The United States began not with a state, but a federal government. The Congress represented a foedus between the newly born republics, containing a multitude even as its own future sustainability was questionable. Like the Batavian Republic, which was an odd and incoherent set of overlapping jurisdictions, not so much under but beside a princely stadtholder, the United States represented, by reactive conservation, a turn of the clock. But in which direction? Forwards towards the National Assembly, the clubs, and the Rights of Man? Or backwards? Setting aside adolescent heuristics, America is a creature out of time, a disjointed future-past entity that avoided Modernity.
The birth of the United States emerged from the jealous rights of colonies that were, in many ways, more English than England. But the America conceived was more often imagined than real. The idea of Roundheads taking the field against a tyrant king, or patriotic Whigs standing against encroachments upon the rights of Parliament, were no different than the idea of reconstituting the Roman Republic. America lacked a hereditary nobility to posture against the grasping king (made somewhat more absurd by the legacy of the Hannoverians as overly reliant on a Whiggish Parliament). The frustration with the British Empire was frustration with an Imperial Parliament, who had become more militant, more reformist, and more grand than at any time in the past. Westminster flourished, as the backwoods colonies saw their own pretentions crumble. North America was, and was nothing more, than an outpost, one that was barely worthy of attention now that Spain had declined and France, effectively, ejected. Asia beckoned, and so the colonies refused their new ancillary role, especially those, like Virginia and New England, that had developed their own highly autonomous polities.
It did not take long, after this prolonged war for separation, that the imaginary cracked. The idea of Patriots as Whigs became rapidly archaic (despite John Adams writing a theory of Whiggish government precisely at the moment it had become obselete). The Natural Aristocracy, which was supposed to take the place of an nobility born by blood, became a figment of imagination. To whom did this appellation belong? Certainly, of all Americans, General Washington! Yet the moment his name was trumpeted as the fame of liberty, he was suspected of ambition befitting a Caesar or a Cromwell. Washington cultivated an image and inner character of Cincinnatus, refusing to act unless summoned, toiling on his farm under the shadow of his great renown. And even as he was called to become His Excellency the President, vigilant eyes still sought for any design upon the new nation, now framed under a Law that some had believed predetermined for Empire. If Washington was not a natural aristocrat, then there were none (at least none immune to suspicion as a would be Cataline). The necessary deference between the Few and the Many did not exist, as every American farmer believed himself a Cicero. The old Whiggish idea dissolved instantly, with a few holdovers.
Thus enters the energetic bastard of St Kitts. Hamilton was perhaps the fastest on his feet to understand the reality at hand. True enough that Whiggery, as it stood, did not exist, but it could if new conditions were met. Hamilton’s flair as an aristocrat burned through the minds of many constitutional critics as Caesar reborn. Adams may have remained dense to the new ethos, but Hamilton had not given up on Whig America. There was no king, but an elective monarchy in the Presidency could offer the balanced, limited, authority to stabilize a national order. In the Convention, Hamilton had promoted, to no avail, the idea of lifetime Senate seats. The compromise of long term office, seated precariously upon the electoral turbulence of state assemblies, marked Jim Madison’s incoherent and maddening genius. But Hamilton envisioned, or, as critics would have it, was blinkered by, the twinkling lights of imperial greatness.
The problem was not Britain’s imperial Parliament, but that Parliament had betrayed America. Untethered from London, the same could be replicated on this side of the Atlantic, with Americans as active participants than groveling subjects. Perhaps, through the scheme of national investment banking (which was never a project for itself), the shareholders could be reborn as the aristocracy that America lacked, the Few who could (through national academies and meritocratic institutions) forge the respect necessary for the deference of the Many. The world was a bitter and vicious place, the stomping ground of Powers, imperial Powers that commanded those who could not compete in their own right. Disdaining the physiocratic doctrines of free trade, as well as the more tempered criticisms of Whiggery from Adam Smith, Hamilton offered his Report on Manufactures as a ideal for the future. Hereditary monarchy and nobility were impediments for Britain, not so for America who could marshal its massive resources to forge into a powerhouse. A national bank would propel the United States into the Modern era, with Philadelphia and/or New York as the American London. In his reformist mood, Hamilton generally disdained tariffs as inefficient, but instead saw subsidies, called bounties, as the means to spur the right kind of industries forward. America would burst into the modern world as a modern imperial state, to do what Britain never could.
