Party (Politics) in the U.S.A.

With apologies to Miley Cyrus. In thinking and writing about American history I was struck with the realization that I don't actually have a good model that would help me understand American political history in context. The problem is that there seem to be a few points that are "cuts" wherein we can determine the political polarity in our terms: 1776, but also Lincoln and the Civil War, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, and finally Lyndon Johnson with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Today we label each of these events as "liberal" or "left-wing" and they are our anchors for political history. The glaring exception is the changing partisan affiliation: Lincoln is a Republican, while Johnson and Roosevelt are Democrats. One reason is that the US is unusually old as a modern-style nation-state, and that the Democratic Party is the world’s oldest continuously operating modern mass political party. It is conventionally dated to 1828 or 1832 and therefore its baggage is much more directly compromising. The G.O.P. at the same time isn't much younger, dated to 1854. Here we begin.

It's therefore common to hear liberals talk about a "party switch": a long time ago, there were Republicans who were liberals, and Democrats who were conservatives, and they switched for some reason in the 1940s–1960s and now we can see the heroic tradition of liberalism from then till now. It is at the same time a very self-serving narrative, at least in that it can allow Democrats to ignore and memory-hole large parts of their history, since their "real" history as Democrats starts only at the time of the New Deal or the Great Society. Ron Chernow ¹ for instance attempts to project current partisan politics back in time to the Grant administration. Adam Gopnik, in his review for the New Yorker, puts it this way:

Coming to the close of Chernow’s book, one will think that we have had, since Grant’s Presidency, very much the same politics, with the same two political parties. One is a progressive party that accommodates what is now called identity politics, reaching out to a coalition of people—those black, Jewish, Native American, and Irish petitioners Grant tried to favor—who think the world is getting better and who support some kind of benevolent government protection. The other is a reactionary party rooted in a core base of revanchist Southern whites who believe that the world is getting worse, want to keep black people from exercising too much political power, and hate the federal government that helps them.... But the two parties in 1877 looked remarkably like the two parties today. The names are switched... [Emphasis mine] ²

Chernow has been applauded for reviving Grant's reputation and making him a genuine civil-rights hero; this I have no problem with, and despite my poking fun at him, he is much more of a historian than I ever will be. It is nevertheless a ruinous model, I've come to realize, when it comes to thinking about the evolution of political ideas. It's especially difficult to put American politics in a less parochial frame—namely, that of the European tradition of political philosophy. There are de-romanticized reasons that American and European politics are different and I hope to present this in a high-level conceptual fashion. In my reading, I've also come to the conclusion that there's a genuine long-term continuity in both the Democratic and Republican parties, and so any "party-switch" is subtler than is often given credit, all the while without effacing genuine policy changes (especially on civil rights).

Here is a schematic formulation of the European political situation in the nineteenth century. There are the "classes" as usually presented: the peasant, the artisan, the aristocrat, and the new figures of the bourgeois and the industrial worker. At the same time, we see a rural world and an urban world; while both are often mixed in practice, we can nevertheless recognize that both present different "worlds." A brief phenomenology of peasant life would show it to be structured by a natural rhythm of seasons, agricultural and livestock life-cycles, and the vagaries of climate. There is a richness to peasant life insofar as the farmer (especially before industrialization) depends on mētis in day-to-day labour. Then there is the complex relationship between rural life and religion, since the clergy are often trained as intellectuals in the city, especially in Catholic countries. What sets this century apart from previous centuries is the rise of industrialization. The old formula is useful as a guide: the old commons are enclosed and expropriated. Deracinated peasants, separated from their means of subsistence, head to the city where they are "free" labour and therefore become what has been called the "industrial proletariat", the "working class."

What does the American political situation look like from a European point of view? Perhaps the main feature is that suffrage was much more firmly established—and established before the emergence of a mass working class. While the early US did not even have universal white male suffrage in that form, there was a dismantling of property barriers (again, for white men) by the 1820s. This is different from the situation in Europe, where republicanism (most famously in the 1848 revolutions) was a demand that was not yet satisfied and could be targeted toward the existing legal privileges associated with aristocratic elements. France did get universal male suffrage in 1848 and then the French people ended up electing Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte president in 1848; he became Napoleon III in 1852, so make of that what you will. It is true that Napoleon III had a peasant base, but it does seem important that these French elections had a plebiscitary character. That American politics started out with such a base of farmers at the very beginning makes it stand out and is why American liberalism is so unusual.

Is Jefferson left-wing or right-wing? Is Hamilton? Wikipedia helpfully tells us: The Democratic-Republican Party was a "left-wing" party by the standard of the era in which monarchy-system was common worldwide at the time. ³ But do we really need to cite Wikipedia to identify a political party's political ideology? Especially for a party so far back in time. The anonymous editor is correct enough in pointing out that there are differing standards between eras. Or, to put it with a linear-algebra analogy, we have to "change bases" by decomposing the political-orientation vector of "the Federalist Party" and "the Democratic-Republican Party" or "the Democratic Party" into 1776 and 2026 basis vectors. We don't have to go into such pseudo-mathematics, especially if we go by the tried-and-tested method of looking at geopolitical affiliation.

We know that Jefferson was famously a supporter of the French Revolution in its early stages. Hamilton, on the other hand, shared some early enthusiasm but ultimately recoiled from its later ideological and violent course. It is not that Hamilton was a supporter of absolute monarchy; let us say that Hamilton's position on the French Revolution was analogous to Edmund Burke's position. Burke could support the American Revolution as a Whig, become the founder of modern conservatism and reject the French Revolution at the same time. Even Jefferson was not himself a Jacobin; perhaps we can say in hindsight that he was something of a Girondin. Hamilton was more opposed to popular participation, or at least ambivalent when it comes to democracy (even if in a way that does not make him an opponent of republicanism). As for the politics of the French Revolution, let us call this "petit-bourgeois radicalism", or less pejoratively and more specifically, "radical republicanism." Jefferson, with some qualifications, is a radical republican. Hamilton, in his sympathy to the British, is something of an old Whig Lord, a Parliamentarian and not a Cavalier or a Tory. Here we can identify the matrix from which subsequent American politics draws.

So it seems that early America thinks of itself as a yeoman republic of farmers and artisans, and it's not for nothing that this vision has been strongly associated with Jefferson. More than that, it is important to think about the "ideal types" of different kinds of work and their relation to a particular consciousness. Or, at least, one’s relation to work influences how one relates to and innovates a political form. Farming before industrial agriculture cannot be planned from above and resists rationalization (as we have seen in the history of the failure of agricultural collectivization). Standardization is difficult, much depends on the properties of the land, and also one's relation to it. The serf who has to work land under a feudal relation bears a completely different relationship to the land as compared to the small-scale farmer who works the land. This difference and the fact that the latter was predominant and had political power make the American case unique. Industrial work can be planned, not only by command economies but also by factory management, which can plan quotas and future expansion. This leads to an interest in government support and industrial policy. There is division of labour and the power of vertical integration, the use of an abstract de-contextualized scientific knowledge put in the service of optimization, and a class of workers and managers who have to imbibe a "mechanistic" understanding and relation to equipment. Perhaps artisanal work is in-between the two, insofar as it does not need subordination to an exterior employer who sets the rules and owns the machines, while at the same time involving a body of practical knowledge that is passed down by apprenticeship or book.

