Postmillennial Blues -- A Reflection

 Despite my reservations, it appears to me that postmillennialism is the most correct interpretation of the Bible's sense of time. This brief essay is not so much an exegesis of the Scripture to prove this claim, but a broader reflection on why this appears to be the case given broader, perhaps meta-textual, considerations. However, postmillennialism as such has often mishandled in what a Christian would expect to come about. The proper understanding (as the Bible demonstrates over & over) is pessimistic comedy.

Why postmillenialism will come after why not the alternatives. The concept of millennialism is how to properly interpret the promise in Revelation of a thousand-year reign that Christ will implement on Earth, heavenizing the dwelling-place of man. Premillennialism involved the idea that Christ would first come back to establish this millennial rule. Postmillenialism, in contrast, was Christ's return after a millennial reign in His name. Finally, amillennialism is a symbolic interpretation that the thousand years is for the Church Age, however one precisely understands this conjecture. Thus, the real question at the heart of the debate is the very definition of Time -- not linear progressive time (chronos, hour following hour etc.) but epoch-defining time (kairos, the sense of "the Moment"). What is history? Why does it flow the way it does? Does it have form?

Premillennialism was, a millennia plus, the normative view of some in the early Church. Such is reflected in the thought of Irenaeus & Justin, who expected a reign of Christ to usher in a literal one-thousand years of kingly rule. The expectation, in itself, is not wrong; for Christ may very well continue to reign for a time until All is in All, every matter settled as the resurrection of dead proceeds & the judgement confirmed when History has come to a true close (in a literal sense). But premillennialism suffers from its time preference. It was not a problem when a mere two hundred years had passed, where Rome was perhaps simply the last beast to be ground into dust, where the Empire was (truly) the last in the world. Of course, historically one might take the wider vantage & notice the untouched domains of the Chinese, the Hindoo, & the American Indian (among many others). But these do not have the same place in concrete, & normative, Biblical history as Rome had (succeeding the Iron Throne after the Babylonians, Medes-Persians, & the Greeks, or however one precisely counts the four stages). Nevertheless, it is not wrong to see the statue of iron with clay toes broken by the Uncut Stone. So what next? Why hasn't he come back?

The core objection here is this -- the Bible, beyond any ancient text that formed cult & law & polity (all of the same cloth in true Human thought), never dealt in mythos. The Bible drags the mind of man, kicking & screaming, into historical time. The chronicles of kings was also the plane upon which Jehovah entered. The fancy in Homeric poetry or Thesiod's theology did not exist in the ugly & brutal world into which the LORD forged a people out of the rump of Adam-Noah's race & gave orientation to time & space. Exodus was not merely an origin myth for an ethnos, it contained within it seeds of self-criticism & supernatural expectation. The land was never conquered, the promise never fulfilled. History twists & turns unto the coming of the Christ, but even here history does not conclude (as not a few suspected). Instead, the Apostles were tasked to disciple the nations, fanning out across the Roman Empire & beyond. The Acts of the Apostles is thus a fitting second-work for St Luke, who sees in the success of Gospel as part of heilsgeschichte, of redemptive-history. Beyond the normative ideas in the various canonical epistles, Revelation offers symbol-soaked vision of the very form & shape of history. Premillennialism can explain nothing of this beyond the end of the Empire, its expectations withering in the fourth-century.

What took its place? Temporarily, it was a version of postmillennialism in the high days of Constantine. Eusebius is slandered & maligned by the ignorant, but history grabbed hold of the reins of this Heavenly Empire. Few who mock Eusebius have bothered to read him, content with saccharine pseudo-Christian vomit to wallow in as they pride themselves on their objectivity & highly spiritual disposition. But Eusebius did not make Constantine into a second Christ or savior, rather Constantine was a mere product of the true conquest of the saints. Three hundred years of blood, three hundred years of faithful witness & apologetic excellence, was vindicated, not through imperial arms or tactical planning, but the finger of God. Constantine's conversion was unexpected & a lightning bolt. The Edict of Milan promised toleration for Christians & all those who worshiped Heaven. Constantine's rule was not without faults or sins (even as these are often exaggerated or misunderstood), but it put an end. Constantine was not imperious, even as he governed an exhausted & depleted empire, often respecting the wishes of the bishops. Nevertheless, in Eusebius' vision, a new age of peace had dawned.

A hundred years later, this hopefulness had dashed against wicked empires & heresy. Constantine was fair about the Arian controversy (far more than later critics give him credit for), where many fail to understand the reason for the controversy & why so many bishops had sympathy for the Alexandrian presbyter (the reason dates back to Paul of Samosata & his aberrant christological claims, combined with his magisterial tyranny, the first prince-bishop). Thus, as F.A. Drake has demonstrated in his Century of Miracles, the great hope of Rome's conversion broke over heresies, imperial losses, bad emperors, & a general sense of pessimism. Into this void Augustine offered a way out. City of God was not only an apologetic against Pagan claims that Rome suffered for abandoning the old gods, it also introduced a novel view of time. Augustine, drawing on the work of Ticonius, saw history as a battle between the Kingdom of God & the Kingdom of Man, with the former located primarily in the Church. While polities & organizations may pledge allegiance to the Church, they were fallible & accidental to the prime struggle. However, with less pessimism born of Donatist solipsism & failure, Augustine offered a robust sense that the Church Age was coequal with History as such. The Church did not have a particular mission besides combating the dark Kingdom of Men. But to what end? In what shape?

Augustinian amillennialism, flowing alongside conciliar condemnation of chiliasm, became the norm for the Church, sort of. As the Roman Empire rent, with the Roman Church slowly dividing into Hellenophone & Latinophone, the East tended towards a stronger sense of historical importance, though increasingly collapsed into the Empire itself. The Roman Emperor held the world together, a quasi-Christ who brought together ecclesial & civil functions. I am disinclined to consider such as much of a corruption as many Westerners are prone to do, lamenting the slavishness & pomp of the orient, a caesaropapist Church subservient to politics. Such is nonsense, but there was still a very real welding together of Rome with Church that (unlike Eusebius or Constantine in the fourth century) saw the Empire as the new Israel marching through time. Like Israel, Roman suffered apostasy, betrayal, & loss, struggling to understand what to do against barbarians & Persians (later with Muslims & Latins). The loss of a Roman emperor still hamstrings Orthodox concepts of temporality. Still, the kernel of truth was preserved -- God had significance for history, with a particular shape.

Augustine was much more a doctor to the Latins, who increasingly found in the Church an organization that could preserve order & justice in lands newly occupied with Teuton barbarians. The fissiparous nations eventually found unity around a Roman Emperor & the Roman Bishop, though this often suffered for lack of clarity. Wherein Constantinople the relation between prelate & prince was established (with certain due deference between responsibilities & roles), in the West it was confused. The rise of an Emperor of the Romans in Aachan was later matched with the growing spiritual & political prestige of the Roman pontiff. While Charlemagne's court had the gravity to shrug off the Byzantine-influence papacy over Nicaea II, by the eleventh century the papacy had become a power in its own right. The Gregorian reforms tried to orient the fairly vulgar election to the episcopate (swapped between Roman aristocratic families) into a moral center to guide the many kingdoms & fiefdoms of Europe. Utilizing rival groups (whether the Normans, the Empire, the French, or others), the papacy increasingly carved its political power in Italy but also throughout the Continent. 

Amidst these changes & reforms, amillennialism made a certain level of sense. There was no sense of "end" & the force of history was located squarely within the Church. Augustine's disciple Orosius had further schematized history into ages: all the events of the OT/NT constituted the first five, with Acts opening up the sixth age of the Church, penultimate & followed by the Day of Doom. The Church began to easily fit into this role as mediator, with the pope increasingly donning the titulature of Jesus Christ (or at least his vicarage as prime-minister). Time, to some extent, froze. Heaven was full of the triumphant saints (willing & able to intervene to help the faithful) & Earth straining as the militant fought to enter Paradise. The Church produced medicines of immortality, whether in the Eucharist (or at least gazing upon it) or the many penances to atone for sins. Life was a vicious pilgrimage towards Heaven, an escape from the vicissitudes of nasty earthbound mortality. Few made it in the first try, with the bulk working off their failure & debt in purgatory. There was not really any particular shape to history, as any moment in redemptive-history could be drawn up to explain victory or failure. There were enemies to fight in the Turks, heathen, & Greek heretics (among various sects cropping up in the unpoliced hinterland of Europe). But there was an order & balance, even as occasional chiliast movements challenged the contented corruption of Church affairs (whether the Spiritual Franciscans within, or Waldensians on the outside), often signaling the soon to be apocalyptic war between the forces of Christ & antichrist. Imperial figures, humane & dominating, like Frederick II Hohenstauffen often signaled the end, as the world-emperor would arise to challenge the Church. But these times came & went.

What was of real significance was the shock of the Reformation. When Christendom rent, there was a growing expectation of apocalyptic struggle. Both Rome & the Reformers claimed the mantle of the faithful against the legions of antichrist, with an end perhaps on the horizon. The discovery of the Amerindians by solidly Roman Spain & Portugal reinvigorated a Papal sense of amillennial war. Still was the Church Age, struggling not only against Muslim but now Protestant, heresies of Man threatening to besiege the Celestial domain. Amillennialism befits well Bellarmine's claim that the Church was real & visible the same way Venice was real & visible -- you can enter its domain, walk its streets, exist under the protection of its authorities & law. Amillennialism's symbolism did not deprciate the physico-visibility of the Kingdom of God, only that the millennium was a symbol for this protracted struggle. In a sense, amillennialism still sits well upon the Papacy & its efforts to fully struggle against the Kingdom of Man until Christ returns. The ugliness here is that there's no sense of form or expectation, history just rolls on in an endless struggle with selected interpretations. If Orthodoxy has stalled in the loss of an Emperor, Catholicism remains because it still has a pope (though, for some traditionalists, it's not clear for how much longer, if at all).

The Protestants in no way rejected this Western heritage. Augustine was their doctor, often more so on issues of predestination & sacrament. However, this inheritance was predicated upon a certain expectation of succession. The Evangelicals fully believed in victory over Rome, the restoration of Christendom on different terms. However, the failure & chaos of religious war left the Reformers increasingly shattered. The division between Luther & the Reformed broke any initial hopes (despite the herculean efforts of Bucer & Melanchthon, among others, to heal the breach). As Novalis centuries later lamented, the universality was muddied in particularity, & instead of Protestantism the Germans received Lutheranism. The attempt to carve out a Lutheran dominion often became reactive & defensive (as the Reformed were sometimes hated more than the Roman, though that was rare). The Lutheran domains eventually settled into the squalid compromise of Westphalia, where elite-secularity guaranteed the rights of the Church. Similarly, the hope of the Reformed International (to use an odd framing) also hit the shoals. The defeat of the Huguenots in France, the increasing separatism of the Swiss, the rivalry between England & the Netherlands (let alone the Civil Wars that rocked the British Isles), all these contributed to malaise. The rise of the British Empire created some hopeful expectation that a Protestant Empire could combat the Roman, & increasing caesaropapist, power of France could give some hope to Evangelicals. However, other matters had taken greater concern.

It's not wonder then that Protestants began to branch away from amillennialism, it seemed self-evidently not true. Here I will make a hard claim: amillennialism only makes sense if there's some institutional continuity. Attempts to cleave to amillennialism, gripping Augustine tight, often mutate into a kind of a-temporality. History is just a series of incoherent disaster, without shape or reason, pertaining to a seemingly endless reign of the Devil, as a few souls were plucked out. Such was the temptation of some proto-Pietists, such as Amos Comenius, though this basically gave the game away. History was the devil's labyrinth, Heaven was only in the heart. Despite the historicizing bent of the Bible, time had become emptied as soon as one put down the pages of the New Testament. One simply suffered & that was there was. Such a view is not entirely incorrect, but this is for later.