But that vision was, from the very beginning, dragged through the mud. Critics of the administration, often organizing here and there in Republican or Democratic clubs, believed all was nearly lost if Britain became the paradigm. For not a few Americans, elite and pedestrian, Independence had radicalized them in a peculiar direction. Divested of Whiggish dreams, Americans abandoned modernity. Thomas Jefferson, the sandy-haired soft spoken delegate from Virginia, who wrote with the thunder to cast Britannia into the sea, became the lightning rod for those against the Hamiltonian plan. As Secretary of State, Jefferson found himself alone against Hamilton and his allies, attacting sympathy from those regions who gained least from the British Empire. The merchants of the coast may thrive, but no so the humble farmers, those whom Jefferson considered God’s people (if he had a people) and would become the basis of an American republic.
Even friends of the administration were often thriving off the legacy of Washington than admiration for Hamilton. The events of the French Revolution, and Jefferson’s almost imbecilic infatuation with it as an American Girondin, further propelled Americans to flock to Washington’s firm hand stearing the nation away from war. The Jay Treaty was hated not because it was Francophobic, but had ceded too much to an enemy who continued to impress Americans into the Royal Navy (as if they were still colonists). The flagrant immorality, chaos, and irreligion in Paris even turned a former enemy of the Constitution, Patrick Henry, to swear his loyalty to Washington. Christianity, so it seemed, was on the line against a revolution that desired to conflagrate the whole world. Hamilton’s policies, in the immediate moment, also benefited ports, even radical Boston, winning New England to the administration’s banner. But only an elite few shared this vision for statecraft, and with the rise of Napoleon (who cancelled hostilities with America), the election of Jefferson in 1800, and Hamilton’s untimely death against the pseudo-Cataline Aaron Burr, the Modern project crumbled into the self-interested mercantile policies of Boston, New York, and Charleston.
In this sense, Jefferson won and defined the American project. The modern state, an imperial Congress, modern culture and modern finance, all fell by the wayside. Perhaps, in Hamilton’s late in life change of heart to embrace Christianity, he had shifted emphases. Or, perhaps, Hamilton had attempted a cynical attempt to regain the initiative against Jacobin Jefferson (his interest in Christianity, even in these latter years, appeared rather thin). Nevertheless, Federalism (so-called) became the rump interest of New England’s mercantile class, who still maintained control over the political machinery of their respective states. But they could do little against the tide of Jefferson and his successors, ironically the last age of a natural aristocracy that could ever be claimed for the United States.
What had Jefferson done? In one sense, he struck the mortal blow against the Hamiltonian project through the Louisiana Purchase. Doubling the country overnight (even if it required him breaking the law), Jefferson had ended any political economy based on the modern city. No London would ever rule America as it did in England, even as New York became the financial capital of the nation. But Jefferson did not remain static, committed to mere Spartan agriculture and homespun. He, later, changed his tune about a national bank (which his enemies, the Old Republicans, decried as his corruption into a courtly Hamiltonian). However, unlike Hamilton’s bank focused on international trade and statecraft, the second Bank of the United States (coming into existence during the reign of his predecessor, Madison, after the War of 1812) would fund internal development. Jefferson accepted a pluriform economy without any whiff of an imperial Congress. The failed policy of Embargo, which had exposed the old Federalists in the Essex Junto as possible traitors, set the stage not only for war with Britain, but also the shock for a national economy. Despite toying with interventions into Europe, America was poised to become Continental across a vast and undetermined steppe.
The children of Jefferson were never quite his legitimate heirs. He had enflamed the growth of Evangelical Christianity, concerned more with spirit against institution. He had given birth to a desire for a national economy that required more energy than a Harringtonian republic of farmers. Even the frontiersmen who would claim Jefferson’s banner were, in many ways, also odd ducks. Monticello was an estate of great learning and enlightenment, grounded in the Tidewater clans that breathed life into these highborn statesmen. The federal government was not for careerism and looting, and parties were not for regular life. And yet such was precisely what happened.