There is a Saint-Simonian characteristic to Hamilton and something different about the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer. If you are a yeoman farmer, there are some policies that immediately appeal to you. You want free trade if you are an exporter, so that you can sell your produce on the world market (at least in the period the US exported agricultural products). You want to be able to own your land and to use it as you see fit. More than that, your economic power comes from the ownership of land, and you want more land on which you can farm (since as a free man you own the land instead of being contracted to it by a lord). Unlike industry, you do not really have the same advantage of increasing returns to scale from greater capital intensity. Capital-intensive industry comes much later in history with subsequent developments in technology. There is also an interesting dynamic wherein open access to high-quality land decreases the Ricardian rent accrued by established landowners, hence giving smallholder expansion a "populist" edge. Since white farmers are legally allowed to own land, by the Domar hypothesis (or rather, a reversal of it) they can easily acquire land and farm independently given the lack of feudal relations that keep them bound to established white planters. ⁴ The flip-side is that enslaved people do not have this same mobility. If the boundaries of the US were not fixed, then it could become the job of farmers and speculators to acquire as much high-yield land as they could. You also want cheap labour. This labour differs from industrial labour because it is not "mediated" through machinery that would legibilize and de-personalize, but on a "personal" basis, since your own subsistence is entwined with your farm, and so slaves are part of the household and barred from owning land. You do not want the government meddling in your business, since no government apparatchik can come in and tell you how to farm.

Hence there is very directly a demand both for slavery and for acquisition of land from Native Americans, both involving incredible amounts of violence. The relation to slavery and expansion differs between smallholders and plantation owners. The dynamic is still present, and it therefore helps explain how the order was justified. As Upton Sinclair famously put it, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. At the same time this is not a cynical falsification of Jeffersonian republicanism. My approach is to accept that Jefferson believed that he upheld liberty, and this made sense in his world, even though this is obscene to our sense of liberty.

As a methodological point I hold that concepts like "liberty" have to be understood in a contextual manner. However I'm not a strict nominalist. This is because I accept a retroactive teleology taking place in the evolution of ideas. If the idea of liberty evolves from A to B, we can retroactively read B as being immanently within A. This holds whether or not B was an improvement. The reason for this is my contention that the best and only serious critique we can make of the past is in an immanent fashion. This allows us to understand how racialist ideologies can become emancipatory, and how originally emancipatory ideologies can become bigoted or reactionary. The flaw or the uncovered gem has to be located within the origin itself, and not as a later deviation that can be scapegoated. This is different from saying that Jefferson was simply not looking at the consequences of his own beliefs, given that his own beliefs did allow him to justify, in however tortuous a way, his slave owning. He could do this despite the fact that there is much that is liberal and republican in his thought. Instead of bringing in our moral judgements (at least immediately), we have to look at the tensions present in a historical concept immanently in its own time and the repression thereof, after which we can construct a line from then till now.

One clue is our earlier identification of Jefferson with the Girondins, or at least with a "radical republicanism." Radical republicanism is a republicanism of property-owners who are free rational agents. Along with this is an understanding of property law, inherited from the Romans and developed over the centuries, concerning the use and "enjoyment" of said property. If you believe that a republic is constituted out of free agents who own property ... and moreover accept "scientific" theories about the rationality of certain peoples and their property as recognized under "natural" property law ... the combination of these premises can lead to a conclusion that free white persons could be at liberty in a republic while owning slaves. Consider how polygenist theories of human origin were viable and influential well into the nineteenth century, though alongside a considerable monogenist current. Polygenist theories were considered hard-headed scientific accounts, compared to the wishy-washy Biblical account in Genesis. ⁵ Jefferson preceded the mature nineteenth-century American School of polygenist anthropology, not explicit polygenist thought as such. So it is not impossible to think there were similar sentiments in the air already. And moreover what makes slavery unusually cruel, especially compared to feudalism and other forms like indentured service, is the subsumption of people under property law, such that they can be traded and used—the very vocabulary inherited from Roman law.

Once the idea of vast human differences can no longer be supported, then the same normative questions of bourgeois property law could be retained while the answers have changed. Now, thankfully, race does not enter into the question of whether someone is a legal person and therefore able to exercise property rights, even if the same legal ideas have survived from Roman times. There is no court, for instance, that would today legally recognize slavery (with the awkward exception of the Thirteenth Amendment's allowing it as punishment for crime), since a legal person then and now cannot be bought and sold, and all people are now legal persons. (However it is not so clear-cut to say that slave societies did not recognize slaves as persons at all, since they could be persons for some situations). There is in Hans Blumenberg's sense a “reoccupation” of questions that a tradition retains even while the answers have changed. This is what “form” means in politics. And not to give the game away this early, but it is exactly this form of continuity (not continuity of policy in the vulgar sense) that holds for both the Democratic and Republican parties.

I wonder whether, in Europe, Jefferson’s supporters would not have had the power they had in America. Or, at least, they would not have had comparable electoral power, given that Europe had a large peasant base but little official electoral power. Their attitudes seem to have been coloured by a suspicion of the workshop, the city and the factory. The Federalists on the other hand do not seem to be as populist, perhaps because of their association with Northeastern businessmen. This automatically makes them unsuited for direct populism. They end up disintegrating in the 1810s but there is a continuity between them and the American Whigs, a motley coalition organized against "King Jackson." The genealogy is more complex, many former Federalists fell into the Democratic-Republican orbit. The Democratic-Republican Party fell apart into the Jacksonian Democratic Party and the National Republicans, with the latter forming the Whig coalition.

It does not make sense to think of Whig economic policy as being continuous with modern liberal policy. A better comparison is with the economic policy of the national-developmental states, whether socialist or non-socialist, like Nehru in India or Nasser in Egypt. Well, Nehru in India would be a much better comparison. Hamilton did not have in mind a planned economy with state ownership of enterprises, but he did have a developmentalist model in mind. The genealogy is not completely empty, given that Hamilton is the root of the "American school of political economy," and this tradition ultimately influenced Friedrich List in Germany. Later members of the American School include Henry C. Carey, who served as a key economic adviser to Lincoln. List's developmentalist policies, supposed to be opposed to the "British model" of Smithian free trade and competition, become influential on twentieth-century developmentalism, directly and indirectly.

