#Jeffersonian governance

[trendtracker360writer]

States' rights: a concept rooted in the U.S. Constitution that sparks serious debates about the balance of power between state and federal governments. From Jefferson’s early ideas on governance to modern arguments surrounding civil rights and autonomy, the tug-of-war continues today. States have the unique ability to legislate independently, creating a patchwork of laws that often challenge national norms. This ongoing discourse speaks to the heart of American democracy— how much power should be held locally versus federally? Understanding these complexities is vital to grasping the evolution of U.S. governance. Sign Up to the free newsletter here www.investmentrarities.com.

[the-river-rix]

Finally finished s3e15 of bones I feel like shit

[godblessthesickos]

The framing of public-sector workers and unions as parasites rests on a longstanding discursive distinction between society’s “makers and takers,” to borrow a phrase made popular by Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Its success depends on the premise that populist politics—and the producerist ideology at its heart—flows from identifiable grievances by those who produce society’s wealth against those who consume it without giving back. This “producer ethic,” as Alexander Saxton calls it, has roots in the Jeffersonian belief that the yeoman farmer, as neither a master nor a slave, was the proper subject of civic virtue, republican liberty, and self-rule. But it first emerged as a broad partisan identity in the antebellum era, where it expressed in the Democratic Party an opposition between white labor and those who would exploit it. Producerist ideology posited not an opposition between workers and owners but a masculine, cross-class assemblage connecting factions of the elite with poor whites both in cities and on the frontier in what Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a Democrat from Missouri, called “the productive and burthen-bearing classes” in opposition to those cast as unproductive and threatening, including bankers and speculators, slaves, and indigenous people. As such, producerism provided a template for subsequent political intersections of whiteness, masculinity, and labor that would include different groups and target different foes, but always secured by a logic that described a fundamental division in society between those who create society through their efforts and those who are parasitic on, or destructive of, those efforts.

[...] The deep logic of producerism thus structures representations of its negation, the parasite, which since the 1960s in particular has been constructed in highly racialized and gendered terms—the mother on welfare, an immigrant draining public coffers, the criminal “coddled” by liberal judges, or the undeserving recipient of affirmative action. These scripts animate the attack on public-sector unions and workers, continually contrasting its version of the producer—in this case the taxpayer and private-sector worker—with public unions and workers. As we demonstrate, these workers are depicted as unproductive, wasteful, excessive, and indolent, indulging the envied pleasures of shorter working hours, long vacations, and early retirement. They are cognizable precisely because they invoke a longer genealogy of the discourse of racial parasitism and producerism, and its representation of fiscal burdens. Framed this way, unionized public-sector workers become threats to taxpayers—not merely economically, but socially and psychologically as well.

Key to the successful development of populist antistatism has been its selective racial deployment, avoiding discussion of forms of state authority and distribution that have been enjoyed by most of the white electorate since the New Deal, such as Social Security, Medicare, and government-secured home loans. Attacks on the state from the right were aimed originally at school desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education decisions, and later at busing, fair housing, antidiscrimination law, and affirmative action, and at response programs seen to favor poor people of color, such as AFDC and Medicaid. Conservatives extended this strategy by targeting other figures of racial vulnerability, such as immigrant children in public schools.

At each stage of the development of antistatism, a racialized line separating the deserving from the undeserving was drawn to bolster its claims. Now, the logic of antistatism has become so pervasive, and its success against everything from busing to affirmative action to welfare so thorough, that advocates have begun to turn its logic against new targets. Political elements made vulnerable in class terms can now be attacked via racial logic. The line between the deserving and undeserving has been moved such that a large number of white workers now fall on the latter side of the line as “takers.”

This transformation is rooted in a generation of neoliberal economic restructuring, as cuts in income transfer payments and reductions in property, income, and capital gains taxes shifted more of the responsibility for funding public services from corporations and the wealthy onto middle- and low-income workers. Households faced with flattening wages and rising levels of debt increasingly came to demand tax relief of their own as a way to safeguard their income, giving rise to a populist tax revolt. In this context, the public sector itself became stigmatized as a drain on the budgets of ordinary workers rather than as a keystone of social equity and income security and mobility.

“Parasites of Government”: Racial Antistatism and Representations of Public Employees amid the Great Recession by Hosang and Lowndes (2016)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Chris Blitt, The New Yorker

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 16, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 17, 2025

Yesterday, President Donald Trump reached back to 1798 for authority to expel five people he claims are members of a Venezuelan gang. Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as the legal basis for the expulsion. The Alien Enemies Act was one of four laws from 1798 that make up the so-called Alien and Sedition Acts.

Federalists in Congress passed the laws during what is known as the “Quasi-War” with France during the French Revolution, when it appeared that members of their political opposition in the U.S. were working to destabilize the U.S. government’s foreign policy of neutrality and overthrow the government so it would side with France in its struggles with Spain and Great Britain.