The National Republicans, as they became known, were not simply recrudescent Federalists (despite the accusations of their enemies). Henry Clay was a Jeffersonian through and through, believing in the non-modern project of expansion and industry. While Hamilton had warned against protective tariffs as inefficient and crude, Clay embraced these as part of his American System (marked against the British System). It was not that Clay had wanted to jump start America to join the imperial game, as Hamilton had. In rejecting an empire of free trade, Clay was signalling a different path forward that disdained global focus. Congress was to open the door for American businesses to function and thrive, giving opportunities to explore, build, and defend (the great graft of the Monroe administration was not in the Treasury, but the War Department). National roads and canals, protective tariffs, and a national bank focused on industry and agriculture were rejections of modern statecraft. The odd election of John Quincy Adams only provoked further accusations, a former Federalist and the son of a Federalist president eloquently babbling about the need for a national observatory — what more proof than that Hamilton had crept back into the executive mansion?
The election of Jackson, and the creation of the Democracy, has often been heralded as a return to Jeffersonian orthodoxy, though the Sage of Monticello was not so sanguine on the plantation agricultural export economy that would dominate the South (a yeoman was not exactly a planter). The bootstrapping Self-Made Man was amenable to Jefferson’s idea of a virtuous and energetic republic, but he stunk of the same ambition and greed that polluted Hamilton’s ideas. Small minded, ill educated, and vicious, the Jackson-Men trashed the president’s mansions after Old Hickory’s inaugural, a very different ethos to Jefferson’s nearly inaudible speech. The debate between Clay and Jackson (and fellow Jeffersonian, John C. Calhoun) was an argument within Jefferson’s legacy. Was the business of America in industry or in agriculture? New England joined the former, not so much as quondam Federalists but due to the victory of the River Gods over the merchants of Boston. The textile interest, not the mercantile interest, won over that god of the senate, Daniel Webster, to remake him into a National Republican. Against Jackson and his imperiousness, the mask of Whiggery was donned again, though with little more than rhetorical pretensions.
The coalition to support Jackson vested much in western expansion and the plantation system, mobilized by heroic personality to fight against the supposed corruption of aristocrats. The coalition against Jackson, lacking the national party machinery that the Little Wizard Van Buren (and also, tongue in cheek, maybe the bastard of Aaron Burr) had crafted, was not so unified. National Republicans claimed the mantle of Jefferson against these ambitious Catalines and Caesar. Some Old Republicans, in the name of Jefferson, also stood against an imperious presidency that dared break the laws of Congress in Jackson’s Bank War. Additionally, the hostility to the drunken ambition of New Men, with their swagger and money and Masonic lodges, had provoked a reactionary backlash. Still sensing the shadow of Jacobinism and conspiracies of an international Illuminati, New Englanders rallied around the church and the meeting hall as Anti-Masons. These Whigs would carve out a few electoral victories, due mostly to Democratic division and incompetence, but they stood as an Opposition, a position due less to weakness than poor organization.
However, the self-professed legitimate heirs of Jefferson had their own problems. What was the future of slavery? Northern Democrats, like their forebearers, swore against it as a public disease. It had to be done away with, whether incrementally or by restraint. Some Democrats, demanding soil free of blacks, began to draw a line in the sand. Others, deluded on the efficacy of frontier democracy, believed in popular sovereignty, the right of every state to determine things for themselves (being the loose federal compact that they were). Southerners, however, looked on these developments with foreboding. Whether pretending they were chevaliers or simply interested in their own plantation fiefs, the question of limiting slavery was negative.
Even as the Whigs themselves collapsed, under similar pressures, the newly born Republicans (obviously channeling the legacy of Jefferson) never claimed federal prerogatives of ipse dixit. It was not that the Congress could remake the nation, but simply determine the future of those jurisdictions under no permanent authority. These divisions, provoked by the gain of territory from Mexico in 1848, would lead to civil war and sectional division. But neither Lincoln nor Davis, both born in Virginia’s former domain of Kentucky, ever foreswore Jefferson for Hamilton. Both indulged in rapid statebuilding out of necessity. Both imposed a form of commissarial dictatorship, though one that wrapped around the President himself than an imperial Congress, to execute the demands of war. The end result, even after the death of Lincoln and the frenzy of Reconstruction to make yeomen out of freedmen, was a breakdown of the garrison state. The Congress had moved against becoming a permanent state, dissolving fiat currency, income tax, military policing, and any social engineering for the policy of separate but equal.