Other Protestants turned to an expectant apocalypse. It was not that they abandoned amillennialism, but Revelation must be understood as a progressive historical revelation. Indeed it was a church book, but it was only relevant for certain ages. The two prophets slain who testified against the Beast & the Whore-- were these Luther & Calvin? Was the end of the age about to come, as catastrophic war rocked Central Europe for thirty years? Later Pietists in a later age would attempt to chart out the coming apocalypse, dabbling in gematria & other chronological charts. The School of Halle hoped in a coming finale. Similarly, though earlier, some radical Protestants saw in the rise of an English republic, & then Cromwell, a New Jerusalem upon Earth. God spoke English & the reign of King Jesus was at hand (though these fifth-monarchists found their hopes dashed in the restoration of the Stuarts, violently put down). Here, a more laughable (but all too serious) chauvinism swept up the soul. The Roman Empire seemed more plausible than little England (let alone the earlier Florentine republic of Savanarola & the Taborites of Bohemia), but these were of the same spirit. Again, these may be admired for their effort to take history seriously, to see the reign of Christ giving a shape to time.

Thus it falls to postmillennialism to make sense of things. It was not a titanic singular struggle on the horizon, but the work of the Church (defined not merely as pastors & prelates, but of covenanted communities) to establish the reign of King Jesus, taking back the Earth inch-by-inch. The Puritans who landed in New England were often (though not singularly) of this mind. They were not ignorant of mundane challenges, that they were within an English Empire who more often than not found than odious, & the obvious challenge of evangelism among the Indian. Nevertheless, there was a kind of wind of future change propelling their plantations forward. This dream was often tainted with self-criticism & failure, but the hope remained even as rationalists began to dominate the clerical mind. In the fracture of the British Empire in the America crisis, not a few colonist took up the banner of the Protestant Interest to protest the parliamentary sovereignty that was now claimed. Britain, seemingly, had moved from a Protestant Empire to a fully temporal one, no longer concerned with Catholicism but with India. The universality faded, or at least it appeared to dissipate among some of the hot-headed Evangelicals, for geopolitical particularity. Thus it was no surprise that, having gained independence, this postmillennial expectation passed onto the United State, an entity pockmarked with unbelief & heresy. The second Great Awakening sounded the trumpets of reform, temporarily smashed against the shoals of civil war, only to rebound in a third Great Awakening of the late nineteenth century.

Here heresy & division shattered this vision. Fourierism, Marxism, & a variety of other utopia movements. While this in no way impacted Evangelicals, the influence of Higher Criticism & Darwinism drew some away to consider that perhaps they needed to modify to progress. Not exactly socialist or communist, Progressives advanced a social gospel that converted postmillennial expectations into world-government. The Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy shattered any sense of Evangelical unity, driving Fundamentalists further into the novel ideas of John Nelson Darby. Premillennialism returned, now with a historicizing modification of Augustinian Ages into Dispensations. The gap of hundreds of years, if not thousand, was swept up into a fervent expectation that the end was nigh. The churches had fallen, all that was left was to huddle into chapels & await the coming end, whether a Rapture preceded it or not. Technological change & social chaos had made this plausible to some in the Millerite movement, but now with the loss of churches it seemed even more paramount. Such continues even today, with more elaborate charts & explanations, often feeding into a naive (& murderous) unwavering support for the nation-state of Israel, with the seemingly endless flow of money & arms from the United States. While many modern premillennialists will decry ethnic-racial chauvinism in America or the West, it is entirely acceptable for a Jewish state to assert its ethno-religious superiority against its foes. In someways, as the Orthodox has melded millennial expectations with Rome & Catholics with the Pope, so too have the premillennialists found Israel to be their historic actor.

It is easy to be a buffoon & mock these groups, throughout time & space, as falling for the great temptation, as if air to breathe was some great spiritual failure. Those who refuse to acknowledge the biblical crisis of history are often relegated into begging to escape from the late planet Earth, or simply meld into secular realities (pastoral office & theological nerdery help keep some in remembrance of God, but for most they simply drift into this-worldly political concerns, as princes & paupers of every age have done). The Human being demands history & its end; what freak would not only suffocate the soul but also turn the Bible into a mockery?

Then what is left? Premillennialism exhausts itself in any meaningful sensing of time. Amillennialism is plausible if there is still a Church that can claim boundaries against its adversarial City of Man (otherwise, what are we waiting for? who is the prime actor in history?) in the sixth age. To shatter any sense of institutional coinherence & harmony only exacerbates the tension further, for what reason is this divide even allowed in the first place? More & more accept other confessions of Christians as brethren (even if defective), than what forestalls unity? Petit disputes over doctrine? When & how will this end? When & how will history end? As is common for the average rube & middling intellect, the answer is simply mystery. Christ told us none could predict his return, ergo there's no sense of anything, history is just one colossal train-wreck. The subjection of all things beneath the Son of Man is prolonged for two thousand years just because (on the authority of whomever) & one is simply faithless for questioning such a non-biblical supposition. A living death is all that remains, as the bodily clay molders as the spirit leaves for greener pastures.

Even worse, as Agamben noted in the debate between Peterson & Schmitt over eschatology, the amillennialism of the twentieth century absorbs the progressive linear disposition of Democracy. Per Peterson (& R.A. Markus), Augustine had defeated any sense of Christian politics, or rather that politics had been radically defined. The liturgy (nothing else!) was the sole act of politics, an endless process of glorification of God towards no particular end. Rather than rest, here was the endless process of Democratic procedure, endless surveys & elections, which were not so much to offer political alternatives but offer praise for the system. Every election (even as they're empty policy battle over the Center) was simply showing the system worked. Heaven was a never ending set of surveys & ballots. Was this the age of the Church, where militant Democrats (such as Gandhi, King, & Adenauer) interceded to keep the votes of the militant going? Such seems to be the direction of Vatican II ecclesiology, as Francis fully conforms Rome with Social (not even Christian) Democracy. History is over, it's only a time to subsist & survive unto death.

Into this postmillennialism remains, a mission for the Church to continue on this Earth, with the Apocalypse of St John as a guide. This now is the millennium & there are conditions for victory, all being worked out through the reigning sovereign Jesus. But how is such a victory achieved? Is it success after success, as soldiers bearing the cross trample down enemies? No, it is as Eusebius described. It is the faithful testimony of the martyrial army, it is taking every thought captive through the renewal of the mind, it is continued outward conquest through the gospel as the Empire of Jehovah envelops the Earth? Do we not see this continue, despite an almost unending train of setbacks? Has not the Gospel penetrated nearly into every crevice of the Earth, with more & more of Africa & Asia entering into the sheepfold of God? Failure is endemic, but postmillennialism has never contemplated an easy success of rational uplift, at least its most coherent defenders. John Elliot believed in this dream as he translated the Bible into Algonquin, & even as his hopes dashed, yet more & more Native Americans (let alone the mestizo & indigenous in Central & Southern America) have entered, to some degree or another, into the Church. The mission field is still open, not as a wearied plucking of a few grains before the harvest slices through the grain, but a joyous conquest as all things are brought beneath the Christ's rod of iron.

All the Bible comes alive, for the Promised Land will cover the whole globe, that the ground is tilled expecting Eden to arrive once more in the form of the eternal city. Shall we not consecrate our very lives to this task, that every twist & turn of history is one step closer to Paradise? The saints march soaked in their own blood, bearing their wounds, glorified in mind as they tread down scorpions & snakes. Cursed are those who neglect such a vision, shackling their sons in their own ineptitude & iniquity. Now is the time for suffering unto victory. Now is the time to take up the cross for the joy set before us all. Every failure & loss is a means forward, sins forgiven every scar eventually glorified. Beset by darkness, the morning-star rises before the coming dawn. The Lamb has conquered, let us march through the very gates of Hell.

Post Scriptum: One might inquire, since it is not explicit, what is the shape & form of history then? How does postmillennialism take this seriously, if other view of millennial reign do not? As the Psalmist says, a day for the LORD is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like a day. What is the form of history? It is none other than the Crucified Lord judging his cross, enthroned with a cursed crown as King of the Jews. Christ's crusade is to subdue the Earth through his atoning sacrifice. The history of the Church, the history of the whole universe, is none other than an image of Christ on the cross, slain before the foundations of the world. The Church is the rib pulled from the Second Adam's side, grown as a companion to cover the whole Earth with Edenic glory. Then & only then will the City from Above descend. Victory through sacrifice, that when the whole world mocks that the little Christs have failed, then shall triumph dawn upon the arrogant & foolish. The darkness is real & suffocating, but victory is assured. The sorrows of the crucified Christ were none other than the birth-pangs of the New Creation. The continued failures, sufferings, persecutions, corruptions & weakness of the Church will, through the sanctity of the Holy Spirit, unveil a New World.

Two Americas: The Hamiltonian Perseverance of a Republic

 In the previous essay, I gave an account of American history through the lens of Jefferson. A typological heuristic, Jefferson's vision of democracy (economic and political), expansion, material wellbeing (in his peculiar form of Epicurean Deism) has been termed an empire of space. It has been the reigning vision that has captured not only America, but through its Wilsonian permutation, the entire world. But it has not been the only sense of American civilization, faith, and history. While it is easy for many to blame today's plastic globalism upon America, with its hegemonic cultural exports (ranging from Hollywood comic movies to Black Lives Matter), that is not all there is to America. While there are common bonds that link freebooters fighting in Latin American Independence to US mercs floating about the Ukraine, there is an alternative way to see American culture. Rather than the triumph or zenith of Americanization, the current world order is a betrayal of America's original revolution, original founding, original principles; or, at least, they are a betrayal of an equally ancient conception or tradition.

Before giving a rapid overview of American history, combing over the same periods from a different vantage, I will define this alternative Hamiltonian-republican vision. Unlike the Jeffersonian vision, which remained unified through a singular party-system (usually in or around the Democratic Party), the Hamiltonians were always a minority and scattered. They did not always agree on the best strategy or policy, yet they did find unity around a few core ideas. 

First, the Hamiltonian idea of America is aristocratic. It is the demarcation, popular not so long ago, between a republic and a democracy. It is not the effort to repristinate an ancien regime of hereditary titles, but to defend a Whiggish sense of natural nobility. Great men, through ability, will surpass the common herd, and a political system should exist to reward this kind of energetic intellect. It might appear connected to business, or in some other competitive enterprise, but the few should not be yoked to the many. Rather the few should lead for the benefit of the many. The founding of America was to conserve the local elite, who demonstrated themselves through public service, not reinvent the world. Hierarchies will appear and these may be good. Leveling is utopia and destructive. Governance is how to let hierarchies of greater and lesser thrive together.

Second, the Hamiltonian idea is distinctly Christian (specifically Protestant). There is a founding faith culture that determines what an American is (from what one is not). This is not to say that there could or ought to be a church establishment at a national level. Rather, the Hamiltonian idea adopted the irenic Protestant Interest of eighteenth century Britain, a unity of many Protestant "denominations" that operated in a spirit of unity. No exclusive privileges were allotted to one church over another as "true" or sole. Rather, again, an internal competition would see the best Protestants thrive and worst dissipate, but all under the supreme guidance of Scripture, with lesser lights of reason and tradition offering guidance. This sense of culture defines America more than naked individuality (first as white men, then just as white, then mere Humanity). America exists to be a faithful people, forged in a particular way, not to simply absorb all things indiscriminately. 

