I don’t appreciate your implication that I’m anti-semetic because I support Jeffersonian small government. You have no basis with which to even bring that issue up. It hasn’t been discussed in this post at all and as such there’s no reason to even bring it up.
Conservative didn’t mean the same thing in the early 19th century that it does today. Neither did liberal. An early 19th century conservative was a monarchist if he was in Europe and if he was in America he believed in that sort of system adapted to the election of a President and Congress. While obviously we did not invite a member of the Royal family to serve as our King, Hamilton and the conservatives did want to adopt that system of government. It included massive spending on infrastructure, a national bank with close ties to the state, high tariffs etc. The liberals believed in limited government with few expenditures, they opposed a national bank and believed in free trade. The term liberal was co-opted by the progressive movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the term conservative shifted to little more than opposition of the progressive movement.
I agree that part of being a modern conservative means believing in Christian morality. Opposing abortion, homosexual special rights etc. usually tells us a lot about a persons character. My issue with bringing up Hoover is that he was a progressive and I’m not sure we know what his view would be on these issues if he were alive today. Yes, he wasn’t as progressive as Wilson or FDR but he was a progressive nonetheless. He undid much of what Coolidge put in place. I would caution anyone to assume about what he and other politicians from the 20th would have done with modern issues. Just look at all the supposed conservatives who have shifted their position on homosexual marriage in the last decade. It is presumptuous to assume that progressives from long ago wouldn’t be caught up in the same tangled web today.
There are plenty of reasons why Christian conservatives such as myself wouldn’t vote for Romney. Let’s begin with the elephant in the room, he isn’t a Christian. He’s a Mormon cultist. The conservatives who stayed home in 2012 were largely Christians who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a pro-abortion, sodomite loving, damnable Mormon heretic.
I understand half the country in the early 19th century believed in implied powers. Like I initially said, in the 19th century the debate in this country was between Hamiltonian big government and Jeffersonian small government. In the 19th century, Jefferson largely won out. In the 20th century, Hamilton’s view has been widely adopted and expanded well beyond where he would likely stop.
Washington signed the US Bank charter Hamilton supported the charter and you’ll recall he was Secretary of Treasury in 1791. This was 4 years before his resignation due to adultery which interestingly was taking place in 1791.
I agree with your assessment of Hamilton, he was a conservative in the sense of supporting a system of government modeled on the British monarchy, minus the monarch. He was also a mercantilist (hence the trade protectionism and the support for federally-funded infrastructure). Mercantilists were the conservatives, classical liberals were the radicals.
However, this observation defeats the whole premise of your argument that Hamilton is the precursor to progressives, populists, and radicals. Support for tariffs and federal public works (i.e. roads and bridges) is not equivalent to support for a welfare state or for social radicalism. Otherwise, you're stuck with making the absurd claim that the British monarchy is the principal inspiration for LBJ's Great Society (and reversing the original definition of Left vs. Right Wing during the time of the French Revolution).
Apart from your (IMO confused) remarks about Hamilton and the political spectrum in the late 18th/19th century US, I agree with the main premise of your article: that conservatives are the odd men out in the Republican party today, and have been so for decades. Unfortunately, Nixon, Ford, Bush I, Bush II and nominees like Dole, McCain, Romney, etc. are the rule, not the exception.