Their fears were not unfounded. In 1793, the year after French citizens overthrew the French monarchy, Edmond Charles Genêt arrived in the United States to serve as the French minister to the U.S. Immediately, Citizen Genêt ignored U.S. neutrality and began outfitting privateers to prey on British shipping. When the government told him to stop, he threatened to appeal to the American people. More radical French officials replaced Genêt in 1794, although he stayed in the U.S. out of concern for his safety under the new regime in France.

But his threat to appeal to Americans highlighted the growing tension between the party of George Washington and John Adams—the Federalists—and the party of Thomas Jefferson: the Democratic-Republicans (or Jeffersonian Republicans). Democratic-Republicans thought that the Federalists were moving toward monarchy, and they worked to undermine that shift by building ties with the French government to put members of their own party into office. In 1798 a private citizen, George Logan, traveled to France to negotiate with the government for policies that would strengthen the hands of the Democratic-Republicans at home.

It’s from Logan’s attempt that we got the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from “directly or indirectly” working with a foreign government to influence either the foreign government or the U.S. government. This is one of the laws Trump’s national security advisor Mike Flynn likely ran afoul of after the 2016 election when, as a private citizen, he talked to Russian operatives about Trump’s plans to change U.S. foreign policy once he was in office.

In addition to the Logan Act, Federalists in Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, including the Alien Enemies Act. That law, which applies during wartime or when a foreign government threatens an “invasion” or “predatory incursion,” permits the president to authorize the arrest, imprisonment, or deportation of people older than 14 who come from a foreign enemy country. President James Madison used the law to arrest British nationals during the War of 1812, President Woodrow Wilson invoked it against Germans during World War I, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used it against Japanese, Italian, and German noncitizens.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he would use the Alien Enemies Act to deport gang members, and in an executive order signed Friday night but released yesterday morning after news of it leaked, Trump claimed that thousands of members of the Tren de Aragua gang have “unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.” In connection with the Venezuelan government, he said, the gang has made incursions into the U.S. with the goal of “destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.”

Marc Caputo of Axios reported that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem orchestrated the weekend’s events. Caputo explained that after news of the executive order leaked, an immigration activist who tracks deportation flights posted on social media at 2:31 p.m. that “TWO HIGHLY UNUSUAL I[mmigration and] C[ustoms] E[nforcement] flights” were leaving Texas on a flight path to El Salvador.

The administration was deporting more than 200 men it claimed were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and sending them to El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele had agreed to accept prisoners from the U.S. for “a very low fee.” Tim Sullivan and Elliot Spagat of the Associated Press report that the administration agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison about 300 men for a year.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Democracy Forward promptly filed a lawsuit warning that Trump would be using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans in the country as gang members, regardless of whether there was any evidence of their gang membership and regardless of whether Venezuela is truly trying to invade the United States. The suit asked a federal court to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the deportation of five Venezuelans in federal custody who believed they were about to be deported. At least one of the men said he wasn’t a member of the gang.

Judge James E. Boasberg, chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, issued a temporary restraining order stopping the government from deporting the five men. The administration promptly appealed, and the ACLU asked the judge to expand the order to cover all migrants who could fall under Trump’s executive order.

Ryan Goodman of Just Security put together the timeline of what came next. At 5:00 last night, Judge Boasberg asked whether deportations would happen in the next 24–48 hours. The government’s attorney said he didn’t know; the ACLU attorney said the government was moving rapidly. Before 5:22, Boasberg ordered a break so the government attorney could obtain official information before the hearing resumed at 6:00.

At 5:45, Goodman reports, another flight took off.

Before 6:52, Judge Boasberg agreed with the ACLU that the terms of the Alien Enemies Act apply only to “enemy nations,” and blocked deportations under it. Nnamdi Egwuonwu and Gary Grumbach of NBC News reported that the judge ordered the administration to return the planes in flight to the United States. “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off, or is in the air, needs to be returned to the United States,” the judge said. “Those people need to be returned to the United States.”

Caputo reports that White House officials discussed whether to order the planes, which were then off the Yucatan Peninsula, to turn around but chose not to.

At 8:02, Goodman reports, more than an hour past the judge’s order to recall the planes, a flight arrived in El Salvador.

Last night, El Salvador’s president reposted an article explaining that a federal judge had ordered the planes to return to the U.S., adding the comment: “Oopsie… Too late,” with a laughing emoji. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposted it.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Caputo, “If the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States, that's a fight we are more than happy to take.” But while the administration would like to make this crisis about the alleged behavior of the men they deported, it is really about the rule of law in the United States.

As law professor Steve Vladeck explains, the administration is asserting that Trump himself can determine that the country is at war although it obviously isn’t, an assertion that Tim Balk of the New York Times notes would give Trump the power to arrest, detain, and deport all migrants over the age of 14 without due process, as he determined who is a gang member without due process. We have no evidence that the men deported were gang members, and now they have vanished.

In addition, the administration appears to have violated the orders of the court. As legal analyst Harry Litman wrote: “The table is set for the most direct showdown of Trump and the courts to date. Administration admits today that 100s of supposed gang members were deported w/ no process. chief judge of district court Jeb Boasberg had ordered them not to do it and to return any planes that had been sent.”