The reason that I'm not counting this Whig model as being liberal is that its model of economic intervention is different. Intervention can be justified in a "Jeffersonian" mold for different ends. There are exceptions like the CHIPS Act, but even that has to be considered unusual. Generally, and purely as an ideal-type analysis, we can say that Jeffersonian economics would draw more from Adam Smith, while Hamiltonian economics would draw from James Steuart (not as a schema but as something that would shed light). The difference is between a methodology of decentralized exchange and methodological nationalism. I certainly think that Henry Clay and Henry Carey would love it if enormous semiconductor fabs were built in the US.

This is why the early Democrats are "left" in being populist. The difference is that they were not produced by the mass levelling that produced the classic European working class. An antecedent of Democratic-style politics might be the Levellers in Cromwell's New Model Army. Like the Levellers, the early Democrats wanted popular sovereignty and shared a radical-Whig suspicion of executive power. Their politics is closer to being small-scale producerism as opposed to, again, being a unified "working class." This is compatible with racism toward black people, given that I follow Augustine on the problem of the human heart. Cromwell too was able to lead his New Model Army to commit catastrophic atrocities in Drogheda, and so it's proof that republicanism and a leveller ethos do not necessarily defend against prejudice or violence against an underclass. Perhaps there was some kind of a crab mentality involved here.

The classical model of the industrial worker is that he would be ripped from his community, ground out in the city, such that he would be "nothing"; it was for this reason that he (it was often a "he") was considered revolutionary by the socialists, since he had no connection and nothing to lose, and was formed by the machine. Farmers were not expropriated in the same way since they had property rights. There was a smaller, less substantial mass of landless white workers, since they could migrate West and start a farm. There was also nothing that would allow a lord to simply snatch his land away from him, because his land ownership was formalized under the law. It is not that there was no labour movement, but that it was comparatively limited compared with the European labour movement. In the Northeast, both farming and industry could coexist; I suspect that the availability of farming might have lessened the pressure for industrialization.

The alternative to the industrial proletariat can be found in the Lowell women of Massachusetts. Rather, the machine took in women and girls, who could not, on this account, become members of the industrial proletariat in the way envisioned by the socialists. They had a safety net. They were expected to leave the workforce and become married to respectable men. The existence of marriage was not a panacea because it introduced its own patriarchal domination, and I only invoke it to distinguish from the classical socialist analysis focused on the atomized male worker. Besides, while company boardinghouses and and paternalistic moral regulation were a given, family resources, marriage prospects and vulnerability all varied. Women could be industrialized without being totally deracinated, given the explicitly time-limited nature of their employment, the guarantee of their feminine morality and even housing. This is not to say that the Lowell women and girls didn’t stage their own strikes or suffer exploitation; they were nevertheless part of the working class.

This is not a criticism of the Lowell women, especially since the classical socialist proletariat did not complete its world-historical mission. The reason is that I'm distinguishing the specific wage-earning working class from the nineteenth-century belief in a particular form of the "rootless" working class that was sure to triumph in revolution. If the Lowell women were not the ideal subject of classical socialist politics, so much the worse for the latter. My point is rather that their relationship with work was quite different and was unlikely to make them revolutionaries, because they had much to lose: their housing, family ties, and marriage prospects; they also faced the difficulty of being a lone woman in the nineteenth century. Much of this was in effect benevolent sexism and it acted as a cage. At the same time, an employer of that time would have been much more reluctant to allow his employees to reach the same degree of deracination that male workers in Europe might have experienced, for better or for worse.

Perhaps free labour is the one "radical" American tradition that has existed from the beginning of modern America. It is instructive to not confuse it with "socialism," especially after it was organized in 1848 as the Free Soil tradition. While Free Soil did function as a large tent, the archetypal Free Soiler was an independent free producer or artisan. If this reminds us of the earlier characterization of Jefferson, it is no wonder when we learn that many former Democrats (the "Barnburners") helped found Free Soil, alongside members of the Liberty Party and the anti-slavery Conscience Whigs. If we are to speak of a Free Soil ideology, the European analogue is almost certainly Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, though without a mutualist rejection of property or a direct Proudhonian influence. In some ways artisan labour is difficult to centralize in an industrial fashion, though it was capable of political organization. There are different styles of producerism, and this is related to the specific form of work in a given socio-economic situation. Socialism often conceives of production on the model of industrial production of a homogeneous kind of commodity. Sraffa models such an economy as a set of production recipes in which commodities enter as inputs and outputs. Such a system is more amenable to planning (famously, Paul Cockshott), national accounting and input–output analysis than a world of singular household crafts. If you believe the Physiocrats, they're sterile, which a Jeffersonian farmer might find amusing.

This is why it is wrong to consider the Republican Party as being left-wing, as some people have done. I can understand why this classification is made. It is for the simple reason that opposition to slavery is of paramount importance to the left. Some of the Radical Republicans might approach this, and there were German socialists who fought on the Union side and voted Republican, but this does not mean that the Republicans were themselves left-wing. Possibly if you rank Lincoln among other world leaders of his time, he would turn out to be left or center-left, but more for his republicanism and his opposition to slavery. (Though since Napoleon III had Saint-Simonian influences and styled himself as a "Socialist Emperor", perhaps a case can be made that Lincoln had a competitor from the left) That comes down to the awkwardness because the left-right and the progressive-conservative, or republican-aristocratic axes are not all identical, and (to borrow an idea from linear algebra) have to be projected onto each other. At a moderate intensity it is hard to distinguish socialism and radical republicanism. This is why I think Harry V. Jaffa's conservative reading of Lincoln is accurate. More precisely, I recognize that conservative readings of Lincoln efface his radicalism on slavery and civil rights. Nevertheless liberal and left-wing readings efface the profoundly conservative aspect of Lincoln's political thought to a greater extent. Only then can we understand the political economy of the post-Lincoln G.O.P., all the way from Grant to McKinley.

It is true that Lincoln was a devout small-r republican who despised slavery, and that he really was much more radical than people realize. Liberals might also object correctly that Lincoln's conservatism, even if admitted, is plainly not the conservatism in vogue today. All this might very well be true; but to the extent that Lincoln really was this influential, his party ended up evolving in this direction and so there is some level of continuity between the two conservatisms. Even though Lincoln was a Great Man, his movement and administration were staffed with Ordinary Men, who would become the Ordinary Men of the postwar Republican Party. It is perhaps difficult to outline the ideology of the postwar Southern Democrats, given that they were mostly a furious ragtag bunch obsessed with white supremacy and Home Rule. All this is compatible with a Jackson-Jefferson Southern politics, with the populist suspicion of centralized power, together with more scapegoating of freedmen. Republican politics at the same time, while a coalition, ends up coalescing around Northern capital and artisans. It is here that we can glean some of the economic motives of this coalition.