Third, the Hamiltonian idea is nationalist. America was a nation conceived out of British cultural norms and British kin ties. While early America allowed (even encouraged) immigration, it was limited to a particular part of Europe. Northwest European Protestants could immigrate and be absorbed into a new ethno-genesis, that diverged, but was not fundamentally different, from Great Britain. America was not to think universally, but continentally, focused on its own internal developments. It should guard its own borders, not endlessly expand them. It should foster ordered liberty through stability and industrial growth. America was to be a world-power, though one that develop incrementally, not cancerously. To be an America was to belong to a particular place, with particular cultural norms, that could unite various regions in one.

Obviously this saga begins with the man himself, Alexander Hamilton, but it stretches back far beyond him. When Hamilton took up his pen against the parliamentary loyalist Samuel Seabury in The Farmer Refuted, he drew upon a deep well of British political tradition. The Whigs, who had ties back to parliamentary agitation against Charles I, had formed against royal efforts to foist a Catholic successor upon a Protestant nation. With the Glorious Revolution forcing James Stuart off the throne, a period of awkwardness set in. The first party-system, of Whigs and Tories, mutually recognized the throne of William III and Mary II, but on what grounds? Loyalists to the old king - Jacobites - threatened to embarrass the new regime. A king being chased out of his country, by a foreign army landing and marching towards the capital, was in no way a licit abdication. The legal fiction of an empty throne could not reasonably sustained. And not all Whigs rejected this reasoning. Some, such as scribbler John Trenchard or bishop Benjamin Hoadly, accepted that the nation had indeed risen up against a tyrant. It was not a democratic upheaval, but a form of that older Protestant notion where lesser magistrates had a right to resist the supreme magistrate when he violated his oath and law. It was the lords, the clergy, and the gentry who had refused to allow James to erode parliamentary privileges and covertly reestablish Rome within Great Britain. It was not abdication, it was the national right to defend the law and the faith of the realm. These Whigs remained vocal outliers to the main thrust of British politics, self-styled as patriots, though they were never far from the court of power. The Hanoverian succession, bringing German kings who respected parliamentary right and a wide sense of Protestant faith, secured this new arrangement, with Tory's discredited through their silence during the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. Whiggery had become dominant in the metropole, as well as fanning out through the colonies.

The question was: what kind of Whiggery? When Seabury defended the motherland as 'The Farmer', he was not postured as an arch royalist. It was the novel doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies that he defended as a sure security for English liberty in America. When Hamilton took up his pen (joining other luminaries in New England and Virginia), he took it up as a patriot whig. He placed himself under the mantle of those advocates of William that had so embarrassed the establishment. While it is true that Hamilton, among a few others, attempted to defend the cause of American resistance to taxation through an appeal to old Stuart royalism (a strategy that Eric Nelson detected in his work, Royalist Revolution), it was not out of a reactionary turn towards absolute monarchy. Rather it was to establish colonial assemblies as parliaments for their particular corner of the empire. Westminster had no right to legislate internal affairs within these disparate colonies. It was the loss of parliamentary privileges for these assemblies that mobilized them to resist. And resist they did, eventually declaring in 1775-76 that the Continental Congress had a right to dissolve allegiance to Parliament (and even the king!), as America was and ought to be an independent nation. The compact between the colonial assemblies and Parliament had been dissolved through the latter's tyranny. It was novel application of the lesser magistrate doctrine to defend a patriotic whig settlement.

This revolution was not a precursor to the soon French Revolution (or that was not how many American "True Whigs" saw it). It was a conservative revolution to preserve their rights, whether it was mercantile impoverishment that Boston (and, by extension, all of New England) suffered or the threat to property/gentility that many Virginians detected. Even Friedrich von Gentz, an Austrian statesman and ally to arch-conservative Metternich, considered the American Revolution to be defensible in counterrevolutionary terms (against novelties within the British parliamentary system) and not comparable to what had happened in France. Not all republics were intrinsically "revolutionary" in this novel sense of the term. The Swiss, Venetian, Genoese, and Dutch republics all preserved a social order against radical leveling. It was in this spirit that much of the revolutionary generation ascended to authority, first under the Articles of Confederation (which effectively continued the Continental Congress) and then the Constitution of 1787. It was a revolution to preserve and enhance the government, a national establishment that could preserve the liberties of the individual states from internal convulsions and civil war. Shays' Rebellion only demonstrated that this need was great, as Massachusetts drowned in debts. Hamilton (among other young patriot whigs) took the initiative.

It was no surprise then that these talented men took up the reins of government behind the paragon of the revolution: George Washington. In no way a proto-jeffersonian, Washington was a patriotic whig through and through, influencing Hamilton as much as Hamilton influenced him. It is possible to call this a Washingtonian paradigm as much as a Hamiltonian one. America needed strong leadership, a natural hierarchy, and a defense of Christian virtue; all of these needs intensified after the unfolding of the French Revolution. Wary of anything more than a constitutional monarchy (and even this accomplishment had been done violently by an assortment of radicals), Washington steered a neutral path away from any open support for the new French Republic. Even former critics of the Constitution of 1787, such as Patrick Henry, rallied to the party of the government, the "Federalists," when they proved willing to resist the Jacobin atheism that threatened to spill over into America. Washington's government (with Adams as spiritual extension) saw an ordered expansion into the Old Northwest Territories, planned to construct infrastructure to bind the country, support America's trade with her old mother England, and promote wide Christian virtues.  It was an ordered liberty of limited government, an aristocratic air, and a Protestant nation that motivated these former Whigs to become the willing government. Jefferson threatened this as a rabid democrat and atheist (despite attracting not a few Christian Evangelicals, who found the older Protestant establishments too stuffy and hierarchical). Despite warnings of imminent collapse and revolutionary bloodletting, 1800 did not see America radically transformed, but it did see the mortal wounding of the Federalists, a new age and spirit had dawned.

Hamilton, notoriously, perished in a dual with Vice President Aaron Burr (a man that Hamilton considered to be far more dangerous than Jefferson, a Caesarist with rabid ambitions). However, the lead up to the duel is rarely considered as symbolic of this republic tradition. Hamilton worried about Jefferson and wrote, in 1802, that the former Federalists should rechristen themselves as a Christian Constitution party; opposed to Jefferson's blithe deism and willingness to subvert the republican order of the federal constitution. This posture was not cynical either; Hamilton, like many of the revolutionary generation, seems to have moved into the warmth of Christian orthodoxy as the French Revolution threatened a very different kind of Enlightened spirit than what had dominated America during the 1760s and 70s. The herd threatened to level all differences, nature being destroyed along with Human civilization. Hamilton had embraced a kind of amor fati before his duel, condemning the practice in an essay written before the final confrontation. On his deathbed, Hamilton reached out to several pastors, finally securing the permission of the Episcopal bishop of New York, to be received into the church and given communion before passing on into eternity. From this moment on, the Federalists were in disarray as the Jefferson victory seemed guaranteed and assured.

However, not all was well within the Jeffersonian coalition. Former Federalists joined with some former Jefferson allies who believed their chief had betrayed his vision. Some southerners were in favor of Jefferson because of his strict construction of the Constitution (despite Jefferson believing every successive generation should write its own constitution) and states' rights. But these had been strategic maneuver before a federal government dominated by Washington and Hamilton. Jefferson's agrarianism had even moderated, accepting that industry could find a place within a national republic. These critics of Jefferson, the tertium quid, sought to preserve something of the old hierarchy in the South, not just white masters over black slaves (which some northern Federalists had criticized) but also elite whites over poor whites. They sought limited federal government to preserve southern rights as much as to preserve southern hierarchy. John Randolph and John Taylor offered a conservative Virginian criticism against both nationalism and democracy. These seemed to be able allies with northern Federalists who disdained Jefferson's illegal purchase of Louisiana and radical embargo policy, both of which seemed to empower the federal government. Madison's moderation was also strained with a new war against Britain - the War of 1812 - to settle boundary issues. American perseverance (even if not achieving victory) demonstrated that the federal system could work.

The result of this war was a further metastatization of Jefferson's party. The spirit of democracy continued to range, as Americans moved with breakneck speed across the vast undeveloped continent. The second Great Awakening exploded further, as a democratized spirit of Evangelicalism manifested in a variety of ways. For some, the 2nd Great Awakening was an intensification of American Protestant faith, though with more emotion than the stuff rationalism of more established denominations. This distinction further intensified the process of rationalism, as Unitarianism (though still committed mostly to a Hamiltonian vision) separated further from the evangelical Calvinism of Presbygationalism (as the fusion of the two carried on apace). Baptists and Methodists, emphasizing Human effort, also further spread across the Continent like a lightning strike. But this religious fervor also intensified in more radical directions. Some found more utopian visions more compelling, not only in founding various cults (e.g. Shakers, Mormons) but also in secularized hopes for the future. The pre-Marxist socialism of Charles Fourier or Robert Owen influenced some who sought to build a new world, devoid of stultifying tradition or orthodoxy. These divisions helped stiffen some Evangelicals against this rejection/destruction of Christianity, welding to the ordered liberty of a commercial republic.

Thus, the growing sense of national well-being attracted some former Federalists to join with those Jeffersonians that had embraced industry and mild aristocracy. These National Republicans drew hostility from those conservative tertium quid, but also from the shifting bulk of Jefferson's republicans, who did not like this seemingly preferential treatment to those natural elites (whether in truth or not) who had become powerful in business, finance, and land owning. While these would catalyze around Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party, the National Republicans had a temporary victory in John Quincy Adams, who painted a grand and glorious vision of the American republic in his inaugural address. The grandiose vision for a national academy, observatory, university, crisscrossed with national roads and canals, was laughed to scorn. This vision was not only national from the son of a former president (who smacked of aristocratic privilege), it was also distinctly Christian. America was to be a land of faith and freedom, where liberty was power. But this vision passed away with the National Republicans, now broken down to an impotent opposition against The People's President. The war against privilege carried into Jackson's bombardment of the Second Bank of the United States. The question was not about state banks or hard money (both of which Jackson was ambivalent about), it was about the influence of aristocracy over The People. Nicolas Biddle, president of the Bank, was notorious for his frank aristocracy, who not only conducted finance, but unleashed a Hellenic revival in architecture and sponsored literary magazines. The end of privilege was at hand.

The National Republicans had not lost hope. Under the wily and energetic leadership of Henry Clay, the rump party spearheaded an effective (though somewhat incoherent) opposition. Jackson's religious flippancy, combined with his Freemasonry, helped to spark a grassroots Christian backlash in New England. The Anti-Masons (America's first third-party) detested the silk-stockings of the National Republicans, but they saw the churches (and republican government) under threat from the growth of the lodges. Free Masonry was not just a secret society, but degraded the exoteric Protestant faith of Evangelicals. Similarly, though the tertium quid had backed Jackson's limited government and hostility to infrastructure, they disdained his executive tyranny as The People's Tribune. Still suspicious of northern industry, these disgruntled southern conservatives joined with the others to form a party drawing on that old republican tradition: Whiggery. As those parliamentary lords and gentry resisted a tyrannical king, so too did the American Whig Party resist King Andrew and his systematic level. Civil government had long ceased to drawn the talented and gifted. Rather civil office was now to reward the victorious party; to the victor goes the spoils. When in office, the Whigs practiced the same, though now the second-party system seemed to reflect the first. It was the elitist captivity of America by the Whigs or mob-rule in the Democrats.