The so-called Gilded Age of robber barons and GOP national dominance did not lead to Hamiltonian statecraft, so much as feudalization. The Congress, to the lament of dandified elite WASPs, had become a tool of industry. Whether it was Rockefeller and his oil, or Morgan and his railroads, Congressmen barely concealed their pricetags as they came and went from the halls of power. The Jacksonian ethos of strivers and civil cretins bled effortlessly into the GOP, with one even murdering newly elected James Garfield for failing to satisfy his ambitions. The only oscillation of power in the White House came with Grover Cleveland, who was ignorantly denounced as Hamiltonian by so-called Populists who believed themselves the Israel of God. Cleveland may have stood against the expansionist designs on Hawaii and elsewhere, but these questions were more a matter of procedure than vision. William Seward or Hamilton Fish, former Whigs and Republican stalwarts, were no less Jeffersonian in the need to expand, not only for migration purposes but trade.
If America had a Hamiltonian political economy, viciously butting up against the imperial spheres of influence across the Pacific, it was because of the needs of American business. This was not statecraft, but the state as a tool of industrial cartels. The passage of the Sherman Act was not to regulate industry, but regulate industrial conspiracies, namely labor unions. Federal intervention to break strikes or disperse crowds were in the name of private property, like a king riding into a town to put down a peasant rebellion. Company towns, farmer granges, the competition between states for water or mining rights, these were so many battles within an overlapping feudal world of contested hierarchies. The state, at the federal level, was primarily defunct or inept to carry out any kind of mass organization.
It was, for this reason, that socialism never left more than a superficial stain on America. Marxists gaped incredulously, blustering about business conspiracies, because they did not understand what America was. It had become a classless society, one that seemed ripe for proletariat revolution against a bouregeois masterclass, but it was because America had accientally fallen out of the stream of historical progress. A nation made up of varied immigrant groups, formed in towns or stuffed in tenements, there was little national identity beyond a ruling elite, the Four Hundred, who could provide any guiding ethos. More like the Habsburgs than revolutionary France or Germany, there was not centralizing pressure. If Britain avoided socialism through a mastery of the means to absorb outside pressures into its imperial Parliament, America avoided it because it simply did not make any sense. It was a nearly medieval society, a few (though growing) pockets of industrial serfs surrounded by freeholders and the traditions of freeholding. Even cartelization lost its iron touch, dispersed across a continental land mass, rather than concentrated in a few, highly bottled, industrial centers. Similarly, Fascism and National Socialism meant little, lacking either a desire for the centrality of the state (and its future dreaming) or any deep sense of racial attachment (America was too localist for this to take root beyond anti-immigrant hostility).
It was not to say that statebuilding, that neo-Hamiltonian ideas, had not been tried. The one moment where it seemed to break through was the aristocratic presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Believed a man of destiny, to catapult America into the world of empires, Roosevelt’s Progressive bona fides were born from his desire to build an Anglo Empire on this side of the Atlantic. In someways an image of Disraeli, though with greater blood claims to rule, Roosevelt sought to forge America into a single nation, created an energetic federal government, and plunge into the waters of Empire. But with some hit or miss domestic policies, some regulatory efforts to crack the skulls of disobedient feudal lords like Standard Oil, and a bid to take colonies (a foray into the White Man’s Burden that America had generally shrugged off), Roosevelt failed. Acquisition of Puerto Rico or the Phillipines became awkward detritus, as few desired to colonize it (as Americans had in settling Hawaii). They were coal stations for the Navy, and little more for most. World War One was Wilson’s foray, but he did not believe in Empire, but a global United States, an exportation of Jeffersonian ideals to all. If these were empire (and they were not), they sunk beneath the American voter’s contempt for modernity.