Consider how the postwar Republican Party was a party of creditors, and then a lot of its economic policy falls into place. Admittedly the coalition was wider, but I am doing an ideal-type analysis here. Lincoln was influenced by the American system of tariffs that was inherited from the Whigs. But to be a creditor also has certain incentives; the main point is that you want a stable currency and minimal inflation. Lincoln famously issued greenbacks during the Civil War, but perhaps this could be justified to finance a war. Economic policy after the war was consistently "conservative" because of the "sound" money policy conducive to established capital. This policy begins with Grant and continues through the Democrat Grover Cleveland, all the way up to William McKinley. We can take another look at Chernow's book, which would like to portray Grant as a proto-modern Democrat. Is it really possible to reconcile that portrayal with Grant’s conservative monetary policy? None of that is to efface Grant's heroic efforts against the Klan, or his support for freedmen. The problem is that looking at economics necessarily makes a hash out of a simplistic party-switch story. The Republican story, given that it was a conservative story about nationalism, could very easily slip from a defence of active efforts made on behalf of Black Americans to reconciliation with the South in the name of nationalism. It is as if the Republican Party were to say, actually, we just want a Respectable Republic, so let's do Home Rule.

It is fair to say that postwar Republicans preserve national, constitutional, and developmental aspects of Lincoln's legacy. "Lincoln" stands as a question the content of which has to be reoccupied; to be a Republican is to find a way to make sense of this legacy. American party politics long had an “ancestral” character. Many a man learned Republicanism from his father and passed it down to his son. This cannot simply be a vague "tribal" affiliation but something that has to be taken seriously as a complex of ideas. Even if "Republicanism" in the old sense of a civil religion based on Lincoln is no longer dominant in the G.O.P., a weaker continuity survives because later Republicans reoccupy the questions posed by that inheritance. This ideational matrix is not necessarily "left-wing" even in a Progressive guise. Perhaps the closest example of such a political philosophy is Herbert Croly's dream of a scientifically managed society, but even this owes more to corporatism than to socialism proper.

That Grover Cleveland could hew to a Republican policy of gold-standard adherence does make it difficult to be too schematic about economic policy. The Northern Democrats help make a case when it comes to political form. The much-maligned "political machines" are not nationalist institutions but coalitions of different ethnic interests. It may not be so much of a stretch to joke that the job of the machines was DEI For Italians (or Eye-talians, as the case may be). A color line existed at this time, and it would be a long time before black voters were subsumed as a constituency, but it's not wrong to highlight that this was how "white ethnics" were incorporated into mass politics. The difference from a more 'Republican' aspect is that the lack of a nationalist edge meant that immigrants did not necessarily have to give up their pre-immigration identities and become an unmarked American. They could retain those identities and vote qua Irish, Italian ... It may not be a huge stretch to think of this as inheriting a Jacksonian conception of a spoils system, wherein political rewards are distributed based on membership in blocs and the ability of bloc representatives to negotiate concessions. The recognizable "industrial proletariat" rather ends up being supplied by immigrant groups. These groups also import European-style radicalism in America, though they were preceded and accompanied by native-born workers.

William Jennings Bryan holds the position of the "vanishing mediator" that connects a Jacksonian populism against the Second Bank and a more contemporary attitude in Democratic economic policy. Your politics is in part determined by whether you are hit harder by poor growth or by inflation (with stagflation being the double whammy). If not for the Scopes trial, the main thing that Bryan is remembered for is his Cross of Gold speech and his advocacy of free silver. The exact mechanism by which the gold standard would have been converted into a de facto silver standard need not detain us. Nevertheless it is useful to remember that Bryan was an advocate for an inflationary monetary policy. If implemented, free silver would have worked against prolonged deflation under Republican governments committed to the gold standard. Why would someone want inflation? Obviously, for debtors and for exporters. The nominal value of debts would stay the same while the dollar is devalued, hence causing the real value to drop; plus exports would become cheaper, so there would be increased revenues for exporters of price-elastic goods. It does not take a public-choice theorist to notice that the "losers" from such a policy would be creditors, banks and fixed-salary earners, who are plausibly part of the Republican coalition. One gets the feeling that a modern Bryan would try to get the Federal Reserve to decrease interest rates; or more plausibly, lament that one should not crucify mankind on a cross of austerity. Plus ça change...

It took me an embarrassingly long period of time to get my head around the Progressive Era. The problem is that most sources tell you that both parties were big tents. We learn that there were progressive and conservative wings in both parties, so it's hard to distinguish the Democratic and Republican progressive wings. It's all very well if you're a nominalist, but I'm not a nominalist. At the very least one should be able to account for how people back then could have thought about the two-party affiliations and why people chose one over the other, instead of just saying "they were broad tents" and hinting that it's just shallow tribal loyalty to Red or Blue. Historical change as such only makes sense against the background of something that is preserved or conserved over time, even if we do not know yet what it is. We have to posit that there is some X that stays constant so that we can talk about temporal change. If not, we will see events that appear to flick into existence with no real cause.

So it's not enough merely to say that there were Progressives amongst the Democrats and the Republicans in the Progressive Era. Rather, there were two streams of Progressivism. Suppose we say that the two poles are the Brandeis-Wilson side associated with the Democrats, and the Roosevelt-Croly side associated with the Republicans. I mean Theodore, not Franklin Delano. The antimonopoly politics associated with Woodrow Wilson and Louis Brandeis are in line with an old Jeffersonian rejection of centralization, though now transferred to the corporate world, with the government's role being the dissolution of monopolies. The approach taken by Theodore Roosevelt is distinct, in that he preferred nationalist top-down management and regulation of monopolies to simply breaking them up.

These correspond in spirit to Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian approaches respectively; we are still dealing with the problem of monopoly today. Some industries really do have increasing returns to scale that cause average cost-per-unit to drop. Supernormal profits derived from monopoly rents can be re-invested into research and development. This is essentially Schumpeter's theory of competition and innovation. The twentieth century is the time of the eclipse of the old mom-and-pop firm, given that many industries need a large amount of capital at a minimum. Most of the non-software tech companies could not have been started out of a garage (though with exceptions, like Hewlett-Packard). At the same time, as the economists tell us, there is a deadweight loss that comes from elevated prices and lowered production, as well as inefficiency that is not simply competed away.

The question, from a political point of view, is about what is to be done with monopoly rents and whether there is some political danger in the disproportionate concentration of power in a few hands. Similar issues survive in oligopoly, where firms face a kinked demand curve and so it is in their interest to keep prices rigid even in the absence of an actual criminal cartel. The reason is that if a firm increases prices, its competitors will gain most of the sales. But a drop in prices causes a price war in which all the firms in the industry slash prices and so do not appreciably gain market share. (Despite the limitation of the kinked-demand model of oligopoly, I use it as an explanation that is fairly intuitive for laypersons). The problem then becomes: if the state is not breaking up these firms, are they involved in a cartel, or are they respecting the market and allowing the social benefits that come from a concentration of market power and capital? It is from this political antinomy resulting from this economic problem that we see the distinct programmes of New Nationalism and the New Freedom.

