Conservatism and the Founding

Imprimis (via "Libertyhaven.com") ^ | July 1983 | Forrest McDonald

[KC Burke]

I think that in the political rhealm, Madison lumped himself into the Jeffersonians. All that was good in Jefferson, he kept. The bad, the excessive, the conspiring against Washington, the idealistic Francophile, etc, he ignored and excused.

Madison was the younger, practical, alter-ego of Jefferson in political party matters as far as I've read. Certainly, as each was in office, they acted as individuals, but there was never the divide that Jefferson had with many others.

Madison had this realism insitlled within him as he was "on the ground" creating the constitution through prudent compromise and the "art of the possible" while Jefferson was off being the toast of Paris. Jefferson felt that Madison and others had done as well as they could in those compromises and didn't oppose the adoption of the constitution.

[KC Burke]

Of course, keep in mind that I am just a general reader and common freeper, with no training in law, history, politics or other fields of scholarship. I'm sure that the truely trained can put more detail into this than I can.

But, in the long run, what are we but a nation of common men, with all the good and bad lumped together as Betty Boop points out.

[KC Burke]

Forrest McDonald has a lot of great books available in trade paperback....check the history section. I have two on my shelf.

[Huck]

Of course, keep in mind that I am just a general reader and common freeper, with no training in law, history, politics or other fields of scholarship.

The standard disclaimer :-) Believe me, I understand what you mean. I keep that in mind about myself all the time.

I think that in the political rhealm, Madison lumped himself into the Jeffersonians. All that was good in Jefferson, he kept. The bad, the excessive, the conspiring against Washington, the idealistic Francophile, etc, he ignored and excused.

It's the standard critique of Madison. I can't argue with it, as a political fact. But ideologically, Madison was at bottom a Federalist, wasn't he? Look at what he did.

[KC Burke]

Madison was a Democrat-Republican party man....never a Federalist in the sense of being in the Federalist Party which rose from pro-constitutional roots after Washington's term. In Madison's election, the Federalists voted against him but by 1816 they were done as a national force and totally vanished by 1828 even from State campaigns.

[Huck]

Well, I guess I am just wrong. But when I read Madison's work in the Federalist papers, or even his letters to Jefferson, or his later writings regarding nullification and secession, he seems to me to be consistently federalist philosophically, unless I am misusing the term. Whereas Jefferson was much more likely to write something crazy, like saying that a government should only be binding on those who were alive when it was formed. Madison didn't go for that sort of thing.

But I guess I just don't know enough about the actual politics of the day. And anyway, I suppose this is a sidebar to the aspect of the article that most folks have found interesting, so I will let it go. Thanks for the reply.

[x]

Interesting paper on Madison here. It argues for a consistency in Madison's ideas throughout his lifetime.

I suspect Madison was drawn to Jefferson because of commmon regional background, because Madison's constitutents were mostly Jeffersonian, and because Madison distrusted Hamilton's arrogance and ambition. Once the Federalist "conspiracy" was vanquished, Jefferson and Madison were less scrupulous about 'strict constructionism.'

What's distinctive about the founders is the mixture of exceptionally high level political theory with the practical belief that political evil could be isolated in this or that conspiracy or faction. Practical politics accustomed them to think in party terms, and the responsibilities of office demanded that they take a more realistic attitude about the Constitution than they had in opposition.

[x]

There's a trick involved in the word "republicanism." It may mean the kind of balanced and limited representative government created by the Constitution. It can also mean an ideology, sometimes called civic or classical republicanism or country ideology, that seeks to create a virtuous society, fears corruption and power to a much greater degree and stresses vigilance, self-discipline and self-denial. This is where Jefferson got some of his ideas, as did Robespierre. There is a good deal of overlap between the two republicanisms in things like the separation and division of powers, though it's true that French revolutionary republicanism ended by by recreating absolute power supposedly to serve the interests of virtue, liberty and equality. In any event, some academics use "republicanism" mostly to refer to this austere and radical ideology, rather than to the ordinary workings of American government. They also make use of the contrast between freedom-centered "liberal republicanism" as a counterweight to virtue-centered "classical republicanism" or "civic republicanism."

