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