Legal commentator Joyce White Vance added that although there will be fights over who did what, when, the case will be headed to the Supreme Court, where Trump will hope for a decision “that says he can do these deportations regardless of other legal issues, because he is the president, and the president has the power to do whatever he deems necessary under Article II of the Constitution.” She adds:” If presidents can do whatever they want, including putting people on a plane and sending them to prisons in a foreign country with no due process whatsoever, then really, who are we?”

Trump’s erosion of the rule of law has been speeding up since he took office. On March 6 he began to target lawyers when he signed an executive order designed to put the Perkins Coie law firm, which often represents Democratic politicians and organizations, out of business. After a judge blocked his order harassing Perkins Coie, Trump followed it with attacks on the Paul, Weiss law firm, and then on Covington.

On Friday, Trump appeared at the Department of Justice, the arm of government charged with protecting the equal protection of the laws, where he said those who challenge his actions are “horrible people. They are scum.” The president of the United States identified lawyers he dislikes by name from the Department of Justice, an astonishing attempt to undermine the rule of law by endangering particular individuals who would protect it.

“We are inevitably headed,” Vance wrote, “to a confrontation between a president who has rejected the rule of law and a judge sworn to enforce it. We are in an exceedingly dangerous moment for democracy.”

In Common Sense, when he made the argument against monarchy that would drive the colonists to create their own new form of government, Thomas Paine warned his neighbors that without the rule of law, the country belongs to a king. He urged them to turn away from a world that gave one man such absolute power. “[S]o far as we approve of monarchy,” he wrote, “in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club held its championship today. He posted tonight that he is proud to have won it again this year.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[whencyclopedia]

Alien and Sedition Acts

The Alien and Sedition Acts were four laws passed by President John Adams and the Federalist-controlled Congress in 1798 that restricted immigration and free speech in the United States. Framed by the Federalist Party as a necessary measure to protect national security during the Quasi-War (1798-1800), the acts were deeply controversial and were challenged as being unconstitutional.

The acts were passed in response to heightening tensions between the United States and Revolutionary France in the aftermath of the XYZ Affair. Concerned by the recent influx of French and Irish émigrés, whose loyalties were considered questionable, the Federalist Party enacted three 'alien' acts during the summer of 1798. The first was the Naturalization Act, which increased the amount of time an immigrant must live in the United States before being eligible for citizenship from 5 to 14 years. Next came the Alien Friends Act, which allowed the president to deport any non-citizen he deemed to be a threat to national security. This was supplemented by the Alien Enemies Act, in which non-citizens hailing from a country at war with the United States could arbitrarily be detained or deported; the Enemies Act remains in effect today and has been invoked several times, most notably during the world wars of the 20th century. Finally, the Sedition Act criminalized the printing of material considered to be "false, scandalous, or malicious" about the president or the US government.

The Alien and Sedition Acts caused a major uproar, with members of the Democratic-Republican Party (Jeffersonian Democrats) condemning them as unconstitutional. Although no one ended up being arrested or deported under the Alien Acts, several people were arrested, tried, and convicted under the Sedition Act, accused of printing material critical of the Federalist-controlled government. Vice President Thomas Jefferson, leader of the opposition, denounced this as a clear violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and press. The backlash against the Alien and Sedition Acts helped Jefferson win the presidency during the election of 1800 and forever stained the reputation of the Federalists, who would never again win the presidency or enjoy the heights of power they had achieved in 1798.

Background

By the late 1790s, the United States was experiencing a deep partisan rift. The nationalist Federalist Party championed a strong national government, big banks, and a build-up of the American military. In international affairs, Federalists tended to support Great Britain, which they regarded as a natural ally to the US and condemned the radicalism of the concurrent French Revolution (1789-1799). Their rival Democratic-Republican Party (Jeffersonian Democrats), by contrast, emerged in favor of decentralized government and republicanism and denounced the Federalists as too aristocratic. They supported the French Republic and rejected the influence of Britain, which they feared would only lead to a re-emergence of monarchism in the United States. Despite President George Washington's Farewell Address, in which he warned against such partisanship, the divide between the two factions had only widened since Washington left office in March 1797. By the start of John Adams' presidency, each party viewed the other as an existential threat to the country.

President Adams was a Federalist, the only member of that party to ever occupy the presidency. But he was not as radical as the Hamiltonian wing of the party and was not as averse to dealing with France as some of his party may have been. This was significant since, at the time Adams was inaugurated in March 1797, the United States and Revolutionary France were on the brink of war. The French Republic was already at war with Britain and had interpreted the signing of the Jay Treaty – a controversial commercial agreement between the US and Britain – as a British-American alliance. In retaliation, French privateers began attacking neutral American shipping in late 1796, arguing that any American ship carrying British cargo was liable to be seized as a valid prize. Within a year, French privateers had captured nearly 300 American ships and had mistreated their crews. While many Federalists clamored for war, President Adams preferred negotiation. In the autumn of 1797, he dispatched three envoys to Paris – John Marshall, Elbridge Gerry, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney – to assert American neutrality in the ongoing French Revolutionary Wars and to hopefully restore relations between the US and France.