Was FDR, then, a return to Hamiltonian ideas? Not at all. A convinced Wilsonian (who had more success with his World War), Roosevelt was not the paternal statebuilder like his cousin. He was a politician, a clubman Caesar, a man who liked power and loved applause. He was adept at building coalitions, throttling them when needed, and playing coy with the many who demanded much and received little. He wielded an incoherent alliance of southern farmers, western populists, ethnic whites, and urban blacks, even receiving the blessing of Wall St, to wage war against disobedient upstarts, those neo-Jacksonians whose only crime was rakish ambition. Roosevelt was a patrician’s revenge against ladder climbers like Joe Kennedy, who had become rich as the Four Hundred became poor, almost resembling the Virginian’s wrath against the interloper from St Kitts. Was the New Deal the child of Jefferson? In some ways, its ad hoc impermanence, aiding the suffering south, reflected Jefferson’s diffidence to statecraft. The goal of Dr New Deal (as much as Dr Win the War) was to uplift average Americans. If America was being released onto the world, it was not to modernize the United States, but to Americanize the globe. In this way, America stood against the Soviet Union as a rejection of modernity stood against its supposed fullfillment.
Of course, that Hamiltonian idea did not dissipate, but coiled around the glowing potentialities of Roosevelt’s unprecedented four terms, his imbecilic coziness with Stalin, and the empowerment of so many WASPs who admired his cousin and agreed with his vision. The men of the Ivy League, no longer dessicated dandies, but masculinized warrior-jurists, intellectually thin (as Endicott Peabody wanted it), but ruthlessly vigorous, were eager to take the reins. What they desired was not so much to leave America as it was, but to stretch their hands across the Pond to the cousins that they sought so vigorously to reunite with. The image for these reformers was not so much an American Empire anymore, so much as a neo-Hamiltonian modernization of the entire world.
The Fabian British, amenable to Tories and deeply sympathetic to the Soviets, were eager allies with those Americans who saw the flowers of modernity blooming in Moscow. It was not so much that they wanted to become Russia (a symbol of reactionary barbarism), though some became so mesmerized with Potemkin villages against their better judgement. But that the Soviet Union’s global goals, the true vision of Socialism, was actually something that Britain had been preparing for its entire existence. The oscillation away from a Free Trade Empire meant Britain was a crossroads. Should it try to weather the storm, forging alliances to maintain a balance of power? Should it slam shut its borders and erect a tariff empire of a white Dominion? Or should it dissolve itself and become something more than it was, but something that it needed to be in order to reign? If the Empire went, what role, if any, did this imperial Parliament have, a role that had been secured over three revolutions and many eras of instability and reform? In Fabianizing American WASPs, the neo-Hamiltonian project had a new lease on life. In a willingness to jettison the Empire for the United Nation, Fabian Britons were open to alternating the accomplishments of their modern state.
But the result was, under the smile of Jefferson, an incoherent mess. The sanguine idea of a global utopian socialist state that traded in Bancor, as Keynes had hoped, gave way to an Anglo-American partnership that stalled any means of success. The Soviet Union had, due to its all too Russian spirit, abandoned its modernity for an older imperial geopolitics. Stalin, it turned out, was less an internationalist than an adopted Russian, more ruthless and irreligious than any former Tsar, but nonetheless backwards. Hitler, too, had been rejected by Fabians and WASPs as being chaotically revolutionary and hopelessly reactionary, using the modern German state to pursue a nearly American lebensraum (though in places far more historical and populated) and a balance of power that the modern world, in its universality and statesmanship, had attempted to overcome. Japan’s naked imperial aggression demanded intervention in Asia. Mussolini, worst of all, had stabbed them in the back with his treaty with Hitler. It may have been good for Italy (at least in the short term), but the failed hope of Fascism had soured many WASPs and Fabians against it as a dud (the praise Il Duce received in the 1920s and early 1930s was nearly erased from the History books). Similarly, the only hope for rebuilding Europe, against Russian designs of further buffering and expansion, was to turn to crusty conservatives, those who had stood against Hitler but were relics of the Vatican. Christian Democracy, with a tint of American unreality, became the politics of Western Europe.
Back home, however, efforts to maintain America global presence sunk again. Social engineering, statecraft, that got its going during the Kennedy years was ultimately inept, drowned in the failure adventure into Indochina. What kept Americans militant and on war footing was not only the propaganda push of Red Terror, but also Brown Terror. The hobgoblin of Hitler and Stalin were summoned to intervene wherever United Nation interests (and, in reality, this international network of WASPs and Fabians expanded) required. And while it was halfhearted during the Eisenhower years (who was driven primarily by the fear of World War 3), it found true believers in Camelot, though with a Kennedy family that more and more treated the state as a patrimonial fief. Such was to turn Jefferson on his head, but the Hamiltonian urge towards modernism moved in fits and starts. Civil Rights was less a program of state-building, empowering the federal government over national life on the world state, than a shoddy propaganda effort manned by true believers against Americans who, in the main, despised these efforts.