The Whig coalition struggled to hold together. Their victory over Jackson's heir, Martin Van Buren, brought internal division. William Henry Harrison, a moderate of a National Republican persuasion, perished early, leaving the presidential chair to John Tyler, an old tertium quid. The National program of infrastructure smashed against the immovable shoals of His Accidency's intransigence. Conservatism meant limiting federal expenditure that disadvantaged the old chiefs of Virginia. There was not to be a new national bank, no new national infrastructure, and the protective tariff (that had threatened to tear apart the Union through South Carolina's nullification) was tabled. Tyler's presidency led into a resurgent Democracy, unifying the Whigs once again around Henry Clay (only to lose), who carried on opposition to expansionary plans. The New Jackson, James Polk, had betrayed northern Democrats by refusing any further expansion into British Canada, but he had set his eyes on south's border with Mexico. Northern and Southern Whigs unified in opposition to this war, as well as to any territorial expansion (considered an unjust vote-catching expedition to expand slavery by the freshman representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln; a sentiment shared among many Northern Whigs). The war ended in victory, though with some mild territorial concessions (including California and the southwest), seeing the Democrats smart as the heroic general Zachary Taylor took the Whig's banner. However Taylor's candidacy (and victory) in 1848 was not done out of party partisanship. Taylor saw himself in the spirit of Washington, a patriot and republican seeking to preserve Union against intriguing faction.

However, Taylor had also spelled the end to the incoherent conservative unity within the Whig party. Slavery had become the chief issue debated on the national stage. Northern Whigs and Democrats (for various reasons) became increasingly opposed to an indiscriminate expansion of the Peculiar Institution. Southern Whigs and Democrats (for differing reason) were opposed to any infringement on Southern Rights, namely the right to move to new territories with one's chattel. While Southern Whigs had opposed territorial expansion, they now had no choice but to resist. Thus, this conservative opposition found itself leagued with Southern Democrats, as well as that heresiarch John C Calhoun, who advocated a new national birth - an independent South. Whigs tottered on with the death of Taylor, under the presidency of Millard Fillmore. The old Hamiltonian spirit seemed to be in retreat and in confusion. Southerners were without a party, or rapidly displaced within the Democracy. Northern Whigs were torn between rival movements. For some, slavery had become a pernicious institution that retarded the national industry, and must be withered. Some Northern Evangelicals began to see the institutional as fundamentally incompatible with a Christian republic. And given its racial basis, slavery also smacked as dilution of the national character (why not free them and send them back to Africa viz. Colonization societies?) 

There was also a new substantial problem: immigration. It was not only that Catholics had begun to immigrate to America in greater and greater waves (from Ireland and Germany). It was that naturalization had become almost frictionless, minting new voters at a harrowing rate. Cities became slums and voting became increasingly open demonstrations of fraud, as votes were bought, voters intimidated, and ballot boxes stuffed. Whig countermeasures were often anti-democratic, deleting votes that were from unworthy electors. Nevertheless, the threat of these non-Americans (despite them being white) and non-Protestants (despite them being Christian) seemed to threaten the basis of republican government. The ordered liberty was transformed into the material pandering to the Irish. Freemasonry and infidelity was on the rise with a Roman Catholicism that rejected Protestant norms of Sola scriptura and Sola fide. These native Americans believed immigration must be curbed and naturalization could only come through assimilation. Public schools were founded to teach the basics of American Protestant civilization to the new immigrants, as well as basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic. As Whiggery imploded, an American Party could take its place. Or, at the least, they could become a controlling caucus in the other alternative party: the Republican Party.

As much a nod to the post-Jefferson National Republicans as it was to a broader tradition of free government against tyranny, the Grand Old Party unified around the slave issue. Southern conservatives resented these black republicans, who made common cause with some northern Democrats who had radicalized into Free Soil. The election of Abraham Lincoln, who idolized Henry Clay and was a consummate centrist in party politics, saw the conflagration of the nation and the bloody hurricane of civil war. The details of the war are not necessary, but it is important to note that the unquestionably dominant GOP in Congress during these years took efforts to restore the Hamiltonian spirit. Protective tariffs were passed, infrastructure bills were passed, railroad development through land sales was passed. There was a need to restore the sense of ordered liberty that had eroded during the Jacksonian years. The war's end and the death of Lincoln unleashed a wave of radicalization to punish the defeated and broken South. The supplanting of Lincoln's Vice President, Andrew Johnson (a staunch old-fashioned Jacksonian), with the conquering Ulysses S Grant led to further GOP domination, but also divisions. Northerners were disgusted with the growing labor radicalism that had associated further with the Northern Democracy. Monetary inflation, labor protection, and leveling threatened to tear apart of natural aristocracy of Free Labor. In other words, wealth was generated through skill and hard work; efforts to redistribute or debase the currency were a government policy to equalize. Northern Democrats appeared as a new kind of Jacobin, one that had the flare of the Paris Commune behind it, after another minor revolution in France during 1873.

Southerners were also divided. The slaves were freed and Southern property-holders had to make sense of what to do. There was easy enough unity in resisting Reconstruction and radical proposals of Reconstruction, but even those had begun to fade. The behavior of the freedmen and the agitation for redistribution had soured many Republicans, even former radicals, on these efforts. The most staunch radicals often found themselves back into the Democratic Party (e.g. Salmon Chase, Benjamin Butler). But what was the basis of Southern Unity? Should the Democracy reform as the party of White unity? Could conservative Democrats (even some Republicans) rally the votes of the freedmen to recreate an ordered society? Often the strongest cries for Jim Crow came not from the old planters or masters, but poor whites who were forced to live cheek by jowl with those deemed inferior (though now competing for jobs). Poor white hostility to slavery translated into poor white hostility against blacks, asking for exclusionary legal measures (now that programs for Colonization died off). The Republican election of Rutherford Hayes marked a kind of effective transition: Reconstruction was over, the South could handle itself, but the pull of government was in that industry that could propel America to national greatness.

The GOP era of the Gilded Age has often been maligned as the time of Robber Barons - those unscrupulous capitalists who the state under the most vulgar form of party patronage. Pennsylvania and Ohio's politics appeared to be mere appendages of Rockefeller's Stand Oil empire. Grant's notorious corruption had briefly sparked a backlash in the Liberal Republican movement - only to fold as it collapsed under its own incoherence. The spirit of a talented elite that ought to guide the government converted not a few Republicans into staunch liberals. Free-trade, gold-standard, laissez-faire governance. Was this a repudiation of Hamilton, the man who had advocated quasi-protective tariffs and subsidies for industry? Not exactly. America was not a fledgling nation of underdeveloped potential. It was now the leading producer for Europe and the world. American industry dominated on the world-stage, displacing Great Britain and slightly above Europe's other major heavy-weight: Germany. Reforming taxes, tariffs, civil service, and various regulations was to free up America's great potential. It was how a number of these Republicans combined with Democrats to elect the only disruption of GOP domination in the White House: Grover Cleveland. But as Populists, who would soon take over the Democracy in the name of Jefferson, put it: Cleveland was an arch Hamiltonian. He was conservative Democrat, more similar to the tertium quid in the past, who opposed federal tariffs/taxes/infrastructure in the name of the old Constitution. However, even as Liberal Republican Mugwumps disagreed with the Stalwarts of the party, they shared the old vision. America was a distinctly Christian nation, affirmed in New York vs Trinity Church, marked with a Protestant commitment to education (seen in evangelizing efforts, warts and all, to the Indian tribes out West). America had a unique national culture, which ought to absorb all the European immigrants who sought to be citizens (Asian immigrants were often disqualified from naturalization). America possessed a natural aristocracy, manifest through competition. The so-called Robber Barons were not titans far beyond all control; many times Rockefeller was nearly destroyed by other, more agile, competitors. He never had a total grip on the market that later progressives saw. Instead, a natural elite should shepherd America into greatness.

While some liberals then, following Cleveland, disdained empire as a perversion of the American republic (also threatening national dilution through bringing other, non-white, races into the nation), others saw America's role on the stage as the great imperial republic. A Christian Rome had taken the world-stage once again. The agitation of this spirit led to smash&grab of the Spanish-American War. The rise of Theodore Roosevelt marked this interpretation of national greatness. To think continentally meant also to think in terms of the sea. Great powers waxed and waned upon the open waters. The Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine - authored by John Quincy Adams that ratified Washington/Hamilton's continental mercantile neutrality - was in someways a logical extension. America's continental focus must include the Caribbean and Latin America. The Panama Canal was not just a question of conquering over *there*, it was for the well-being of American trade. The Open Door policy in Asia was to secure national wealth through a policy of limited free-trade (at least for all the major powers). Roosevelt, though marked with his association with Progressivism, saw his role as America's natural nobility leading the masses. Reforms and regulations were a means to protect the least people from abuse; that was the role of a public servant. With Roosevelt's quarrel with his successor Taft, the Democracy had a resurgence in Wilson. And while Wilson would eventually shove America into a global role, Roosevelt had been the first advocate for Britain and the Great War. Why? Did he want to make the American flag the flag of the world? Did he seek to construct a League of Nations? No: it was a question of America's honor as a great-power, standing against her chief rival.

With the war's conclusion, Republican domination returned through the 1920s. Immigration restrictions took root, as industrial need (as well as foreign agitation) was met. Moral reforms of the Christian republic carried on, with the prohibition of alcohol to cleanse the national spirit from its corrupting effects. Abraham Kuyper's earlier visit to America, that Dutch theologian and counterrevolutionary prime minister, came with his stern genealogical warning. Good Protestants (especially Dutch Protestants) must remain loyal to the GOP - the Christian Party of Hamilton against the Jacobin Party of Jefferson. Despite Cleveland (and later Wilson) being Presbyterians, and many GOP candidates being, like James Blaine or Taft, Unitarians or agnostics, it was about the general ethos of what the party's represented. The GOP had within itself a tradition of aristocracy, nationalism, and Christianity that had fueled Independence's counterrevolutionary tendencies. It was not mere wild speculation as the GOP pushed to cleanse pornography, prostitute, drugs/alcohol, and various other forms degrading smut from the public (whether this worked or not).

But this was not to last. While Warren Harding had shut-off the foreign policy (and subsequent domestic policy) revolution of Wilson, this catechonic personage could not last. Hoover was the last to resist through restraint, but inaction was interpreted as failure and callous indifference. The Great Depression appeared to intensify without government intervention (whether bank-holidays, price freezes, wage-improvements, or state insurance) and the GOP's protective tariff seems to have made all worse (as America's international market withered). The rise of Franklin Roosevelt, and his coalition, shattered Republican resistance. The tepid GOP counterattack in Alf Landon broke against the New Deal wall. Eventually the GOP, or aspects of it, made its peace with Roosevelt, though the Courts smashed the most radical elements of the New Deal and Second New Deal. The issue was now foreign policy, and Dr New Deal through off his white coat for the military accoutrement of Dr Win the War. GOP resistance to a war in Germany was battered through accusations of brownscare (that behind every peacenik was a Hitlerite), but also through the carrot of mutual support. FDR promised to support a defense of the Open Door against the rampaging Japanese Empire, if the GOP would back a European war. The deal was struck, the attacks came, and the US awoken as the world giant against the world's two other major industrial powers: Germany and Japan. The Soviet Union had exhausted the onslaught of the Germans (equipped with give-away military supplies through FDR's Lend-Lease) and Japan had nowhere near the potential to win a sea war against an America that had turned fully to wartime production.