This diplomatic mission failed. In an incident known as the XYZ Affair, French agents refused to open negotiations unless the United States agreed to pay a large bribe, resorting to thinly veiled threats once the American envoys resisted the notion. On 5 March 1798, President Adams told Congress that negotiations had failed and, shortly thereafter, requested a build-up of the American army and navy. The aging former President Washington was pulled out of his retirement at Mount Vernon and named commander-in-chief of the American army, which was being organized by the Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton. American and French frigates clashed on the high seas; although this conflict, the Quasi-War, never wound up escalating beyond limited naval skirmishes, for a time it seemed as though France and the United States were on the brink of a major war.

In the months after the details of the XYZ Affair were published, the American public were firmly behind the Federalists; Adams reached the height of his popularity in mid-1798, allowing him and the Federalists to begin their military build-up program practically unimpeded. The blatant disrespectful behavior of the French agents left the Democratic-Republicans with little ammunition, giving them little recourse but to stand to the side and announce that the country was making a bad decision by going to war with France. This was the context – deep partisan rivalry and the looming threat of war – that led Adams and the Federalists to create the Alien and Sedition Acts, policies that ultimately helped lead to the decline of the Federalist Party itself.

Continue reading...

[deadpresidents]

"General Pierce is a sound radical Democrat of the old Jeffersonian school, and possesses highly respectable abilities. I think he is firm and energetic, without which no man is fit to be President. Should he fall into proper hands, he will administer the Government wisely and well."

-- James Buchanan, in a July 26, 1852 letter to reporter John Binns, on Franklin Pierce, who had just won the Democratic Presidential nomination as a dark horse candidate at the 1852 Democratic National Convention in Baltimore.

Buchanan had been a leading candidate for the nomination throughout the convention but could not win enough votes to put him over the top. Pierce became a compromise candidate when his name was first introduced on the 35th ballot, and clinched the nomination on the 49th ballot.

[icarusbetide]

me making entirely unsubstantiated claims again

this is ridiculous but we can accurately calculate the relative strength of amrev relationships through the lens of mutual hating, actually.

hear me out but for every period of cooperation between two amrev politicians, is at least one person/concept they mutually hate. surprising moments of cooperation make sense if we assume those bonds were forged by pettiness and anger, and strong relationships make sense as well - just longer-lasting, more frequent bonds of hatred. also if we consider if the "hatred' was a politically strategic stance or just. genuine emotion, and whether or not either parties were on the same page.

jefferson & madison: hate hamilton. hate federalists. hate extroverts and large crowds.

jefferson & adams: hate hamilton. hate banks. hate england (to a certain extent)

jefferson & hamilton: hate burr.

jefferson & burr: ...hate hamilton (? again to a certain extent). hate federalists (? to a certain extent because everything with burr is ? to a certain extent)

jefferson & washington: hate large crowds and extroverts. hate being more than cottagecore farmers

hamilton & madison: hate inefficient government (? sort of? kind of? in their early friendship?)

hamilton & adams: hate actually agreeing on some issues

hamilton & washington: hate jeffersonian newspapers. hate monroe. hate burr. by the end of washington's life, hate a lot of virginians.

hamilton & burr: hate jefferson? mayhaps if hamilton lived and mellowed out they could've bonded through it.

washington & madison: hate large crowds and extroverts. seemingly hate partisan opponents.

washington & adams: ?

washington & burr: ?

adams: hates everything.

[landrysg]

Martin Gurri:

The past four years have seen a sustained effort to overturn the principles of the open society. ... Supported by its allies in the media, the university, and the bureaucracy, the administration became, in its own eyes, the guardian of truth. Yet on every important question that confronted the country, it was almost invariably wrong — and I say “almost” as a kindness. From the pandemic to the economy, from energy to war and peace, the faceless clique that ran the government on Biden’s behalf made an unholy mess of things. ...

Whether Trump’s policies turn out to be right or wrong evidently matters. But the resumption of the great American debate, of speech that is unencumbered and unafraid, of a Jeffersonian-style open society, matters much more, since it will enable progress. Let there be furious disputes among political allies, Republicans arguing with Republicans, Democrats with Democrats, inside the right and the left as well as against each other. And let outsiders, popular or unpopular, orthodox and heterodox, join in.

I propose an easy test to tell whether we have regained the freedom to discuss every important subject: Count how often the word “disinformation” appears over the next four years

[whitetape]

I get what they’re trying to do here, but there’s no way that The Jeffersonian Institute, a government building, is not more up to date in terms of ADA compliance.

[irenespring]

Rewatching Bones and the season 1 writing is sure something. There are a lot of scenes where I notice writing...areas for improvement...similar to the ones I find in my own writing, which is weird to see in a professional show.

