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.