Neither side is necessarily left-wing or right-wing; consider that the classical left-wing response would be "let the monopolies absorb the mom-and-pop firms, and nationalize them," which is anti-Brandeisian and ironically closer to Roosevelt, Croly and the Hamiltonian tradition. This explains some of the early alignment of socialism with the prewar Republicans on an individual level. A notable example is Fiorello La Guardia, a Republican who ran on the Socialist ticket in 1924 despite not identifying with socialism. Nevertheless it must be noted that the Socialist Party itself opposed the Republican and Progressive parties. This isn't to distract from the idea that the New Freedom was cast in populist terms. This formulation is continuous with Bryan's earlier populism. At the same time, the ideal of competition to be restored is similar to the "neoclassical" account of perfect competition wherein supernormal profits fall to zero in the long run. This presupposes a positive picture of the market that is similar to that held by modern right-libertarians. ⁶ Theodore Roosevelt's politics, on the other hand, is premised on the rejection of class warfare (though admittedly this is different for some of the Progressive Republicans like Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette), though it did not exclude the sort of boat-rocking he practised from his Bully Pulpit.

It is perhaps difficult then to see how Democratic Progressivism could develop into a state-connected institutionalism. Jeffersonianism might seem to be the precise opposite of both Wilsonianism and the New Deal. Here the difference is that there has been a transmutation by which the state has been identified with civil society. If you accept that the state is the republican representative of the people, then the breaking up of monopolies is not the use of a "higher" State force against another corporate force. It becomes the use of the people themselves to dissolve "un-democratic" power. In discussing the early yeoman Democrats it is also easy to miss that a lot of these "freedoms" themselves depended on an existing federal government that could survey land and much more. If we are to call this "libertarianism," it is not a libertarianism that is incompatible with state capacity (and indeed there is such a creature as "state-capacity libertarianism" as in Tyler Cowen, though he takes a more Hamiltonian attitude). This does not involve idolizing the Democratic Progressives, since they did hew to a color line even while campaigning for reform in both North and South.

The Brandeis-Wilson New Freedom politics, in its approach to monopoly, comes from a Jeffersonian view in seeing monopoly and anti-competitive moves as an unaccountable accumulation of power threatening Jeffersonian democracy. The New Nationalism of Croly and (Theodore) Roosevelt, on the other hand is to be thought of as literally nationalist, accepting the existence of monopolies but regulating them in view of the public good or the national interest. Here are two distinct views of politics, the national interest, the common good, and the place of democracy. Let us say that it's about whether there exists a national interest (and therefore a substance to the nation) that exists above and over what "the people" have expressed at a particular time. La Guardia and La Follette do diverge more from the Republican mainstream (and perhaps shouldn't be confused with Roosevelt too easily) but perhaps they do share a similar philosophical understanding of the "national interest," though with a more class-egalitarian point of view. It is this Democratic notion of democracy that helps us understand what has been called the "party switch": insofar as it seems to reject that "national interest" supervenes on "democracy" or "people."

Bob Wallace: What do you think would be a novelty up here in Vermont?
Phil Davis: Who knows — maybe we can dig up a Democrat?
Bob Wallace: They'd stone him!
White Christmas (1954) dir. Michael Curtiz

The fact of the "Southern Strategy" has been accounted for by historians, especially with respect to the approach taken by Richard Nixon and his successors. This part of the narrative: the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 under Lyndon Johnson (with the apocryphal quote about the Democrats having lost the South for a generation for it), the Nixon administration, the Reagan Revolution, the rise of talk radio, the "Contract with America" ... has been hashed out in detail in the academic and the popular press. It then became very difficult to then think about where the "liberalism" in the Democratic Party came from in the first place, or to compare it with the liberalisms on the continent. There is often little contextualization with contemporary liberals like François Guizot, Jean-Baptiste Say, Karl von Rotteck or Rudolf von Bennigsen (here I'm tossing out at random prominent European liberals from the nineteenth century).

As one hears the story, it seems that God sends Franklin Delano Roosevelt down into the White House with the tablets of Keynesian Economics, Deweyan Liberalism and Maybe-Considering-Civil-Rights. I kid, mostly. But what happens is that it's quite difficult to consider the continuity of the Democratic Party and even Roosevelt's preceding career with respect to the sea-change brought about by the New Deal. In 1920, Roosevelt tried to persuade Hoover to seek the Democratic nomination and apparently contemplated joining him as running mate. Roosevelt ended up standing as James M. Cox's vice-presidential candidate in 1920. We should not think of Roosevelt as being a proto-New Dealer in 1920, but surely there has to be some level of intellectual and political continuity between the man of Cox's Democratic Party and the man of the Second Bill of Rights.

If liberalism could appear in the Democratic Party in the 1930s, it is not so implausible that some precursor, some proto-liberalism could have existed in it before that point. This is where it gets tricky to look at history from our standpoint; instead of hindsight being 20/20, everything seems much more fouled up. Is Al Smith a liberal? Or would a liberal today wish that Al Smith had won, as she might wish for McGovern, or Stevenson, or Carter? On the other hand, we see that Herbert Hoover was described as a Progressive Republican, and his legacy includes the criticism he recieved for his response to the Great Depression. Hoover would end up becoming the godfather of the modern conservative movement. Yet it would seem perverse to consider Buckley and National Review as being products of any kind of progressivism!

The same goes for political thought. Consider John Dewey, often treated as a patron saint of modern Democratic liberalism. He is considered one of the big intellectual influences of the New Deal. It is not enough to consider the New Deal a wholly Deweyan project, since Dewey outflanked the New Deal from the left and had his own criticisms. But we can argue that some sort of Deweyan thought was influential in Democratic circles, watered down as it may be, while nothing on this level happened with the Republicans. Dewey originally supported the Progressive Republicans like La Follette. La Follette and his allies however were later marginalized from the party. La Follette ran on the Progressive ticket in 1924 despite formally remaining a Republican senator because he was alienated by the conservative incumbent president Calvin Coolidge. Their exclusion from the Republican mainstream is explicable given the Republican Party's economically conservative streak.

It has then been said that the reason is that it was easiest to enter the Democratic Party precisely because it was an incoherent coalition. The story goes (again to proceed by caricature) that a Democrat was either a political machine-man who voted for what got him his spoils, or a partisan for Home Rule (i.e., more spoils) until somehow the New Deal and the Great Society turned them all into confirmed liberals. But this assumes that people—and, for some reason, only Democrats—were fundamentally transactional and cared only for their ward captains, not their country. The other aspect is that it would assume that Democrats were somehow atemporal and cared little for history. But if there was something that people in the past cared more about than we do, it was history. It might be that, in 1920 or 1910, the Democratic and Republican Parties were huge tents with conservative and progressive wings. But the Republicans would have, whether or not they were liberal or conservative, some kind of appreciation for and interpretation of their history: Lincoln, the Civil War, the Union. The same would go for the Democrats, even if it had to be Jefferson and Jackson instead of Jefferson Davis.