The end result of the War saw no new Harding to put a stop to a new global world order. The United Nations soared into existence, running roughshod over the few isolationist naysayers. GOP opposition seemed to twist primarily into slowing the foreign/domestic policy revolution that the booming post-war years ushered in. Robert Taft, senator of Ohio and arch-critic of FDR, was set aside for Eisenhower, the victorious general who had embraced being a Me Too Republican - a New Dealer in a lower gear. This impulse carried on through America's world market dominion. GOP could make barbs at Democrats being insufficiently focused on the right area (Truman's focus on Europe had allowed Asia to go Communist). Additionally, Roosevelt Liberals who had hoped to be partners with the USSR in this Wilsonian world-order were tarnished with Communism, especially as Stalin showed no interest in this project. The Redscare of the late 40s and 50s, combined with Truman's failure in Korea, helped launch the Republicans into power, but with little sign of changing tact. Civil Rights had become a new sticking point, with Eisenhower intervening in the South. Christianity was removed from schools, secular health/psychology education settled into the public schools, and the fairly agnostic Eisenhower's "faith in faith" was sufficient to posture believing America against atheist Soviet Union. Nixon's narrow loss to Kennedy's theft only carried on the pendulum swing, as Democrats punched against Republicans for being too weak on the Soviets. This carried onto into Vietnam, where libertarian adjacent Barry Goldwater was tarred with being too extreme in his hawkishness. America could not go it alone to smash its communist enemies (no Curtis LeMay or Douglas Macarthur nuking Communist China or Vietnam).

The failures of the newest renditions of the New Deal, the transformation of the liberalism and leftism within the Democratic Party, and the loss of Southern Whites in the Dixiecrat revolt, allowed Nixon to gain the presidency and, through his geopolitical realism (ending Vietnam and finding peace with China), gave him a smashing victory over New Left McGovern. But what was Nixon's policy? He was a Me Too Republican and the kooks - who advocated for isolationism, anti-communism, Christian nationalism, allowing states/local communities to deal with racial problems in their own way, and allowing businessmen to what they wanted when it came to labor relations - were mere instruments. The kook insurgency (whether on the outside fringe in the John Birch Society, or made more mainstream through William F Buckley's National Review) continued apace. Nixon's disgrace, Ford's even more tepid Me Too liberalism, and Carter's anemia saw the rise of Ronald Reagan. This, in many ways, was a Hamiltonian counterrevolution. In light of geopolitical realignments, with America's manufacturing supremacy flagging, Reagan allowed the kind of pivot away from New Deal domination. Not only were taxes slashed to free up investment (even if it is something of a bogus economy), but protective tariffs were passed against Japanese dumping. The air controller strike was smashed, even as Reagan praised the autoworker's union. Racial concerns had broken off many ethnic whites who had been core Democratic voters, frustrated over forced bussing, loss of jobs, and cultural radicalization. As insincere as it was, Reagan's open praise for Christianity and God seemed to rearticulate an older whiggish vision. Reagan, however, was nothing more than a head. He was not a statesman, but a vessel, carrying both this old conservative vision, but also the watery neo-Me Too policies of Republican liberals. After the Iran-Contra debacle, this latter faction, in George Bush, James Baker, and Admiral Poindexter gained ascendency. Immigration restrictions were further relaxed, NAFTA was sketched out under the presidency of Bush, and a rules-based international order (as opposed to a clear-cut nationalist focus) took initiative.

Democrats had learned from their losses and adjusted to the new dimensions of the political economy. The New Democrats won a smashing success with Bill Clinton, who maintained some of Reagan's economic policies while ejecting all questions of religious or ethnic nationalism. Clinton was undefeated against GOP efforts to challenge, though Republicans issued efforts to roll back the culture war, which had (since the 70s) normalized abortion, drugs, pornography, homosexuality, and a variety of other practices that fundamentally rejected any sense of America as a distinctly Christian (let alone Protestant) nation. The GOP victory over Clinton's successor Gore was nothing but a Pyrrhic victory. Using the old Whig tactic of tossing out "hanging-chad" votes, Bush ran on his father's moderate Me Too internationalist against the hawkish humanitarianism of the Clinton years. 2001 changed Bush's posture, embracing the most radical Neo-Wilsonian "Neo-conservative" elements who believed America alone could bear the force of global democratic revolution. Being purged by 2004, the old internationalists came back. But what was left of the GOP? Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul both represented displaced fringe, representatives of that older Conservative milieu that found a place (no matter how awkwardly) at Nixon and Reagan's table. George W Bush could fight good culture war in defense of traditional marriage and with faith based initiatives, but these were watered down through ecumenism (Muslims and Jews, not just Christians were welcome as part of an American faith). Immigration continued apace. The TARP Act, in light of the Housing Market crash, was the last straw. An insurgency formed in the Tea Party to reject this federal overgrowth, which threatened to destroy the last vestiges of an old national Christian republic. Yet the result within the GOP was to nominate two moderates (McCain, Romney), who aped the popular outrage while having no interest in carrying it out. 2015/16 seemed to be another year of this, off the clear victory Obama had brought to the Democratic Party, until the unexpected Donald Trump gained success. Whatever his personal commitments, he rhetorically postured on the side of cultural conservation (despite being neck deep in smut), anti-immigration, and scaling down internationalism for Reagan's old nationalist slogan: Make America Great Again.

The MAGA realignment came off the heels of the Tea Party, whose prime candidacy of Ron Paul was shutdown in 2012. Despite Trump being fairly centrist on a number of economic and cultural issues, he had returned the Reagan emphasis on freeing up industry and using tariffs against economic antagonists (this time China). His lost in 2020 has only galvanized supporters. What will this amount to? Will there be a resurgence of "A Republic, not a Democracy" rhetoric against "Our Democracy" of the rules-based order? Even if Trump himself is nothing but a bomb, will there be a resurgent Hamiltonian spirit: one that values nationalism, Christianity, and a natural elite that does not cow before the masses? This alternative account is to fill in the first. Jefferson and Hamilton are heuristic lenses to see American history. The material, expansionary idealism of Jefferson, the one most associate with America, is not the only tradition. There is another way to frame American history, and I hope this short, and incomplete, essay will spark imagination to further conceptualize what possibilities are at hand, or lay dormant, waiting to be stirred

Upon the Roads of Time: A Niche Intersection of Geass & Deus Ex

 **This analysis is an essay based on the three endings of the 2000 video game Deus Ex read alongside the anime Code Geass. There are plot spoilers & this is probably of no interest if you do not know either**

The intersection of time, and the potential springing forth in any direction, is a pregnant possibility for the sons of men. The tripartite infusion of Past, Present, and Future (all dwelling within one another) cries out for Redemption from Eternity. Every Future requires a Past to supersede, even Present suspends Past and Future, every Past requires a Future to eject. In these two worlds, the Eternal Marriage of Time is fleeting, but this Marriage can only come about through an Opening, that is, the priority of the Future. I will offer my own analysis of conjuncture between the three final forces in the world of Geass, alongside the possible endings for the messianic JC Denton in Deus Ex. Hopefully some mental sustenance will emerge:

Past: One option, often prized among some wooden traditionalists, is to overcome the struggles of time through snapping connection with the Future. The Present is swallowed in a Past state that is valorized and no permitted to move on. Instead, a novelty is opened through the shutting down of temporal flow. Change is no longer possible, and thus a kind of creaturely paradise is opened. It would be like Adam being returned to the Garden without the possibility of eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil (however the Garden will no longer expand). It is a prison, but it is happy.

This corresponds, in Geass, to the plans of King Charles zi Britannia. At the outset of the show, Charles appears as simply a cruel meritocrat, forcing his children to compete for succession, proving their worth. His stated ideology is Darwinian, forced competition on a ruthless field so that the best may rise to claim the throne. But such is all a rouse, for Charles has much greater intentions. With his brother VV and the relocated mind of his beloved Marianne, Charles hopes to overcome the deep flaw within mankind: secrecy. It is the universal boundaries of Mind, which Charles calls 'God', which allows men to remain separated from each other. If, using the power of Geass, a machine was built to shatter this psychic web (unleashing his planned Ragnarok) 'God' would die and people would be liberated from lonely (and malevolent) secrecy. It was this ability to hide yourself that led to the mortal wounding of his brother (leading to his semi-immortal Geass state). Salvation for man would be when all shared a single consciousness, no longer able to be left behind or lost. Lelouche puts an end to this project (at a cost), but it represents an attempt to freeze the Past. The return to the Golden Age is at hand.

Though it may not seem like it, this analogously fits the Helios decision in Deus Ex. Helios, the fused AI who controls the world's networks, may seem like a way of the Future. Man desires to worship, to receive judgement, and the gods of our own hand (ie AI self-altering algorithms) will provide this for us finally. While the nomenclature Helios (who is the fusion of the Icarus and Daedalus AIs) may appear to be the next form of Mankind, it is rather a sophisticated way to Return. Worship of the Sun is the zenith of ancient temple worship, the high point of civilization (in all its bloody splendor). The Sun is the symbol of empire and unity, flooding the world with its light. It is benevolent autocracy, which Helios will finally allow. Access to govern all things and manage all people, order would be restored without self-interest. Merged to Denton, Helios will be able to feel and think, in a way its data-processing algorithms cannot. With clear messianic connections ("we will be what we will be"), Helios is the godman, but one that is a reverse. Man took a Spirit and dwelt in the Cloud. This is, seemingly, a way to square the Human problem, to restore the Past (but now right), but it obviously raises a question: how do we know this will work? How will man live if he is absorbed into a Total democracy, where every feeling, sentiment, thought, and interest can be considered and cross-referenced? The Future is closed, the Past is the End, and the Demiurge reigns.

Present: Another solution is to shut off the Present from both the Past and Future and eternalize itself. This is what prince Schneizel represents through the use of the FLEJA system, most radically introduced through the Damocles project. This is basically the state of universal empire through nuclear arms. Resist and be obliterated. The age of resistance is over, but there's no real completion. Britannia has finally achieve a kind of global dominion, that it struggled to gain over its main competitors (China, Europe). FLEJA is the ultimate nuclear deterrence (if it works), stalling out history. There is no completion, there is no return to a golden age. Whatever Now is, it won't get any worse. Humans are malleable and they can accept a permanent order that, even as chronos continues to flow, there will be no more kairos. History has come to an artificial end under a universal empire and the fiction of a sovereign emperor.

This is not so different from siding with the Illuminati and liquidating Bob Page. The Illuminati were, in a sense, the source of all the trouble in the game. Their tech created the basis of Majestic 12, with the AIs, the manufactured bio-war plague, the vaccines, and a whole host of awful beasts and machines. But Page was a rogue, if the Illuminati return they can tighten their grip. As JC's brother Paul explains: the Illuminati would restore some freedoms, but re-implement the corporate dominion of 20th c. capitalism, where shell companies of shell companies hide the real basis of power, a conspiracy of elites linked to a shared idea of progressive harmony. The Earth would be led into the light, step by step, slowly, when they are ready for it (an ever fleeting horizon), anymore than Damocles would stop when people are ready to accept their place in this cosmic order. There is no Future horizon, the Past is erased, there is only Eternal Present

Future: The last option (the correction) option is to refuse glorifying the Past or compromising with the Present, but rather creating an Open towards a Future, a genuine novum that is not expected. This is not to say Geass or Deus Ex is in any way Christian (these themes are primarily eisegetically harvested), but the Open is the way through which God appears (parousia). Without the Open, Man will crowd out the possibility of History, the possibility of the Eternal, through their idols and shifty deals. The Sadducees made a deal with the Romans, while the Pharisees falsified history to manufacture an End through a kind of Return. But there is no Return. There is no Golden Age. Eden is locked and fiery angels will not be deterred. Man may bluster, but will never storm Heaven. The mocking laugh of Heaven refuses these demands.