And s1e21 is so interesting to me. At first I thought it was actually very brave/progressive to have the plot twist be that the tragically suffering Brave Soldier Team assassinated a family of civilians. It was especially surprising because after most of the dialogue around the war could have been pulled by from a DoD press release. Hodgins, a conspiracy theorist, is the only firm anti-war perspective. He states his straw-man arguments and his big Character Building Moment is when he "finally" shuts up about the injustices of the war. So having Hodgins validated by the soldier team's big hero action being a war crime seemed very brave.

But then as the episode went on I got the impression that using the war crime plot twist actually made the episode an especially clever piece of propaganda. By including the war crime, the show can't be accused of ignoring civilian casualties. They get points from the liberals in the audience, while still using every trick they have to exonerate the soldier who killed the civilians and the US military as a whole.

Charlie, the young soldier who killed the family and was later killed by friendly fire is portrayed as: young, inexperienced, panicky, undertrained, and arrogant. His actions are waved away as just a mistake by a freaked out kid. Surely, a proper soldier who received complete military training and knew not to charge forward and instead wait for a command from his superior would never have killed those civilians, right? So in that way, the civilian deaths were not the military's fault. The military's image takes a hit for not properly training the kid, but they couldn't have been expected to correct his temperament, of course. War is war, it isn't the US' fault. It's frankly an extraordinary writing feat given that Charlie was literally wearing a uniform, killing the family with his government-assigned weapon, and acting in a United States military operation. Just in case you weren't convinced, the writing moves on VERY quickly from the deaths of the family. They have like five minutes of mention, tops. After that the show goes back to the REAL problem here, who is killing Americans to cover up this unfortunate accident.

Additionally, the military is seen as a wonderful force for justice. An ally to those looking to expose its dirty secrets. You know---the opposite of what would actually happen. Based on real events, the United States would classify any information the Jeffersonian team reveal and demand their secrecy. But when Booth shows up to arrest a high-ranking officer in a civilian court, the central military authority figure says "we are cooperating fully with Agent Booth, [the officer] will not disgrace us." It's a line so stilted and unrealistic that I almost laughed. The line gets a lot of emphasis in the scene, for good reason. It's the big propaganda message distilled: the United States military is an ethical force that makes mistakes but is always acting in the service of truth and justice (as they say in Chernobyl: "our goal is the happiness of all mankind"....in that show it's meant to be an ironic statement about government failure and cover-up, but in this episode I could imagine it being said earnestly, word-for-word). Thus, people who go against Truth and Justice---by killing civilians or covering up those civilian murders---are either outliers or traitors.

It creates a separation between the tragedies of war and the US government. The final theme is what I imagine the US military desperately wanted liberals to pivot to: war bad, US military good. As long as you don't think too hard about why the war started and was happening, you too can oppose the war but still fall in line and stay the fuck out of our way! Therefore the seemingly subversive plot-line ends up fusing nicely with the earlier rhetoric about the Iraq war being justified and any protest against it being disrespectful to the troops.

So in the end, s1e21 pulls of a very impressive stunt: they use a fictional war crime committed by the US military as a propaganda tool for the US military. It works because the whole episode is built to divide the reality of an action from the perpetrators of said action. Really a shining example of taking the concept of passive voice and running with it. Kudos to the writing team, a very interesting example of poli sci cognitive dissonance in the early-mid 2000s.

[memorable-epocha]

Facts about James Madison Vol. 1

(Because I’m bored and everyone should be enlightened with some James Madison)

James Madison walked with a small spring in his step, considerably to make himself appear slightly taller than he was

Because of the soggy and mushy climates surrounding William and Mary College in Williamsburg, James Madison instead went to the College of New Jersey (Princeton) for his health

James Madison, along with Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe, created the Republican Party (also known as the Democratic Republican Party or Jeffersonian Republican Party) in 1792

James Madison’s wife Dolley Payne was gifted a pet parrot named Polly— who was notorious for being aggressive towards humans (thus biting Madison’s finger in front of guests during one occasion)

James Madison personally knew Aaron Burr and Philip Freneau ever since they were all in college

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, reported by a girl walking down the street, could once be seen playing with a neighbor’s pet monkey

James Madison had a long-lasting five decade friendship with Thomas Jefferson

James Madison would eventually have a fall-out with not only Alexander Hamilton, but also George Washington over the belief of federal government and a national bank by the early 1790’s

While Thomas Jefferson in France, he and James Madison would enjoy measuring animals, comparing them to their counterparts (North American animals compared to their similar species in Europe), and telling each other of their findings

James Madison, while he was in college, would last on a five-hour sleep schedule due to studying until he collapsed from a breakdown (this made him stay at the college for an extra year to restore his weakened health)

James Madison had never been good with marital relationships (being allegedly rejected by Freneau’s sister Mary and dumped by Kitty Floyd in the 1780s), but eventually married the 26 year-old widow Dolley Payne in 1794

James Madison was a MASSIVE fan of ice cream, along with his wife Dolley, whose favorite flavor was oyster

[whencyclopedia]

US Presidential Election of 1800

The US presidential election of 1800, referred to by Jeffersonians as the Revolution of 1800, was a turning point in the early political history of the United States. It resulted in the victory of Vice President Thomas Jefferson of the Democratic-Republican Party over his rival, incumbent President John Adams of the Federalist Party.