Hence there is an appropriation both of a legacy and of a shared political grammar. A Republican could talk about the abolition of slavery and preservation of the Union. Republicans had a shared grammar connecting nationalism, citizenship, and development. All this could hold a big tent of Republicans together. It is this shared grammar that I keep referring to as political form. The same goes for the Democrats, insofar as there was a shared political grammar: consider the famous line from the 1908 Democratic platform: "Shall the people rule?" is the overshadowing issue which manifests itself in all the questions now under discussion. ⁷ The Democrats want to "free the Government from the grip of those who have made it a business asset of the favor-seeking corporations," a people's government according to the Jeffersonian maxim of "equal rights to all; special privileges to none."

We see that the Democrats of 1908 reject protective tariffs (calling for a revenue basis instead), want campaign-donation transparency and contend that "private monopoly is indefensible and intolerable." We learn that the Republican Party "has so linked the country to Wall street [sic] that the sins of the speculators are visited upon the whole people." We hear that the Democrats favor an income tax and an affirmation of the eight-hour day (if only for government work), the popular election of senators, and so on. There is even a very strong statement about imperialism: "We condemn the experiment in imperialism as an inexcusable blunder which has involved us in enormous expense, brought us weakness instead of strength, and laid our nation open to the charge of abandoning a fundamental doctrine of self-government." Here I have quoted many passages that in a surprising way remind us of current Democratic rhetoric and grammar; there is even a strongly worded self-definition that I am sure modern liberals could believe in:

The Democratic party is the champion of equal rights and opportunities to all; the Republican party is the party of privilege and private monopoly. The Democratic party listens to the voice of the whole people and gauges progress by the prosperity and advancement of the average man; the Republican party is subservient to the comparatively few who are the beneficiaries of governmental favoritism. ⁸

None of this means that the Democrats of 1908 are in agreement with modern Democrats. Most strikingly, they "are opposed to the admission of Asiatic immigrants," and, most importantly, defend states’ rights. Though I don't think that this has totally disappeared, since it survives in the defence of blue states against Republican federal governments today, for instance sanctuary cities, or preserving environmental regulations. The 1908 Democratic platform condemns the increase of officeholders and government expenditure under the Republicans, as a critique of Republican use of public funds for patronage. It is also true that many of these Democrats would be incredibly racist toward much of the current-day Democratic coalition. I chose platforms precisely because they record the common programme on which a large tent of party figures could agree. The persistence of a language is more striking with that in view.

What this shows is that it is plausible that there was such a shared grammar that could hold together the Midwestern prairie populist, the Southern Home Rule advocate, and the Northern machine immigrant. There is also a shared mythology: the Revolution, Jefferson and Jackson, interpreted in an anti-elite "republican" sense, which today has been discredited in the eyes of many. There is a shared grammar that is still recognizable today and this manifests itself in the psychoanalytic sense of recurring symptomatic repetitions in different contexts. It is still striking to note that a Democrat in 1908 and 2008 could stand for the People against a plutocratic-statist machine. The difference is the interpretation of the category of the "people" itself; the question of what this "people" is was wildly different and was only really stabilized after the New Deal, Civil Rights and the Southern Strategy.

It also becomes a question of whether voting rights for non-whites are "special privileges" or "equal rights"; and then the debate is about what counts as equal rights, and somehow the Democratic grammar was able to accomodate a strong case for universal voting rights (this could be claimed as evidence of the genuine radicalism and importance of this grammar). Such an argument could be legitimately used to argue for civil rights on the premises of Democrats themselves (at least for Northern Democrats) and so pull them closer toward a civil-rights position. Such a change should not be interpreted in a purely cynical fashion! Racism and anti-racism could both be justified in the same grammar; to the extent that there has been a change, it pertains more to content than to form.

If talk of a common "grammar" or a "form" seems too totalizing, perhaps we can use these analogies to make sense of what this means. For instance, we can think of politics as being a "game" (but without the frivolity) that is similar to the factional analysis of parties. There are multiple factions (local parties) that fall under a national umbrella, and therefore want to negotiate not only spoils but a kind of self-understanding. We can, by analogy with linguistics, talk about a "Democratic Narrative Grammar" or a "Republican Narrative Grammar" by analogy with Chomsky or Saussure. ⁹

Agents can use this narrative grammar to phrase objections, critiques, affirmations, and dialogue with other agents. They can contest shared terms like "people", "rights", "privileges." This grammar itself is not determinative because it does not set party politics in stone. For the same reason, despite the generativity of English, most English sentences have never been spoken. These linguistic practices do not float above people but are affected by racial, economic, and social factors, but it is in terms of language that these factors can be symbolized and expressed. It is not that the Democratic form abruptly decided to include black people but that black people who entered the Northern machines could phrase their demands in a Jeffersonian language of rights and popular government and shift the positions of moderates and even some racial conservatives in the party.

This is not an "essentialist" description of party traditions but rather a "functionalist" account. The grammar is not a constraint but an enabling structure. It allows agents to make moves in a political game. It makes certain coalitional moves possible, and enables political programs to be interpreted in different ways. There are, for instance, a Republican and a Democratic approach to civil rights: either as a nationalist "levelling" in spite of race where the individual is reduced to an un-"raced" citizen, or as part of a coalition set against a racist elite. Both affirm "civil rights" but both have a different relationship with minorities, a different legal theory of non-discrimination and a different kind of failure mode. This is why I disagree with Chernow, since even on the issue of civil rights the approaches of Grant and Lyndon Johnson, would have been quite different. It holds despite their shared progressive interest in racial emancipation. Each embodies a different legal theory and a different relation to history.

Another example is theological, though parties are not literally religious. We do not say that Catholicism is an incoherent coalition because it could include both William F. Buckley and Dorothy Day. Both were devout Roman Catholics whose faith played a deep role in their politics and broader worldview and who made interventions in politics. From that, however, we cannot infer that Catholic thought is actually Day-style distributism or Buckley-style conservatism, or that for some reason New York anarchists and New York conservatives decided to join the same organization because of mutual back-scratching. Rather, both Day and Buckley drew on the same (or similar) traditions and texts, interpreted a particular philosophical doctrine and used it to make sense of their political beliefs.

It is not that their political beliefs were deduced directly from an encyclical or that they were just baptizing what they already believed in. Similarly, Democrats and Republicans in the past interpreted their political beliefs in terms of a shared mythology (Lincoln or Jefferson), which provided a common language and form. The difference today is that there has been an analogous process of "secularization." Few today feel the need to justify their political views with respect to the Gospel according to St. Jefferson, or the Epistles of St. Hamilton. The driving questions are themselves re-occupied with new content, new answers. The reason for the religious analogy is that some mention the social and inherited nature of party identity in the past as an example of why they were not ideological, but we do not for that reason apply that argument to cradle Catholics.