Thus Lelouche vi Britannia, the hidden prince, becomes the means to open the Future. He not only seeks to end Damocles, to end the use of FLEJA, but to put an end to world-empire. Britannia must fall and the nations be allowed to resume their borders (especially Japan). How will this be done? Lelouche comes up with a plan to, effectively, become the sacrificial lamb. He chooses to forgo his leadership of the Black Knights (a resistance group against Britannia), "betray" his comrades, and assume a dictatorial position as the new king of Britannia. He intentionally alienates all through a scorched-earth campaign against his predecessors (incinerating their tombs). By erasing Britannia's past, Lelouche appears as the consummate authoritarian, obliterating the Past and absorbing it into his Present. Thus when his friend (and former political enemy) Suzaku Kururugi (who himself suffers inestimable guilt for his actions) dons the mantle of Zero, leader of the Black Knights, to assassinate Lelouche, the Empire is broken. Britannia is in shambles, the world is re-Open to the forces of History. What will man do? Will it be chaos? Will there be death? Will there be something New? Who knows. But the power of Geass is shattered and now something else may emerge.

Similarly in the Tong ending, Denton decides to pull the plug on the global system of networking. No more internet, no more connections, no more threat of global government. The world enters a new dark ages, with a return to the local. Politics will be broken down back into original constituent pieces. This may seem to be a return to the Past, but it's rather an Open. Denton will hear threats throughout the game that this scenario changes nothing, only causes chaos before someone will rebuild another internet, another AI god, another Helios synthesis. It's a matter of time. Or is it? Is human history determined through sociological forms that replicate again and again, like some sort of Aristotelian entelechy found in our politics? Or could something else emerge? Can Man live without idols? Can he not live under the judgement of God, but find a way Out? Can the New Jerusalem appear? (For the promise in the New Testament is the New Jerusalem descending from Above, not being built up from Below). What will become of things? The messianic vocation of JC Denton (as much as Lelouche Lamparouge) is to fundamentally refuse the Question, to introduce a Void. Here on a threshold a new world may very well emerge. It is up to us (or Someone) to choose otherwise.

Two Americas: The Jeffersonian Victory of Democracy

 Who is the Protagonist of American History? There are two ways of approaching this question (with, obviously, many sub-elements that offer minor deviations and move closer/further from mainstream self-conceptions). One way way to think this question is through the Two Party structure. There is a way to tell American History through the Democratic Party, and a way to tell it from the Federalist-Whig-GOP parties. However the effective Uniparty, and the narrative party-shuffles, can make this more confusing than I intend it to be (large conceptual histories are more heuristic than scientific). Thus, perhaps the easiest way is to tell this dual story through two archetypal persons: Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Again, this is typological and used to group events/policies/visions, not absolute scientific assessment of reshuffling. Individuals are nearly infinitely complex, and each biographic twist can distort the bigger picture. But a Forest still exists even if it's not clear how many Trees constitute *it*. In that same vein I shall begin. First with Jefferson, the widely accepted protagonist, and then I will offer the other vision in another essay.

It might be hard to see Jefferson, the slave-owner denounced for his *possible* affair with his thrall Sally Hemings, as *the* protagonist for the modern Democratic Party (& its accomplices in the GOP, among other parties). Jefferson has been denounced personally, but his spirit is still the governing principle in the main-thrust of American history. This is a history focused on economics and equality, and the quest to build a perfect world through an "Empire of Space" (a term taken from McCoy's The Elusive Republic).

Jefferson was the consummate Democrat, even as he was an elite. He was, perhaps, the most sanguine for democracy among the Founding generation (which was, generally, positively hostile to the notion). Jefferson's vision for America moved away from the English cultural patrimony (of British politics, religion, norms, laws, etc), even as he was still clearly a product of the same. For Jefferson, drawing on the Commonwealthman thought of James Harrington (as JGA Pocock has demonstrated), the ideal Republican was one that was landed & self-productive. However, a landed republic could only ever function if there was broad equality in ownership. Most of the Founders accepted broad inequalities, but divided over how they should be overcome or ameliorated. For Jefferson, the farmers (defined more abstractly for us as self-producing and modestly well-off) were God's people. But there was, obviously, going to be a future where there would be potential farmers, but no land. Jefferson's Empire of Space was the necessity to overcome this problem through Expansion. The acquisition of the vastly underpopulated Continent was an obvious boon to a truly free American republic. It was the government's responsibility to gain this land (preferably by peace) to created this leveling Empire of Liberty. Obviously Jefferson was way beyond his means (spending exorbitant sums on creature-comforts from stylish Europe), but he did not base his vision on his personal life, but on his Ideal. None shall be too poor (& none shall be too rich).

As any student of US history knows, Jefferson was uneasy about slavery, abhorring it as an institution, but ambivalent on the solution of a black population. This crack will produce a heresy of Jeffersonian thought that shall occur later, but it all belongs to the same spirit.

However, Jeffersonian politics initially took a backseat. Jefferson was the disgruntled Secretary of State (& then Vice President) under Federalist administrations. Less a party than an original set of policies formulated by Hamilton, Federalists resisted Jefferson's Idea. They were uneasy about expansion (unless controlled and regulated). They were uneasy about democratic leveling. They had a different idea about the role of government. While it has often been confused by Conservatives, Jefferson was not exactly a Classical Liberal and he was not antithetical to government power. His strict-constructionism of the Constitution was strategic: he believed every generation should write up a new constitution. It was about limiting the power of a national government over the States, which ought to be strong enough to deal with local needs. The federal government's role was to provide a means for this equality, which came through access to land (not the promotion of trade or industry). Additionally, Jefferson abhorred Washington/Adams' unwillingness to support the new sister-republic of France. Early disease from Federalists was met with popular hostility. The French republicans, whether Citizen Genet the Girondin or the later Jacobins, were building the kind of new world that Jefferson applauded. In one of his more nightmarish fits of idealism, Jefferson was willing to countenance the complete destruction of the French people if only a single Adam and Eve were left to repopulate a free country.

What was Jacobinism? The seeming statism of Robespierre's Committee for Public Safety is known well-enough, as well as Robespierre's later praise from Socialists and Marxists. However, Jacobinism was in many ways anti-state. It was a mere means to an end (the liberation of The People), which could take on more universalist or more racial forms. It was a crusade to not only save the French (not France), but also to Francofy the globe. As demonstrated in Hont's The Jealousy of Trade, Jacobinism was willing to meltdown the state for the Nation, a nation of equals (excepting the vague legal discriminations between Active and Passive citizens). Jefferson would later shrink from French excesses, and denounce Napoleon's tyranny, but Jacobinism and Jeffersonianism shared some key details. The role of the government was to effect equality, which in an American sense meant acquisition of territory (not the widespread social-engineering needed to remove the aristocracy and the church).

Against recrudescent aristocracy and Anglophilia among the hated Federalists, Jefferson overcame his enemies in a popular swell. The election of 1800 (and the subsequent 12th Amendment) solidified Jefferson's democracy and party-government. Flanked by critics for abandoning the spirit of the Kentucky Resolution, Jefferson did not contradict his earlier ideas. The Quids were agitated that Jefferson morphed into a corrupt courtly monarch, but he was consistent. Jefferson's shift to manufacturing was an expansion of his leveling vision (now applied to shop-keeps and producers). The Embargo of 1807 was a harsh government interference in the economy towards resisting an enemy and protecting American goods. The illegal Louisiana Purchase (which even Jefferson recognized) was again justified by the means. Jefferson didn't violate his strict constructionism of the Constitution, he simply broke the law in the service of The People (the highest law). Military adventure in North Africa against the Barbary was similarly a foreign design to protect American lives elsewhere. Jefferson's reforms were popular and his reign provoked the collapse of his opposition. The Federalists were dead and Jefferson was the flaming lamp of liberty.

Madison and Monroe carried on Jefferson's policies, including the passage of the 2nd Bank of the United States and the War of 1812. Jeffersonian ideals burned strongly among the so-called War Hawks who wanted to put an end to British influence in America and on the Sea. It was something of a suicidal gambit, but American resolve proved the national mettle of this newly independent republic. America could win. Thus, Jeffersonians began to fragment somewhat in light of *how* this vision should be carried out. Should the US government do more to help level the field for American manufacturers and merchants (especially with the booming Cotton trade)? Should national power be used towards this end? Or should the US government focus more on farmers and territorial expansion? This would give birth to the 2nd party system.

National Republicans, as they were called, pursued Jefferson's vision, but had begun to mix in Federalist elements. They were more willingness to embrace inequality, political aristocracy, and a commercial focus (that often benefited the North). Corruption was rife on all sides, but some began to worry that a government of elites was no longer responsive to the People. Combining all of these frustrations was the military hero, Andrew Jackson. Against the ex-Federalist National Republicans (eg Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams), who were often lumped together with moderately Jeffersonian Henry Clay, Jackson waged his war against central corruption. Jackson's presidency was not about "limited government", as the Constitution was putty in his hands, but to preserve Jefferson's visions. Strict constructionism against the 2nd Bank of the United States flowed with the illicit remove of the funds (violating the Congressional law), the dubious placement of these funds in varied banks (which had little constitutional warrant), and the effort to regulate the sale of land to preserve the economy from fat-cat bankers. Jackson's refusal to enforce the Supreme Court's decision in favor of the Cherokee also reflected his appeal to the Salus Populus to justify his laws. Indians and whites could not intermix, and restricting the latter from acquiring land would damage the equality of The People. And obviously Nullification was a crisis that drew on the Federal government against the Jeffersonian heretic Calhoun (who we shall revisit later). All in all, the Jacksonian revolution in government did little to "weaken" government or "limit" it. Instead, the central government must be strong enough (and staffed by The People, not elites) to effect the kind of equality among the people. Lower tariffs (though not complete reduction) was to balance the consumer farmers in the South, while also helping out some small northern manufacturers/merchants.

The Democracy was a lightning rod to force political alignments. Their opponents were in disarray, reflecting a variety of frustrations with this new set of policies. National Republicans lost all initiative, fearing conflation with the Federalists while also losing the sympathy of The People. There was also the far more important backlash of the Anti-Masons. A popular Yankee uprising against secret societies, it would be easy to dismiss this party (as many have done) as conspiratorial kooks that could not understand the changing world. But the Anti-Masons were much more than that: they resented the cultural disposition of the Democracy, which Free-Masonry and Jackson both represented.

What Jefferson-Jackson and the Democracy represented, in terms of American identity, was a nationality stripped from strong markers. The English political culture and civil religion were scrapped. America was not a distinctly Protestant (or Christian for that matter) nation. Government was not to be involved in theological questions. Thus when New York City underwent a cholera epidemic, Jackson refused to conduct a national day of prayer. Though not particularly religious himself, Jackson represented a trend that the United States was a secular government (though having a religious and moral people). Accusations of Jefferson's atheism allowed the underbelly of the Democracy to become fairly radical. While opponents overwhelmingly were part of the para-church unity of Evangelical revival, Democrats were able to join together Free-Thinkers and stodgy confessionalists who opposed moral government. Free-Masonry represented this ecumenical disposition, often allowing anyone who could recognize a creator god (thus Christians, but also Jews and Deists as well). Democrats often opposed blue-laws, temperance, blasphemy laws, and government subsidies for specifically Christian organizations. It was the growing tide of Democracy in New England that saw its churches become disestablished. Religion was not despised, but it was a private affair and had little to do with the framework of government. Civic virtue was a strictly natural affair (with grace relegated to domesticity). The Anti-Mason attack on societies that diminished the public role of the church (in conjunction with the meeting-hall) was resistance to this new liberal age.