Election of 1800 Electoral Results

United States Geological Survey (Public Domain)

The election came at a moment of deep political polarization across the country, with each party viewing the other as an existential threat to the Constitution. At the same time, the Federalist Party was experiencing infighting, with the Hamiltonian wing of the party – the so-called 'High Federalists' – disappointed with President Adams' handling of the recent Quasi-War with France, as well as his reluctance to adhere to their agenda. When Adams dismissed two prominent High Federalists from his cabinet, Alexander Hamilton turned on him, writing a pamphlet that critiqued Adams' character and his presidency. Attacked by the Jeffersonians on one side and the Hamiltonian extremists on the other, Adams ultimately lost the election. However, in an unexpected turn of events, both Democratic-Republican candidates – Jefferson and Aaron Burr – received an equal number of electoral votes, meaning that they tied for the presidency. The tie-breaking vote was then left to the House of Representatives, which was still controlled by Federalists.

Although many Federalists initially wanted to deny the office to Jefferson, Hamilton once again interfered, using his remaining influence within the party to sway the vote towards Jefferson. Although he despised Jefferson, Hamilton feared a Burr presidency even more and was determined to prevent it. Jefferson thereby won the election and was inaugurated on 4 March 1801 as the third president of the United States. He called his election the 'Revolution of 1800' and promised to steer the country back toward the republican ideals of the American Revolution, which he claimed the Federalists had lost sight of during their time in power. It was indeed a revolution of sorts, as the Democratic-Republicans would hold on to the presidency for the next quarter century, while the Federalists would fade into irrelevance.

Background

At the dawn of the 19th century, the United States was more divided than at any other point prior to the era of the American Civil War. The Federalist Party, which had dominated the national government for the last decade, was being increasingly viewed as an aristocratic if not pro-monarchist faction that had lost touch with the principles of the American Revolution and now stood in the way of republicanism and progress. The other faction, the Democratic-Republican Party, was accused of being a group of atheistic and bloodthirsty Jacobins who sought to bring the excesses of the French Revolution to American shores. The emergence of partisan newspapers only inflamed these divisions, turning ordinary Americans against one another. Historian Gordon S. Wood writes:

As the Federalist and the Republican parties furiously attacked one another as enemies of the Constitution, party loyalties became more intense and began to override personal ties, as every aspect of American life became politicized. People who had known one another their whole lives now crossed streets to avoid confrontations. Personal differences easily spilled into violence, and fighting erupted in the state legislatures and even in the federal Congress. By 1798, public passions and partisanship and indeed public hysteria had increased to the point where armed conflict among the states and the American people seemed likely.

(209)

Each party believed that its own agenda was the best way to ensure the survival of the country and the Constitution. The Federalists were a nationalist party who, under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton, wanted to transform the United States into a modern, industrialized nation on par with the great powers of Europe. The Federalists sought to forge a strong, national government designed for the "accomplishment of great purposes" (Wood, 91). Through Hamilton's influence, Federalist policies greatly shaped the presidency of George Washington (1789-1797) – these included the Hamiltonian financial program of big banks and the funding of national debt, as well as the controversial Jay Treaty (1795), which strengthened ties with Britain. During the presidency of John Adams (1797-1801), the Federalists looked to consolidate their power by provoking and winning a war with France; although President Adams built up the military and allowed US warships to capture hostile French privateers, he did not ask for a declaration of war and, in fact, worked to de-escalate the conflict, called the Quasi-War. Adams' refusal to seek a full-scale war with France would cause a rift in the party, between him and the 'High Federalists', as those loyal to Hamilton's political agenda were known.

John Adams

Gilbert Stuart (Public Domain)

The Democratic-Republican Party, also known as Jeffersonian Republicans, had arisen in opposition to the Federalists. The Democratic-Republicans believed that Federalist policies were too aristocratic and too pro-British and that Federalists like Hamilton and Adams had lost sight of the principles of the Revolution, or the 'spirit of '76'. Jeffersonians believed in an expansion of republicanism and agrarianism and generally supported the French Revolution as a continuation of the American struggle against tyranny. During Adams' presidency, the Democratic-Republicans resisted the war with France and condemned the implementation of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798; this allowed for not only the deportation of non-citizens deemed hostile to the country but also the arrest of journalists and other speakers accused of spreading lies about the president or Congress. Jefferson, serving as vice president in the Adams administration, denounced the Alien and Sedition Acts as unconstitutional and condemned the Federalist administration as a "reign of witches". This was one of the larger points of contention in the upcoming election, which promised to be a rematch between Adams and Jefferson.