Nixon’s return to the White House was significant in that, whatever good will the Wiz Kids had created in the power of a Liberal Establishment, he crashed statebuilding. Watergate exposed the nastiness of the bureaucratic maze, where the best and brightest were unveiled as cynical, incompetent, and down right immoral. Whatever boom that a neo-Hamiltonian project received crashed and burned. The CIA as the boogeyman for every coup and conspiracy is, in effect, a legacy of this era of state building. The institutions became taken over by self-interested criminal reptiles and muscular anticommunists, but the greater vision was gone.
With Ford and Carter, the decline continue. Reagan’s Revolution was not a return to faith in the Liberal Establishment, but a popular mobilization against all its efforts to impose imperial policies of cultural and moral reform. Washington DC was not London, it was more like Aachan. It was the site of a court, and all the courtiers thus attracted, but it had no power to shape the culture and mentality of America. Its high point, from the 1930s through the 1960s, had failed. The WASPs dissolved, often intermixing with others who had similar aspirations without the grandiosity of vision. Jewish and Asian Hamiltonians appear, but these simply ape an idea that is not fully understood. The Clinton administration attracted these types, but the moralizing swagger of Human Rights is a grotesque ventriloquism of Hamilton’s corpse. Perhaps that was why the musical was made, a product of the Obama years’ Clintonian staffers and ethos. With Trump, a sledgehammer is wielded against a rusted and corrupt federal machine, operated by men with none of the talent or vision, motivated by the most vulgar forms of self-interest and professional clambering. They may want a modern state (as not a few lisp) in the form of a Britain or Sweden, or any other European nation that’s unlike uncouth America with its bibles and guns, but they have no idea how to build one, no idea how to operate one, and no idea why its a preferable option at all.
Hamilton is a ghost that hovers over America, but America is Jefferson’s progeny, America is full of Jefferson’s progeny, even as most of them are those without a birthright and dubious legitimacy. America is Jefferson’s country, whether in the form of continental isolation, captains of industry, backwoods frontiersmen, even the teeming masses of immigrants (though with certain racial and cultural qualifiers) that came to settle the Midwest and beyond. Jefferson the man may have been a snake in politics or a bore in philosophy, but he marked (as as a symbol as much as a man) the American departure from History. It is not that America is not in time, and does not have a past, but rather America departed from the course of civilization that marked most of the rest of the world (with the exception of Russian notwithstanding). It never had a modern state and thus never gained or suffered the travails of modernity. It never truly experienced liberalism and it never truly experienced socialism. There was never a nobility and there was never a proletariat. Corporations reigned in America, but almost as feudal overlords over plots of territory than the cartelized iron dome that Max Weber lamented in Europe.
In a way, this primes America for the future as much as it made it a nation born out of time in the past. The diffusion of power from increasingly inept and decrepit centralized states, not that this power is free or uncontrolled (to the contrary) but cannot exist in any situated institution. Britain may also find a way into this future through the city-state of London, but America is already a land filled with potential city-states, corporate fiefs, states as republics, and city-states extracting the resources needed to survive as they exercise their own power. The United States provides a useful umbrella, but the interconnectivities of cities, regions, states cuts across any clear political divide. America is nowhere close to civil war because there is really nothing outside of America. In the Union winning over the Confederacy, the possible path of mutual modernizing (creating new states and new nations locked in fratricidal combat) was ended. While a real Yankeeland and Dixie could have come into being, the idea of a United States of Canada against Jesusland is simply the nightmare of Hollyweird executives and schizophrenic dissidents. In this way, as the Bush-era jurist, Phillip Bobbi,t had argued in The Shield of Achilles, America (as much as most of the world) is set to reenter a political world that resembles the Holy Roman Empire, with its competing/feuding centers of power and overlapping jurisdictions, more than any centralized national state.
Whatever the future course America takes, despite the frown of Hamilton’s specter, it will remain populated with the illegitimate sons of Monticello.