Hamilton was never my favorite founder. Just because he lived back then doesn’t mean he ‘got’ Liberty. Hamilton was, in many ways, the founding father of Big Government. Radical Progressive Woodrow Wilson was a big fan of Hamilton’s, too. Perhaps Trump is, as well. I, however, am not.
‘Liberty’ meant a whole lot of different things to the founding generation. David Hackett Fischer wrote a book on this subject alone.
Hamilton definitely was the father of a strong central government, at least what passed for it in his era. He can’t be dismissed because he represents the faction that won the debate. And Lincoln ended whatever remained of the argument by force of arms, and Americans foolishly hail that as the high water mark of the American presidency.
Trump isn’t breaking any ground at all with his call for economic nationalism. Google “the American System” or Henry Clay. And again his combination of populism and nationalism is most reminiscent of Andrew Jackson.
Carson Holloway at Heritage Foundation writes about the idea that Hamilton is the father of progressivism:
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/04/alexander-hamilton-and-american-progressivism
“Although Hamilton advocated an energetic national government, his grounds for doing so reveal that his thinking has much more in common with American conservatism than it has with its progressive ideological rival. Hamilton’s program as Secretary of the Treasury was animated by his practical interest in laying the foundations of American security and prosperity, not by any progressive concern with pursuing a continual amelioration and equalization of social conditions. His vision, therefore, called for active but not unlimited government.
Moreover, Hamilton shared the Founders’ rather conservative view of the limits of human nature and the dangers of excessively concentrated power and accordingly defended institutions like separation of powers and federalism that modern progressives have been quick to criticize. Finally, as both theorist and statesman, Hamilton was guided by the Founding natural-rights doctrine, which progressivism is inclined to jettison.
Alexander Hamilton and Energetic Government
In his own day, Hamilton famously advocated a strong national government. The call for a more powerful national government is a thread that runs throughout Hamilton’s career in American politics, and it informed his most famous acts of statesmanship. That advocacy affords the most obvious ground on which to establish the claim that he was a kind of proto-progressive.
Today, the progressive political vision also calls for the national government to take on much more responsibility and power than conservatives are willing to concede. Hamilton therefore seems to have occupied in his own time a political position analogous to that taken by progressives today.
Taken in its proper historical context, however, Hamilton’s advocacy of strong national government appears to stem from a different rationale and to subsist within more clearly defined boundaries than is true for the progressive advocacy of today. As a young man, Hamilton served as George Washington’s chief aide during most of the American War of Independence. He was an eyewitness to all of the inconvenience and even danger that arose from the government’s lack of power to raise men and matériel under the Articles of Confederation. By the early 1780s, Hamilton was already calling for reforms that would increase the power of the government of the Union.[4] “