[Huck]

I like the title (James Madison: Federalist) . I am going to take this with me on the bus this am. Looks interesting. I admit I for whatever reason sort of "root" for Madison. I am much more sympathetic to him than I am to Jefferson. In my view, Jefferson was a bad influence on him. But I am going to try to be fair, not biased in Madison's favor, and see what I can learn. Thanks for the link.

[WhiskeyPapa]

bump

[lentulusgracchus]

Englishmen looking back over to their own Civil War commonly took it as a victory of liberty against tyranny or, less commonly, as a defeat of tradition by modernity. What we can see now is that liberty, tyranny, modernity and tradition present in both camps.

I agree, it seems to be a vice of historians, that they see their job as the resolute rationalization of mere chronology into a regular declension of causes and effects, and to sort hideously complex "event-clusters" into easily understood memetic jousting matches.

But the idea that all has to do is pick up the banner of Cromwell or Charles, Jefferson or Hamilton to automatically be right in all subsequent political conflicts is a mistake.

The descent of Barry Goldwater from Jefferson not Washington is easily shown by his dictum, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice". He and the conservative wing of the Republican Party are descended from the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats who were exiled from the Democratic Party by the triumph of the race-pimps and Fabian Socialists in 1928, and FDR's conversion of the party into a socialist machine a la Tammany Hall (which FDR and Al Smith both knew well).

So the GOP has a split personality, being partly descended from the Federalist business interests and planters of the 1780's and partly from the Jeffersonians and their sturdy yeomen. Forrest McDonald would seem to sympathize with the former, the party of business oligarchy, whose highest value is "keep your hands off my stack", which they interpret as "liberty". His sympathy is understandable; as a professor at the University of Texas, where the Texas barons send their sons to be educated, he is a courtier of their regime, which has enjoyed uninterrupted control of the state since the end of Reconstruction, and which very much celebrates inequality, perquisite, and privilege. Or as LBJ told the state trooper who stopped him, who involuntarily blurted out "My God!" when he realized who he had stopped, "That's right -- and don't you forget it!"

[lentulusgracchus]

.....it's true that French revolutionary republicanism ended by by recreating absolute power supposedly to serve the interests of virtue, liberty and equality.

Jefferson was a great admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte. He placed a small bust of Napoleon in Monticello. It's still there.

[lentulusgracchus]

But the pivotal event in the regrouping of the republican ideologues was the decision in 1791 of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to organize a political party to oppose and ultimately undo the policies of the Washington administration - and, into the bargain, to transform the Constitution into something it was not. [Emphasis added.]

Is he referring here to the Bill of Rights?!

[lentulusgracchus]

Though it is anathema these days to suggest it, we'd probably be a whole lot better off as a nation if the franchise were limited to those who could meet some type of property qualification, and/or pass a literacy test.

What about membership in the New York Athletic Club? That'd be a pretty good proxy.

But please explain why you think that what you say is true. If the (Republican) U.S. Government, in the 1920's, hadn't moved to break up the holdings of the heirs of J.P. Morgan, who were discovered by a Congressional inquiry to control or beneficially own 20% of everything that was worth anything in the United States, how far do you think the concentration would have gone by now, 75 years later?

How do you think we would be better off under such a regime, which even as late as the 1920's, had successfully resisted labor syndicalism's demands that the people who ran Morgan's companies for him equitably share with the workers the great productivity of their labor? Milton Friedman said it on national television: if there had been no labor-syndicalist movement, there would have been no middle class. How well off do you think you'd be, if you were still working for 1920's wages? I think $60/week was common then, as a good wage. How would you send your kids to college, so they could break out of the "lower class"?

I don't think I agree with you, sorry. Too many of McDonald's descriptors of "conservatism" have altogether too much to do with preserving privilege, classism, and perquisite. Or do you think that everyone outside the charmed circle of Fortune 500 heirs and heiresses should be re-proletarized? Bat that one around for a while -- it's implied by your statement of preference.

[betty boop]

Bat that one around for a while -- it's implied by your statement of preference.