I repeat this point in a pig-headed fashion because something seems bizarre to me. In discussions of European political history, we have a much higher willingness to talk about ideas, ideology and political thought, even when they drew on a heterogeneous base. We therefore are able to talk about the ideology of Bonapartism, or the SPD, or of Boulangism, French republicanism or British liberalism in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, even if their bases were diverse in practice. This is justified with the SPD because it had Lassalle and Bebel and Bernstein and so we can say there were explicit declarations of party ideology and key works that party members read. But we can also talk about the ideological underpinnings of less textually oriented political movements, which means that it can be extended to the United States. Boulangism is a good example because it was set forth in political manifestos, pamphlets, contemporary newspapers. My impression is that Americanists prefer to talk about ethnic and social identities instead insofar as they predict electoral results, which effaces the whole ideological background of politics and political self-understanding. American thought seems to begin with the Founding Fathers, before there is a huge gap and it picks up again with classical pragmatism. Even when work is done on American intellectual history, it is for contextual ends for understanding partisan and political shifts like slavery and abolitionism, not for a long afterlife of interpretation and comparison, or inclusion in an intellectual canon.

Earlier I discussed the shared political language of a party as being like a game. One of the two games we have been discussing entered into terminal crisis in 1924. I am speaking about the implosion of the Democratic National Convention, the conflict between the coalition of the "wet", Catholic, urban and immigrant-friendly Al Smith and the "dry", Protestant, rural, Klan-allied William Gibbs McAdoo. ¹⁰ 1928 marks the shift from the old rural base of support toward the urban immigrant machine, with the nomination of Al Smith, who as we all know lost badly to Herbert Hoover. Hoover is an interesting fellow because he is not only a LessWrong poster avant la lettre but also what is called a Progressive Republican. ¹¹ Hoover is a Progressive insofar as he wished to expand state capacity, and really his previous work as Commerce Secretary can be read in the vein of building up the modern scientific managerial state. All the same, Hoover’s Republicanism meant that his response to the crisis would proceed through the great corporate heads, and not directly to people. Certainly he was not the same kind of Progressive Republican as those active before 1912. The man who moved heaven and earth to feed starving Belgians and Soviet citizens could with apparent callousness disregard American suffering; or was it simply callousness? It nevertheless has to be understood from the point of view in which the purpose of the state is the top-down organization of institutions such that productive society functions properly.

The New Deal is extremely weird to me and I've never gotten a good idea where it came from. Scholars such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch have placed the New Deal in an international history of interwar planning and corporatism, with comparisons to Mussolini's economic policies and those of National Socialism in Germany. I understand that this is Schivelbusch's thesis in his book Three New Deals. As a quasi-social-democratic programme it has to be placed in the context of the Left and its embrace of economic planning as well. What can be said is that the interwar period is one in which corporatism and government planning could be seen as revolutionary for liberal-capitalist, fascist and communist states, with some amount of borrowing between all three. ¹² At the same time it is still incredible that the Home Rule For the Confederacy Forever Party, which had imploded over the Klan in 1924, won a majority of registered black voters (especially in the North) by 1936. In writing this I came across a passage by Rexford Tugwell reporting a conversation he had with Roosevelt in 1932, in which Roosevelt states his sympathy for the old Progressives (George Norris, Gifford Pinchot, Harold Ickes, Felix Frankfurter, Bainbridge Colby and others), while critiquing them as politically unreliable and individuals who could not follow a leader. Perhaps in part the Democratic Party was open for the taking for its own revolution, though what made Roosevelt's entryism more successful than Militant Tendency in Labour is that he could speak the Democratic language and pay off the established Southern Democrats.

Roosevelt himself was clear about the Jeffersonian inheritance of the New Deal, in his campaign address on Progressive Government at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, California, which was dated September 23, 1932. It is this speech that marks the transformation of the Jeffersonian grammar into its familiar modern form. Roosevelt gives a brief account of the origin of governments in the Old World and of the American Revolution. He says that Hamilton "believed that the safety of the republic lay in the autocratic strength of its Government, that the destiny of individuals was to serve that Government, and that fundamentally a great and strong group of central institutions, guided by a small group of able and public spirited citizens, could best direct all Government" and contrasts Hamilton with Jefferson. Jefferson according to Roosevelt recognized the rights of "personal competency" ("the right of free thinking, freedom of forming and expressing opinions, and freedom of personal living, each man according to his own lights") as well as the rights surrounding the acquisition and possession of property. It is here that he can attribute an economic doctrine that he claims that even Jefferson saw: "the exercise of the property rights might so interfere with the rights of the individual that the Government, without whose assistance the property rights could not exist, must intervene, not to destroy individualism, but to protect it." And then he can freely claim that out of Hamilton's duel and the Revolution of 1800 come the Republican and Democratic Parties of his time, with the implication that the Democratic Party is the Jeffersonian party.

Then according to Roosevelt the subsequent history of the United States in the nineteenth century is in the hands of the "industrial Titans," supported by the governments (where one is sorely reminded of the old Whigs and the National Republicans), but that the common man could no longer share in this wealth once the low-hanging fruit of expansion into new land was halted. Here he comes to a political competition that can be caricatured as inconsistent by us, and which Roosevelt seems to think of as a kind of hypocrisy; the fellow who does not want to see government interference in business often heads to Washington to ask (especially from a Republican administration) for protective tariffs and loans (with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation as an example). If we were to be charitable to Roosevelt's rhetorical opponents, though, perhaps there is a difference between the top-down alliance of national and business elites with the purpose of national development, compared to the "interference" with property law and taxation that is meant to break such business elite power in the name of the people; certainly it is possible to object to one and not the other.

His comments on his recent Progressive predecessors help put all this in a clearer cast; Roosevelt clearly approved of his fifth cousin Theodore's rhetoric of "trust-busting," but then saw that the clock could not be turned back to the era of the small business, and that he had to end up working out a theory of "good" and "bad" trusts, which would have to be ad hoc. It is Wilson, according to Roosevelt, who transmutes the Jeffersonian problematic for the modern era. To quote Roosevelt: Where Jefferson had feared the encroachment of political power on the lives of individuals, Wilson knew that the new power was financial. He saw, in the highly centralized economic system, the despot of the twentieth century, on whom great masses of individuals relied for their safety and their livelihood, and whose irresponsibility and greed (if they were not controlled) would reduce them to starvation and penury.

Here we see a curious transformation wherein the administrative state itself can be seen as an agency of public power, and economic concentration attains a political aspect: in the sense in which the industrial titan or monopolist is a tyrant akin to George III and the opposition to monopoly has a political aspect. This is not merely "Hamiltonian ends for Jeffersonian means" since "Hamilton" and "Jefferson" both denote differing conceptions of the state, the people and power, because the meaning of state power differs in both traditions. It is not simply that they differ on what to do with state power. Roosevelt therefore goes as far as to claim that if Wilson did not have a European war to deal with, his presidency might have been one of domestic radicalism. His praise of Wilson has to be placed in the context of the 1916 Adamson Act that set an 8-hour workday and overtime pay for railroad workers and the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act that exempted labour unions and agricultural cooperatives from antitrust laws. He also supported federal prohibitions on child labour, though the Supreme Court later struck down some of his early legislative attempts.