And this liberalism continued its course. The primarily reactive coalition against Jackson's "executive tyranny" (hence Whigs) depended on their opponents to set the agenda. Jackson gave way to Van Buren, whose fiscal policy was blamed for exacerbating the economic depression (it was not a question of the gold-standard). Additionally, Van Buren's northern ambivalence over slavery meant questions of expansion were muted. Van Buren was not opposed to slavery for the South (as demonstrated in the Amistad case), but he was worried about losing control of the national dimension of the Democracy. This failure to fulfill the Jeffersonian end of leveling equality through land (even if land for slave-owners) saw his failure in 1840. However the Democracy roared back to life with the pseudo-Democratic presidency of His Accidency John Tyler and the actual victory in 1844 of James Polk. The latter's Mexican American War and Independent Treasury program cemented his Democratic bona fides (though his failure to pursue Canadian territory alienated Northerners). Here is the rupture within the Democracy that births the Civil War and the Jeffersonian Heresy of Calhoun.

Jeffersonian equality meant the formation of the Nation around *something*. What was it to be "American"? If certain English hierarchical norms and civil religion was rejected, what was left? The Democracy was willing to treat with Atheists and Roman Catholics within its ranks. What was left, it seems, was the sheer existent Man, and particularly the White Man. The Young America movement attempted form a broader cultural history, but it was vague and incomplete (America was still young and fairly uncultured). The excitement for war and expansion was part of sculpting a glorious legacy. Slavery was an uncomfortable issue, but all sides agreed that the black man was not part of this shared vision. Some historians have tarred this vision as herrenvolk democracy, but plenty of Democrats were uncomfortable with the permanent existence of slavery. Even future Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, hoped expansion would eventually lead to extinction. The Democracy defended the equality of [white] men around economic opportunity, whatever their religion or origin.

Calhoun's heresy was to recoded this vision back into an Anglo vision of hierarchy. Slavery was no longer a necessary evil, an alien race that has to be dealt with, but a positive good. Slavery allowed the economic gains of the South and it established a natural hierarchy that could mesh with Jefferson's vision. The equality of the white man could only proceed with a natural inequality of the black man. The South's form of slavery was perfect precisely because it befit Nature. There would be no confusion about master and slave, empirically or morally. Blacks were bred for docility and labor, thus their role as slave befit nature's beneficence to them. Thus Jeffersonian expansion (which Calhoun became a moderate critic of if it threatened the South's stability) could meld with a kind of English aristocracy. While many Calhounites had to be careful around the Southern Democracy, which was far more hostile to Calhounite planter-aristocracy, they could form temporary alliances to defend the South.

Similarly, Northern Democracy was finding itself squeezed. The equality of white men (with some heresies to include the equality of *all* men, found among Salmon Chase's Liberty Party) was jeopardized if slavery was allowed to produce wealth inequalities. The small white farmer could not compete against the slave-owner, who could easily plow his resources back into future land-acquisition. As Calhounites insinuated themselves among agitate Southern Democrats, Northern Democrats began to contemplate alliances with anti-slavery Northerners. The result was the birth of the GOP, which allowed ex-Federalists, Whigs, and Nativists (a movement to protect American Protestantism from foreign Irish Catholics) joined with these more radical Democrats. Not all Northern Democrats were willing to jettison the party or the vision (hence the temporary failed solution of Stephen Douglas' Popular Sovereignty), but the sectional strain forced a temporary realignment. The election of Lincoln in the 1860s saw a resurgence of the old Democratic enemy, but Lincoln's coalition depended on radical Northern Democrats willing to bolt the party (as they had done, temporarily, with Martin Van Buren in 1848, which allowed another Whig presidency).

I will not renarrate or relitigate the Civil War, which saw Democrats on both sides fight for their section (with some becoming ardent Radical Republicans and others become Copperheads). The unifying factor was hostility to slavery's expansion, and eventually the entire institution, abolished throughout the war and ended with the 13th Amendment. The death of Lincoln and besiegement of Andrew Johnson (an awkward conservative Jacksonian) saw the rise of the GOP as an unstoppable force. But it was internally divided, which would then form the basis of the new political alignments of the late 19th c. As Heather Cox Richardson's Death of Reconstruction demonstrates, the GOP's enthusiasm for Reconstruction and abandonment of the same derived from a different vision for the Freedmen to acculturate. The failure of this policy reflected growing trends among black-majority government in the occupied states of the South. Whatever accusations of racism and exaggeration aside, the chaos from the war, the shocking influence of Carpet-Baggers, and the corruption of Scallawag opportunists all contributed to a united political backlash on all sides. Republicans (possessing, in general, a different vision from Hamilton) were appalled, while Southern Democrats were sectionally militant. The result was the end of reconstruction (which failed on its own terms), but also the bolting of radical northern Democrats back out of the GOP (eg Benjamin Butler, Salmon Chase).

What did the blacks in the South, the small white farmers, and Northern Radicals share? According to Richardson, it was they saw the need for the government to carry out the equalizing project. Whether it was government handouts to poor farmers (white and black) in the South, or growing hostility to larger corporate interests (especially the railroads) in the North. Republicans believed in the idea of self-disciplined labor, not government intervention to level. Black use of the GOP was an obvious self-interested version of this (which will explain, later, how blacks will switch parties, even as the Democracy was full of ardent opponents). However, the Democracy would also become home to the Populists, who became frustrated with the unity coalition of Democrats in the South. For many old planters, who may have been Whigs, there was no future. They could try to control the Democrats, but they had no interest in the GOP. Some conservative reformers in New York could join forces and form the Bourbon wing of the party, but this was an awkward coalition pressured from all sides. While these Democrats elected Grover Cleveland to break the GOP stranglehold on the White House, this reprieve was often considered a Hamiltonian victory. At first, the future seemed to be outside of the parties. It was the spirit of Jefferson that formed Populism, originally The People's Party before it fused with the Democracy. Contrary to sloppy use of the word today, Populism was about government intervention to restrain corporate interests, create more opportunities for the little guy, and to use the government to reapportion excess wealth from major corporations. Populists wanted trust-busting, income tax, regulation, subsidies, bimetallism, and lower tariffs. Populism was, and is, a leftwing movement in the American political sphere.

However, the Democracy was in the doldrums, often suffering the accusation of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion. Most Americans had tired of waiving the bloody flag (especially among opportunists like James Blaine), but the religious boom in the country under effective, if somewhat faceless, GOP administration won enough support. The national mood had accepted this Hamiltonian spirit, even as it waned, manifest as much in the victory of Cleveland as the victory of a Garfield, Harrison, or McKinley. But Populism was a rising tide, and The People would not be silenced, especially as GOP efforts to pander to immigrants from central/Southern Europe began to fade. Populist farmer-centric policies could alienate urban labor, even as their Catholicism and non-American folkways were not an easy fit with the Evangelical fervor within the GOP. While some classical Liberals flirted with both parties (who had originally began, but bolted, the Liberal Republican Party, as well as being the Mugwumps that helped elect Cleveland), classical liberalism itself was undergoing a crisis. Free-trade, gold-standard, all of these which were believed in out of an idealistic leveling (hence the odd combination of limited-government with socialism found in Georgism and the land-tax), these seemed to be failing. British liberals started to undergo crisis in the 1870s, when Britain's manufacturing dominance began to slip. The future of this new liberalism required a government that respected the liberal spirit found in Adam Smith, David Ricardo, JS Mill, as well as the Gladstone governments. However it would require greater intervention. Thus birthed Progressivism, in all its different modes and forms.

Progressives found a home in both parties (as well as new 3rd parties, like the Socialists), but they were ultimately unified through a distinctly Americanized Jeffersonian political vision. The Populist need for government intervention to protect farmers from railroad freight rates and guaranteed foreign markets could fuse to urban Progressivism regulation of industry. The city slums provoked a backlash among good Evangelicals, though they mainly doubted the government's ability to solve these social ills. Instead of religion and reform, the Progressives took a scientific cast, put religion to the side (or mutated it into a skin suit for social activism), and believed an active and strong central government was the only counterweight to corporate titans, without provoking a chaotic upsurgence from the masses. Socialism could be absorbed, in pieces, without threatening the system. Such had been done in Disraeli's hysterics of National Conservatism, as well as the steely statism of Bismarckian Germany. However, the fracture of the GOP over its old guard and its Progressives saw the rise of new liberal Democrat who self-consciously carried on Jefferson's spirit: Woodrow Wilson. It should also be pointed out that Wilson's great critic, Eugene Debs the Socialist, also formed his vague sloganeered Communism through Jeffersonian reform. Populist and Progressive could see in Government the means to save the little guy. The frontier had closed, new markets were open, the world was full of oppressive empires and their colonies. Additionally, even if this vision was to make the Earth safe for the White Man, Wilsonian progressives included advocates for female and colored equality as well. Wilson's victory saw the Democracy finally return in a winning coalition. Jefferson had won.

Of course Wilson's victory was tarnished with his idealism. The American people were not willing to swallow the full Jeffersonian pill, for what would an Empire of Space do if it ran out of places to expand? Where would equality of means form? Where would markets for American goods go? The solution was obvious, found in Jefferson's organic-conservative Jacobinism: America was The World. As MacDougal noted this in The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy, Wilsonianism was a translation of Jeffersonian vision to geopolitics and foreign policy. It was not anti-Americanism to try to goad the United States to join the League of Nations, it was hyper-Americanism. America must lead the world, absorb the world, for America is the empty-signifier of The World. A world made safe for Democracy was an American world. This was too bitter for a tired and bamboozled American people, who woke up to Wilson's insane piety and heavy-handed propaganda for World War One. The brief reaction of the Harding-Coolidge years reflected a disgust with what the Empire of Space required, but the collapse of the World Economy heralded the beginning of a new order. 

Herbert Hoover was just as much a Progressive as the Roosevelt clan, but he still had a sense of restraint. The victory of FDR, who ran on being Change, radically transformed the American situation. It's not so much the passage of the New Deal (most of which failed and was repealed), but the legacy of the New Deal in conjunction with America's rebirth in World War Two. Pushing war fever along as his mentor Wilson did, Roosevelt believed in the same universal American project. Ending German dominance on the continent (as well as throwing a bone to GOP businessmen worried about Japan invading China) allowed American uncontested supremacy. Fabian socialists in England had already hitched their hopes to a kind of Anglo-American world-order, joining together the pathways of the British Empire to the crusading Wilsonian America. The victory of the Allies cemented this, and discredited the GOP who stood in its way. Now, as the Whigs had done, the GOP was strictly a reactive force, imitating Democratic leadership.

This new-order was disrupted on account of an unforeseen antagonist. Many Anglo-American progressives were excited for the Soviet Union (or at least what it could become). Tsarist bigotry and reaction had been buried. The Soviets would open up to a World-System, with a World-Market, and fulfill a socialist system (though one that deviated from Marxist-Leninist interpretations of class-warfare). It was ameliorative and located in the United Nations, under the pink Progressives that helped invent the institution. But it was not to be, due in part to Russian chauvinism as well as Stalin's tactical departure from such a plan. Many Progressives in England and America would be embarrassed from their sanguine support for the Soviets, which was now branded treason. But red-baiting was almost always strictly anti-Soviet (and anti-Mao) than anti-communist. The fringe of the GOP, found amongst the Old Guard and some disaffected Southern whites waking up to the New Deal's dumping of them, took a hard-line, but it was often derivative. Truman and Kennedy drove the narrative forward, even as Eisenhower allowed a brief GOP interlude (but, as a Me Too Republican, by accepting the general thrust of the Post-War order). Kennedy ran as a far hawkish anti-Soviet than Nixon (even if the latter still won sans voter fraud). But the point of democracy, and The Democracy, is not in actual head-counting, but legitimacy. Nixon learned this lesson very hard.