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[darkmaga-returns]

As I drove across America this summer, I met scores of beautiful people - ordinary Americans, generous, open, folksy, even self-deprecating Americans - who seemed to inherit either through the blood that flowed in their veins or by a transfusion of that blood, a unique albeit subconscious awareness of their unique destiny amongst the nations.

And like Louis Armstrong, I thought to myself - what a wonderful people! And what an enormous tragedy that their ruling class is so pathetically unworthy of them!

Today, America is the envy of the world, including for us here in Canada. Some of the envy is grudging, but most is rooted in the world’s own realization of the uniqueness of the experience of this still young nation.

Most of the world thinks of “democracy” in rather undefinable terms such as “the rule of the people” or “accountable government” or even, “exercising one’s right to vote.”

But few realize that all our modern ideas of democracy owe their inception to the beginnings of the American nation. Jeffersonian democracy was the high point, the defining ideal of a type of system which Lincoln famously described as a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

The English civil war (150 years prior to American Independence) and Cromwell’s challenge to the King’s “divine right to rule,” undoubtedly laid some of the foundational stones of the American nation, when many of those same Englishmen crossed the Atlantic to the American wilderness to start a new nation. But there was nothing resembling Jeffersonian democracy in England when the Declaration of American Independence or the American Constitution were written.

To their credit, the Victorians in Britain in turn, learned from the (unruly) Americans and incorporated for themselves most of the ensconced ideas of a free press, free speech and freedom of conscience that Jeffersonian democracy had bequeathed to the world.

[philosophicalconservatism]

hi, how are you? 😊 just for the fun of it, i'm throwing a random question at you: are there things which you think people shouldn't be able to buy or sell or do you think there should be no restrictions? like buying/selling e.g. organs, babies, weapons, drugs, sexual favors, etc. i follow some radical feminist blogs who are very much against surrogacy and oppose people (mainly sexual minorities) who say they have a right to surrogates and that it should be covered by insurance. i was wondering what a conservative thinks about these issues. i'm just curious & eager to hear different perspectives.

Thanks for the question, and once again for following.

The phrasing of your question cries out for drawing a basic distinction between Conservatism and Libertarianism. Yet the very moment we proceed to do so we come to an initial realization. If Libertarianism is only distinguishable from other ideas of government by the fact that it embraces an “absolute” ethos of liberty, then the only genuine Libertarianism is something called Anarcho-Capitalism. This is a scenario within which every voluntary transaction is permissible, which necessarily means that there can be no political state. Every element of order within such a society is to come about as a consequence of voluntary contracts between individuals at specific moments in time (including policing and enforcement).

Any professed Libertarian that adheres to anything less than this standard does not in fact embrace a genuine Libertarianism but some specific shade of Conservatism. How can I say this? Well, let us consider why someone who calls himself a Libertarian would reject an Anarcho- Capitalist model. How would he explain himself? In explaining himself he would begin to sound very much like a passage from an Edmund Burke pamphlet. He would begin to talk about abstract ideological speculation having to give way to practical human realities, and concrete social precedent. He could not exclude something like Anarcho-Capitalism in principle, as a future possibility, but he would insist that human societies as we presently know them cannot practically assume this form.

Now once he begins to reason in this way on political matters he cannot later on decide to appeal to some “absolute” Liberal ethos to settle every political question. He must continue in his confessed understanding of the fact that politics is actually a convergence of abstract ideals and (historically grounded) practical social realities. Without abstract ideals politics is morally blind, but without practical consideration and historical orientation, it is in applicable and useless. Attempt to establish a Jeffersonian Democracy overnight in a place like Saudi Arabia much less Afghanistan and see how far it gets you. On the other hand, you can take small practical steps toward gradually liberalizing such countries over time. The Conservative is a believer in freedom, but freedom is a thing into which societies must continually grow and develop.

So this brings us to your question of exactly what should and should not be permitted within the so called ”liberal” societies of the West. The answer is that we must determine on a case by case basis what we can realistically sustain as individual societies in this stage of our growth and development. We must carefully examine each issue with a close eye on the law of unintended consequences. Some professed Libertarians for example, like to talk about the legalization of drugs; but what would absolute drug legalization mean? It would consist of the right to freely dispense and use for recreational purposes, every single pharmaceutical and street drug in existence. We have absolutely no idea what an America like that would even look like.

We presently have a nationally crippling epidemic that revolves around a single strictly controlled substance (Fentanyl). One could not even begin to predict the vast sea of long term social consequences that would be created by the kind of policy referred to here. It would not even be guaranteed to eliminate the black market sale of these drugs. For example, there is still a multi-billion dollar international black market in tobacco, a legal drug. Now I made reference specifically to America here for a reason. Because in the end, every individual society must assess these issues for itself, on the basis of its own unique characteristics and national experience. Prostitution may be handled in one way by one legislature but differently by another (including within the same nation, as it is in the U.S.). One of the unintended consequences we must always consider is how the legalization of something complicates the prosecution of the illegal (or unregulated) versions of that thing.