It wasn't a "statement of preference." It was an observation. I'm not a constitution writer, nor a system builder, and have zero interest in that sort of thing. But, if I were "the king," dictator or tyrant, I'd take the Constitution we have (after purging it of every Amendment other than the original ten) and I'd say, "Here it is, kids: The law of the land. Them's the new rules, so don't you go messing them up." That is to say, I like the Constitution of the United States that the Framers wrote, exactly as they wrote it, just fine, and deeply resent how little it is respected these days.

Notice that under "my regime" the determination of qualifications for the exercise of the franchise are left to the several states.

I don't see how the labor movement per se and exercise of the franchise per se are necessarily related or mutually interdependent. It seems to me there are sources of social power that do not depend on the ballot box for their effectiveness. Though I have noticed that, these days, it is fashionable to politicize everything.

And what we seem to have gotten from that is endless, one-size-fits-all rules for specifying just about everything in human life. One key by-product of the universal franchise seems to have been the creation of a mass, totally homogenized, and highly regimented society.

I've got to go to work now, though there's more I'd like to add. Maybe later. Thank you for writing, lentulusgracchus. best, bb

[KC Burke]

First of all, in the sense of being one of the authors of the Federalist Papers and urging the adoption of the constitution, Madison was certainly a "federalist" in that sense. During the Washington Administration, within his cabinet, there arose two factions. One, headed by Hamilton, became the Federalist Party. The other, headed by Jefferson, Madison and others became the (Jeffersonian) Repulicans, who later morfed into the democratic-Republicans. Much of the short history of the Federalist Party was then tied up in the personality of Hamilton, soon to pass from the scene. The Bank and the French made up the chief areas of conflict between these two factions which grew into full fledged Parties active on State as well as Federal levels.

Adams, as VP stayed above the fray, but became the focus of Federalist support.

When we talk of the Age of Federalism, we are speaking of the time from Washington's administration's second term to, say, the election of Jefferson.

[KC Burke]

Agreed. Thanks for your insight.

[Huck]

Weird the way things turn. You have the Federalists passing the Alien and Sedition Acts. Then you have Madison and Jefferson writing the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, protesting the acts. Later, you have Madison as President, waging the War of 1812. If I am not mistaken, a large part of the demise of the Federalists was their reaction to the War of 1812, particularly the Hartford Convention, where they contemplated the idea of secession. The war is won, and a hero is created, named Andrew Jackson. The Federalists go extinct. Madison, because of the war, forms the first standing army and reauthorizes the same National Bank that caused him such a coniption fit when he was in Congress. Jackson later becomes President and denounces nullification, a theory that South Carolina justified by pointing to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Meanwhile, Madison, as an old man, writes letters which show him to be opposed to both nullification and secession, and he does a fair job of laying it out, but it's too late. What will be will be. The nullification theory and the secession theory come back, as justification for the full split of the Union, and here comes Lincoln and the war.

I mean, you look at that. The causes and effects. It's just plain wacky.

[x]

Goldwater performed a valuable service for the GOP and the USA. It's hard to imagine the Liberal Rockefeller-Scranton-Percy wing of the GOP providing effective oppostiton, let alone dominating the political scene as Reagan and Bush have. And given how centralizing the Democrats have been, it's hard to see how or why the GOp would want to compete with them in that department.

But I don't think LBJ was very Hamiltonian, though Michael Lind tries to make him out to be. Hamilton would have been very dubious about Johnson's "Great Society." Rather Johnson fits into that Democratic party tradition of the Big Man or the boss going back to Jackson and Van Buren. During and after the New Deal, Washington was full of latter-day Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, agrarians and populists who retained the old demagogic rhetoric but became willing servitors of big government and big business.

McDonald goes too far in this article, but I'm not so hard on him. His career began with the study of men like Hamilton and utilities mogul Samuel Insull who built up the country and its economy over the opposition of demagogues and politicians. For better and for worse, Hamilton and his heirs did promote economic development in ways that Jeffersonians never did. Given Jefferson's agrarianism and the state sovereigntism and opposition to big business of his successors, would our country have become the economic powerhouse that it did as quickly as it did?

If Hamiltonianism is enjoying a renaissance it may be due to the rise of the global economy. The corporations that Hamiltonians promoted have become quite powerful and free of any national loyalties. While the power of government is still the main cause for worry, the nation-state may provide a means to check or deflect global corporate power.