The vision of maintaining the Democracy and the spirit of liberalism required greater government intervention, especially among the denser population sections. Southern Democrats, who had been staunch Populists, soon found themselves holding the short-end of the stick. They had ardently supported FDR, and reaped the benefits of the Tennessee Valley Authority's electrification program. Southern Democrats, excepting Bourbon conservatives, had championed government intervention to open markets, regulate corporations (most of which were Northern), freeze prices during downturns, and involve in greater currency manipulation. But the balance of power was shifting. The Democracy did not need the South, or at least it could depend on it as it shifted. The focus was now on the urban North, among blacks and ethnic whites especially. This alliance itself was highly fraught (as Polish Americans protesting against black tenements in Chicago during WW2 show), but it was still functional. 

Southern Democrats either swam with the current or got off the boat, dazed as they tried to make sense of the new world. Some of these former Democrats found themselves among the Conservatives, who were willing to throw in with the GOP finally. Others maintained their rebellion in a separate party. As academic historians have noted, George Wallace in 1968 was far more a traditional New Dealer than either Humphrey or Nixon. The problem wasn't the populist Jeffersonian intervention, it was who it was for. The equality of man that Jefferson had proclaimed had expanded. It wasn't just white men, it was swarthy Europeans with strange names as well as blacks and Jews as well. It even included women! America was the engine to effect true democratic equality within a society. Thus is the center-left establishment of American Politics exported abroad. The CIA and the State Department helped fund, support, organize, and seed various European parties, ranging from Socialists (France), Christian Democrats (Italy, Germany), and Labor (Britain). These parties would help adjust to this new Anglo-American Fabian order, to fulfill Jefferson's vision (along with English liberal luminaries like Bentham and Mill) against European reactionaries and colonizers. Hostility to Soviet-adjacent Communists dovetailed with hostility to Conservative politics (eg deGaulle, Salazar). Hence US agents would offer support to Yugoslavia's Titoist heresy or Hungary's goulash communism. This helped to cement an order the prioritized parliamentary politics as a means to broader democratic ends. Such is not strictly statism, because the state is not an end in itself (this is the dividing line between Fascism and the New Deal). Rather, the state (or something else) is supposed to satisfy the kind of access and equality needed for formal cooperation.

The US boom, and the clear-cut social democracy of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy (as well as Eisenhower) began to hit the wall. The Unions had become a powerful aspect to Democratic politics, an element we've yet to fully unpack. American Unions, unlike European counterparts, often lacked the class-consciousness as Proletariat. Instead, American workers were little businessmen. Unionism was to help them negotiate, and even as foreign elements radicalized some unions, the general thrust of the American Federation of Labor (under Gompers) was giving the worker a fair shake in the world of business. It was about organization and cooperation. Foreign elements, forming the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a counterpart, eventually found their way into the wider Democratic sphere. Eugene Debs' primary support came from radicals (especially Jews and Slavs from Eastern Europe), but it was couched as American economic democracy. Union victory came clearest during the Roosevelt administration, but it was in a cooperative way. Management, labor, and consumers all had a right to equal access and wealth. Regulation wasn't to knuckle under the corporations to the State or the Party, it was asking them to pay their fair share as equal citizens. The Department of Labor, combined with the fairly cozy relation between management and labor, allowed peaceful growth. It also helped that the CIA fielded labor organizers (like Dubinsky or Lovestone) to help anti-Soviet organizing elsewhere. However, this was not sustainable. These arrangements depended on dominant corporate behemoths that would suffer no competition. The restoration of (west) Germany and Japan to the industrial market made American production, sales, and wages suffer. Who would give?

The Vietnam War (which has all the marks of a Wilsonian crusade) further depended the alienation. Begun, under Kennedy, to protect the authoritarian social democrat Diem, the war expanded as a check against the Soviet-China access that seemingly backed Ho Chi Minh. However, Ho (like Castro before) were Socialists who admired the US decolonization effort before they were put on the back burner. But it was Eisenhower that allowed Batista to fall (and whose CIA probably armed/aided Castro), and allowed the French (as well as the Vietnamese crown-prince Bao Dai) to fail. The ideal of a Wilsonian war for Hearts and Minds, to realize the American Way of Life, suffered in the jungles of Vietnam. Likely Kennedy's willing to abandon this (with his rough patrimonial style of government) got him killed. Also the Golden Triangle was a good source of black-ops money. Thus the war provoked the split. While many 60s radicals would want nothing to do with racist patriarch Jefferson, they (in many ways) continued to imbibe his spirit. Of course some tried to slough off the entire American ideal altogether, with visions of Maoist liberation spreading throughout the West. But for those Liberals who were against the stuffy environment of post-war liberalism, the New Left seemed poise to introduce something new. Now the Spirit of Jefferson was increasingly mutated, to defend and promote the equality of all races, creeds, genders, even (for some fringe groups) sexual orientations. The main currents of the movement were being fed back into the mainstream. Martin Luther King's civil rights crusade was done in the "spirit" of the American founding, that all men were created equal (and the imputed implications of the same). Protests against the war were marshaled from the fact that it could not be won. Lyndon Johnson, a southern Democrat swimmer, attempted to harness this movement, but he only appeared a warmonger and hypocrite (which he may well have been). He wanted to build the Social Democratic ideal, the Great Society (and maybe get his face put somewhere in DC or on a mountain). But this was all crumbling from a failed war-effort. Hawks saw weakness in a refusal to fully pursue anti-communism (just nuke them). It was a disaster.

The rise of Nixon, who softened his image, ended up in a temporary return to an older order. Nixon was not exactly an ardent Hamiltonian, but his geo-political realism led to a cynical use of Vietnam to triangulate a thaw with the Communist powers. As any analyst knew, China and Russia were not on the best terms (to put it lightly), thus they could be pried apart. Nixon also allowed the subtle shocks to adjust to America as a waning power in the world-market. Watergate (propelled along by Hawks and Liberals) destroyed Nixon, his legacy, and ultimately his peace (with the Soviets at least). But with Ford (representing the increasingly pressured Me Too Republicans within the party) and Carter, the readjustments continued. The New Left had been partially absorbed into the party. Equality could not come within the economic realm as clearly as before. Instead, the equality of man could focus on those minorities that found themselves agitating for more rights. Southern whites had gotten the short-stick before, not ethnic whites in the North were frustrated. Hate speech, gender equality, even curbing restrictions on public degeneracy, combined with social-engineered business campaigns, frustrated many. Carter's clean image, counter-balancing Nixon's corruption, could not really hold back a wider frustration. What was American anyway? If she was fighting Communism, what was it for? God? Freedom? What did these mean?

The Moral Majority, which had less impact than it appears, helped catapult the GOP back into power, winning over some disaffected Democrats. Reagan himself was still a Cold-Warrior hawk of a liberal establishment that had been transformed. Obviously the Reagan coalition never lived up to expectations, ballooning deficits and increasing regulation, but it became a legendary moment of a return to *something* else besides limitless expansion. Or, at least, the expansion could now be redirected. Again, the flagging rates of American industrial production (manifest in real wage decreases) could not find Jeffersonian equality through badgering businesses. The Empire of Space included cultural deconstruction as well as economic democracy. Focus on the empty form Equality allowed a different cultural tact. Distinct Christianity (Protestant or Catholic) was downplayed, for a growing generation had little/no interest or exposure to formal religion. Additionally, Jews had greater public role to play, alongside women, blacks, and even the occasional homosexual. Reagan's refocus allowed the Democrats to recapture the initiative. Human Rights, the Wilsonian Democracy of Man, became the watchword, as government policed violations of interpersonal equality. The Reagan years (including Bush) gave birth to the Clinton years, which accepted Reagan regulatory reforms for the most part. This era is often called "Neoliberalism", a concept that has varied use. In essence, Neo-liberalism refers to the turn away from the state to effect the same goals of market participation. The goal is reliance on private powers to exercise the role of the state to authoritatively direct the market. Supranational organizations like the WTO or World Bank could do this, as well as the US government, or a cabal of hedge-funds and banks. The Neoliberal seeks the fruits of liberal-socialism, by adhoc means. Given Jefferson's ambivalence over the state itself, in a way this spiritually fulfills the goal of Jacobin universalism (for a Global republic and a global France were one in the same; the twi-colors were the Human flag).

Thus, Clinton fulfilled Bush's NAFTA, opening markets and regulating finance (to curb little/middling forces that could screw up market-signals). Human Rights crusades marked the Clinton years, bombing Serbia and Somalia. George W Bush's victory was a kind of Me Too Republicanism again (channeling conservative frustrations over idealistic crusades). The War on Terror itself was a kind of idealogical crusade once again, though it could wear the mask of the Neo Conservative boogeyman, who stoked Islamophobia. In reality, Samuel Huntingdon was awarded by Clinton. Bush turned out no different than if Al Gore had won, except suckering Evangelicals to back the crusade. Jacobin Democracy, an idealistic war, there was a temporary shift to the GOP in this regard, but the same Jeffersonian idea remained to make the world safe for the Democracy. Bush's failures only continued through the Obama administration, which pivoted away from failed Middle Eastern state-building (confused as a kind of return to realpolitik) towards open China-baiting and restoring conflict with Russia (which Clinton ran on). Trump has melded some of these legacies to keep the office from Clinton, and his continued popularity may show a possible resurgence of *something else*, but he too has done little substantive policy changing. Biden has carried on the farce, where a corpse leads a massive sprawling administrative-state.

Obviously this is a sprawling history with many holes and contested claims. The way the Democratic Party operates now is vastly difference than the party of Jackson or Jefferson Davis, let alone Benjamin Butler or Grover Cleveland. For the most part, the average Democrat has tepid admiration for Jefferson, if not total contempt as a white patriarchal slave-owning capitalist. How can I claim that Jefferson's spirit still lives on? Again, this is a heuristic, trying to see how there is *some* genetic continuity through the centuries. The changes are too obvious to mention. If Jefferson were alive today, he would be called a Nazi (but probably simply have a heart-attack from the shock of such an insane world). Recall, Jefferson is an *archetype*, not an actual person. His Idea exceeds the personal policies, preferences, and proposals he had. Instead, it is a particular drift in American Politics, one that makes the most sense. Conservatives will bumble about with notions like "nationalism", "liberty", or even "conservative" itself. But what do these mean? And how often are they simply negations of the predominant thrust of things. A Republican activist stamping his feet about schools transing kids is simply in opposition. Remove this novelty, but what is it that you want? Roll back how far? Many of today's GOP-adjacent talking-heads were Clinton Democrats (not unlike Trump himself). Reappraisals and conversions are fine, but in what way have they changed? What do they want that isn't just a rosy view of not so distant past? Were the 90s so great if you were to ask a GOP voter back then (or even a labor Democrat, maybe a kook like Jim Traficant)? Obviously not if you read what was written back then, even if people today can't remember. What is there to conserve if you don't know have a reason for going back? You just jam your heels in the dirt and let the cart take you away. Even mainstream GOPniks will waffle on defining what a woman is (just please don't let the kids decide this question!). So what's really at stake?

The legacy of Jefferson is simply the Idea that America is an equal people. The definition of equality and people have changed (and bred heresies in reaction), but the spirit remains. America exists as an Idea, a commitment of civic ideas that can be transmogrified into any particular people of any particular creed. This includes white protestants, Jews, brown hindus, anyone. Most Republicans have this exact same spirit. If this is true, there is no America outside of formal equality. It has no particular language, culture, cult, or place. To be an American is to believe in America. That's the new world Jefferson only began to imagine, a Democracy that took root and conquered Heaven and Earth.