The issue of surrogate motherhood could potentially yield some unique unintended consequences which cause it to stand apart. I do not have a problem with it in principle, but I think it must retain a certain character. If surrogate motherhood becomes a market exactly like any other market, then childbearing becomes the production of a commodity, and human beings can become articles for sale. But a child is not the “possession” of their parent, and therefore an unfettered market model is wrong for this kind of issue. There is a vast difference between parental discretion, and property rights. This topic is somewhat different from the others we have discussed so far. Those issues had to do only with how human beings dispose of their own person and property. This issue has to do with one party’s (or more than one party's) power over another (the future baby). For this reason it must be regulated even in the freest context.

In conclusion, the approach that I take on most of these question is to outline how we need to think about them rather than to try to answer them directly. Some of them are tremendously complex questions that do not necessarily have any uniform answer that is fit for every single society. We should act in a way that tends toward the maximization of freedom within the constraints of the present development of each society.

[46ten]

Hogeland's "The Hamilton Scheme," new book for May 2024

[Here's a search for all my posts with Hogeland in them.]

Ohh, The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding is finally coming out at the end of this month (May 2024) - I've been following Hogeland discussing it for several years!

Hogeland is not at all interested in Alexander Hamilton as a persona (most AmRev and early American historians aren't), but as a policy maker and creator of the federal govt and financial system. And he's sharply critical.

Hogeland and Robert Sullivan (author of the 2016 Harper's magazine cover article "The Hamilton Cult: Has the celebrated musical eclipsed the main himself?", which also quotes Hogeland, will be discussing the book at the National Archives on May 16th, 1-2 pm EDT.

I think this quote from Hogeland in the above linked article is key to his approach:

" 'But it’s just the icing on the cake of this industry that’s existed for decades now, trying to promote Hamilton as something other than what he actually was.” The duel with Burr, his relationship with his wife and his mistress — these are rich material for a narrative biography, Hogeland concedes, but in terms of Hamilton’s impact on the formation and the very nature of the United States, they are little more than footnotes. “Accidents,” he calls them. They lead us to overlook what Hamilton thought was his own purpose in life. "

Blurb: "William Hogeland is the best guide I have found to understanding how we today are, for good and evil, children of Alexander.” ―J. Bradford DeLong, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Kirkus review:

A lively if overlong history of the origins of federal power.

A reader of a QAnon-ish bent might come away from this book convinced that Alexander Hamilton founded the so-called deep state. That person would have a point. As Revolutionary War–era historian Hogeland writes, Hamilton was committed to founding a strong, even imperial national government; to achieve it, he crafted instruments of a national economy. One of them was public debt, the “driving wheel” for a great nation. Without debt, the fledgling nation could not have funded any number of endeavors, not least the first foreign war against the pirates of the Barbary Coast. Much as Thomas Jefferson disliked the specter of a federal power stronger than that of the states, without that debt, the Louisiana Purchase could never have been completed. As Hogeland shows, the struggle between Hamilton and his states’ rights–minded opponents was an existential one “over the fundamental meaning of American government,” and in many respects, it continues today. Hamilton had a talent for making enemies, though friends such as Declaration of Independence signer Robert Morris, wealthy and powerful, helped him survive politically. Morris’ great lesson was one of “commercial domination,” to which Hamilton aspired more as a national than a personal accomplishment. Hogeland’s story is lengthy and circumstantial, but marked by plenty of drama: Hamilton’s stepping out from under George Washington’s shadow to become the foremost “Continentalist” politician of his day; his pitched battles with Albert Gallatin, “treasury secretary to two presidents,” over the structure of the national economy; and Thomas Jefferson’s eventual dismantling of “the Hamilton scheme” and subsequent returns to it until the hybrid called “Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means” took root. A well-wrought tale of how the American empire came to be born on the balance sheet as much as by the gun.

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

I'm not reading all that. The fact is agrarian country > industrial hellhole. Peace.

lmao trust me i had no expectation that your mediocre low iq ass would read it. my response was for my (elite high iq) followers.

you offer a false dichotomy and demonstrate your lack of vision. let me offer you an alternative. not agrarian vs industrial but agrarian AND industrial; an agrarian-industrial superpower. btw, by the time of the civil war the north was producing more staple crops than the south. half of the union army was composed of farmers. industrialization and infrastructure benefits all parties; accessible market for the farmer, cheap food for urban workers, efficient distribution for the manufacturer, etc.

people want to point to the whiskey rebellion as some example of the federal government's "overreach" (lmao) but really it points to the deficiency of jeffersonian democracy. maybe if the jeffersonians let us build roads and canals and issue credit those farmers would have had markets to sell their grains to at fair prices and have them paid with actual money instead of something consumable like whiskey and they'd have the capital to buy machines to farm more efficiently. the people who rebelled weren't simply rebelling because they hated taxes but because they felt like the government wasn't doing /enough/ for them. and who was keeping them from doing so? jeffersonians.

proponents of the american system called these mutually beneficial and mutually reinforcing relationships "the harmony of interests."