatives like to point out, he also embraced laissez-faire, although, as they neglect to add, he was not advocating "laissez-faire capitalism," but a pre-industrial laissez-faire agrarianism, which is a VERY different thing. Jefferson's laissez-faire was an egalitarisn attack on Hamilton's policy of big government favoritism toward wealthy and powerful corporate interests, so it resembles today's populist critics of Halliburton more than anything else. Jefferson also favored a narrow reading of the Constitution, although he berated the view that it was a sacred document, or that the founding generation's views of it should be determinative: "no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law."

I don't know that Jeffersonian politics would fly today, or that they could dominate our landscape as they did that of the early American republic. The world certainly has changed in two centuries, and the U.S. has become a far more Hamiltonian place. Yet Jefferson is still the greatest of American visionaries, and his professed ideals touch the hearts of both liberals and conservatives far more than those of Hamilton. The Bushies may have been unwise to bite so fully upon the Hamiltonian apple. Maybe this would be a good time for a "little-r" republican revival. Jefferson claimed that you ought to have a revolution every 19 years. How long before we get ours?