[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!"

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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.