'Do the math' - count the bodies. The genocidal track record of many twentieth-century governments with regard to their own citizens suggests that the Jeffersonians were 'on to something'...
I think Lind's point here was that we had more to fear from a hostile world -- Communists, fascists, terrorists -- than from our own government. Every people may have something to fear from its rulers, but the "math" does suggest that Lind and his Hamiltonians are more correct on this score than the Jeffersonians, at least as far as the US is concerned. The "math" would be different for those in other countries.
Hamilton or Jefferson? To tell the truth, in school I had always prefered Jefferson. If I put in a good word for Hamilton now there are several reasons.
First, defense. A strictly Jeffersonian society would not have been able to defend itself. This was the reason why Washington supported the move from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. A strict Jeffersonian -- as Jefferson himself admitted -- would not even have been able to purchase Louisiana. We owe one of Jefferson's greatest legacies to his breaking his own rules.
Jeffersonianism was based on the idea that America would be able to remain neutral and secure and aloof from all the world's quarrels. This too was disproven by the events of the early republic. A world torn by war and revolution showed scant respect for American isolation and neutrality, and the same would be true in the 20th and 21st century.
Secondly, a reading of the Constitution does suggest that it was not intended to be a straitjacket. Some things were definitely forbidden, but there was room for government power to grow. Here too, Jeffersonian practice contradicts and disproves Jeffersonian theory. Jefferson and Madison did not hesitate to make use of new powers when they felt it was necessary, though they had denied this to the Federalists when the Jeffersonians were in opposition. And this has been accepted by paleo-libertarians and Rockwellites and anarcho-capitalists, who now turn back to the Articles of Confederation for their models. There isn't much left of the theory that the federal government's powers are limited only to those things specifically spelled out literally in the Constitution, and Jefferson and Madison knew this, when they weren't acting and thinking in a narrowly partisan fashion.
Thirdly, there is that contradiction between high-powered capitalism and its wide markets and Jeffersonian theories of agrarianism and narrow state sovereignty. To tell the truth, I like a lot about those Jeffersonian theories, but they would not have created the kind of capitalist society that Rockwellites prefer. A Jeffersonian society, fragmented into narrow state sovereignties would be more like Europe was before unification than America is now: shallow little ponds with their own traditions, regulations and bureaucracies, rather than a free and open field for development. There are some things I find appealing about that vision, but it's not one that I think the anarcho-capitalists would really prefer.
There is also the unacknowledged contradiction between "state sovereignty" and libertarianism. Rockwellites luxuriate in the fantasy of an alternative line of development, without having to face the hard question of which they would prefer -- sovereign, autonomous states with real powers, or the libertarian vision of less government across the board. Had their path been followed, or were we to follow it now, it would lead to a sharp conflict between the two. It's only that the plan remains a fantasy that keeps two such potentially hostile camps in the same faction.
Are there contradictions in Hamiltonianism? To be sure, but the contradiction you point to is one associated with economic development as such, not with the Hamiltonian program in particular. If one had been able to cultivate a modern corporate economy by Jeffersonian means, one would find the same conflicts developing. Arguably the Hamiltonian policy accelerated the point at which socialist ideas would be put on the agenda. But what those policies accelerated was precisely the success of capitalism at generating great wealth.
If capitalism works, it produces an economic surplus. And it produces classes and parties which want to take it through political means and use it for their own purposes. If you don't develop and create that kind of wealth, you may avoid this development for a time -- and the may should be stressed, since once they become fully settled poor, agrarian societies are equally suceptible to class-based agitation -- but you don't create the kind of wide-open capitalist society that so many latter-day Jeffersonians would prefer, either.
If you want to attribute the Roosevelts to Hamilton and Lincoln, you have to look at the kind of agitation that a Jeffersonian society would produce. You can see this in the populists and agrarian socialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You would also have to ascribe a lot of demagogues -- Pitchfork Ben Tillman and Tom Watson, etc. -- to the Jeffersonian camp.
The Jeffersonian South produced its own forms of demagogery and radicalism that can be laid at Jefferson's door just as deftly as you or Lind attribute FDR to Hamilton*. If one's quick to attribute LBJ to Alexander Hamilton -- two figures with nothing in common beyond the fact that they were both politicians who wanted government to do things -- one shouldn't gag at the association of Debs or Wilson with Jefferson. An agrarian, decentralized society would not be less quick to produce egalitarian radicals or statists than a highly developed capitalist one.
Another example of latter-day Jeffersonians wanting to have it both ways is that they ignore that Jefferson had both a theory of government and a theory of development. The ascribe so much of contemporary political developments to the success of Hamilton's path, but ignore that Jefferson also had a path of development, which would have had other consequences had it been followed. By the same logic which they apply to Hamilton, one must make Jefferson responsible for the political consequences that might have ensued had society followed his path of development, though these consequences would be as far from his political philosophy as Clinton or LBJ was from Hamilton's vision. Blame Hamilton for both 18th century elitism and 20th century liberalism, and you must blame Jefferson for the consequences of extreme libertarianism and state sovereignty and for all the consequences that his policies would have entailed had they been followed. I don't think it fair to blame Hamilton for totalitarianism, but the counterpart would be to blame Jefferson for all those who were too weak or irresolute to stand it its way.
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*Bear in mind that Lind has an agenda of his own. He wants to defend the FDR, LBJ, Hubert Humphrey vision of government that he sees opposed by neo-Jeffersonian Republicans. It's for this reason that he's latched onto Hamilton. Your typical Republican of 1930, heir to Hamilton and Lincoln, would dispute Lind's genealogy.
I'm seeing here the Spaghetti Theory of History: it's all mighty twisted, ain't it?
Even Washington subscribes: Sure, he had it right in theory with "no foreign entanglements." But the man himself knew how to use those entanglements to the national interest. Did he not win a war with it?
American isolationism is a myth. We used George III, Louis XVI, Napoleon, etc. long before the nation could even pronounce the word, "isolationism." Look at Jefferson. For a man so intent upon the idyllic, independent farmer, he was awfully concerned with Paris.
What I'm trying to get at is your:
"...there is that contradiction between high-powered capitalism and its wide markets and Jeffersonian theories of agrarianism and narrow state sovereignty... A Jeffersonian society, fragmented into narrow state sovereignties would be more like Europe was before unification than America is now: shallow little ponds with their own traditions, regulations and bureaucracies, rather than a free and open field for development."
Huck