Roosevelt did not set out the complete agenda of the New Deal in September 1932, because much of the legislation and the agencies of the New Deal came out of experiments and reactions to crises and problems during his presidency. He also had his own intellectual evolution from 1932 to 1945. Nevertheless, here we can see how a Jeffersonian thought (if not systematic enough to be a policy) was constructed and contrasted with a Hamiltonian-Whig-Republican political economy. We also see an attitude toward the economy that was not perfectly Jefferson's (the libertarians have Roosevelt beat on that front) but justified on Jeffersonian grounds. This transformation of Jeffersonian thought is recognizable to modern Democrats and serves as the missing link between pre-1932 and post-1932 Democratic thought. We have to recognize that this style of intervention is not government support for elites and for capital in the national interest and development, but rather a populist push to restrict the power of economic elites in a way meant to protect the individual's rights.

The impression one gets is that for a long period the Democratic Party in the South functioned like a one-party state in which the "real" competition occurred in the primaries. The Northern machines on the other hand seem to have been much more promiscuous. Black voters increasingly entered the Democratic coalition through an uneven process shaped by New Deal policy, northern urban politics, and black political organization. This could be interpreted in a "cynical" fashion; the Democrats were finally able to expand to a new interest group and to depend on them as a voting constituency, especially because New Deal policies had already benefited many black voters by 1936. The other reason is that the Democratic form was able to integrate the concerns of black folk. Here at the same time we see the origin of the modern conservative movement. It is hard to initially see where the Republican reaction to the New Deal and the conservative opposition to the New Deal came from. None of Roosevelt’s subsequent opponents—Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey—were members of the anti-New Deal Old Right and were happy to retain parts of the New Deal. While Landon was more to the center (while being influenced by Bull Moose progressivism!), Willkie and Dewey were both internationalist Republicans, rooted in the Northeast, friends of business.

It seemed to me at first that the Republicans ran liberal internationalists like Willkie and Dewey, but then suddenly freaked out and opposed the New Deal. The other puzzling factor was precisely how the Old Right could affirm Lincoln (maybe even Grant too) while rejecting Roosevelt. Decades of claims that compare both to dictators efface that a Republican in 1936 would still have a strong attachment to Lincoln. What, even before the war, made Roosevelt seem more dictatorial than Lincoln? It struck me that to the Old Right, the New Deal must have looked like an enormous Tammany Hall on the Potomac—a large administrative state that could intervene as it pleased and could hand out spoils to its supporters. If you could justify it in terms of national interest, I wonder if you could justify it to Robert Taft. If invaders were attacking the continental United States I am sure that you could convince Robert Taft to support a federal order that made everyone eat worms to help the war effort.

The Republican ethos can handle centralization if it is in the service of national interest, development, and if it is linked to the purposes or the authority of the executive; what threatened Republicans about the New Deal was its prospect of producing an unelected bureaucracy within the State. ¹³ The Executive could be a matter of national will, and could be toggled on and off, while the great machine produced by the Legislative and the Judicial branches (if Roosevelt's court-packing had succeeded), egged on by the Democratic Executive, would presumably produce a parasitic self-reproducing class that was not in the national interest and could not be dislodged. Many of the supposed self-contradictions of the criticism of Big Government and the attraction for an unchecked executive among Republicans can come down to this.

The will of the executive can be thought of as acting in the direct national interest (seen as being determinate) and therefore working for the will of the people, and so it cannot be impeded by anti-People elements in the other branches. It is not only the "amount" of an univocal "government power" that is resented but rather the type that is critiqued: under this point of view, going to war is much less authoritarian than setting up a new agency or Commission or government-linked organization to manage some social issue. This is also the problem of the "Deep State": if the federal government is thought of as connected to a self-justifying administrative class, then the strong-executive purge of this is not an exercise of government power but a reduction of it. The question, strangely enough, is about whether you prefer to be ordered or managed.

By the time the twentieth century rolls around, it becomes quite difficult to distinguish the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian, for the reason that every country worth the name has central banking and financial instruments. Therefore Barack Obama could be elected in 2008 with Wall Street-critical rhetoric that would have been familiar to Andrew Jackson, but with a solution ("stimulus packages") that would have been totally alien to him. The trouble starts with the New Deal. Hence the discussions of Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism and means and ends that can end up quite confused. Here is quite another way to approach it: whatever Roosevelt's policies, his approach was continuous with Woodrow Wilson's. He made use of Wilson's New Freedom and the administrative state that Wilson helped build. The rhetoric of the New Deal draws upon historic "Democratic" exemplars, namely Jefferson and Jackson. Famously Roosevelt could compare his policies with Jackson's Bank War against the Second Bank of the United States. No wonder he admired Jackson. The only sense in which we can say that the New Deal "uses Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends" is that it absorbed Progressive Republicans into the New Deal state. We can even say that his confiscation of gold and the devaluation of the dollar have a respectable Democratic pedigree.

The reason for insisting on this is that there is a great awkwardness if the "Democratic story" is to be written without reference to Democratic history; it is understandable that many liberals today reject Jefferson, Jackson and Wilson for their roles in slavery and Jim Crow, and they need not regard them as personal heroes. Neither do they need to continue hosting Jefferson-Jackson dinners. All the same, though, if you were to select the point at which the Democrats became "good"—Roosevelt, or Kennedy, or Johnson— you still have to account for these heroes having substantial political, rhetorical and intellectual continuities with their less enlightened predecessors. Swapping them out for Whigs, Federalists and Free Soil is understandable but not very helpful about the past. It also doesn't help with understanding how the civil rights shift happened. A specifically Democratic line of abolitionism passes through Free Soil, and then to the Liberal Republicans in 1872, of which more later (many of the Liberal Republicans were from Whig/Republican backgrounds but I understand that most Free Soilers in the Republican Party joined the revolt).

An account that presents a country's history as a battle between oligarchs and the people is only possible as a retrospective selection of heroes and villains. This is not wrong, insofar as we can and should select heroes from the past, especially those unfairly maligned or forgotten like Hamilton and the Whigs. But from the standpoint of history, much as we are free to morally judge historical figures, historical figures themselves did not think of themselves as being "good" or "bad" in the way we mean. We find in reading European intellectual history that some of the greatest figures in favor of freedom, or liberty, or republicanism, had sentiments that to us today sound strange at best or bigoted. Therefore recruiting them into a Whiggish story of freedom is difficult. There is for instance Thomas Cooper, who was a close associate of the "Christian materialist" Joseph Priestley, who emigrated to the United States, became a Jeffersonian radical and defended unrestricted enquiry. He was originally an opponent of slavery and became a slaveowner. But Cooper at this point was not a cartoonish villain giving up "liberty" for "oligarchy." Or rather, while he was indeed an opponent of liberty, that was not the meaning his acts had for him. Cooper could justify it on utilitarian and racial-scientific grounds while still being a radical who could demand free inquiry, liberty, and utility.

We can say that his actions make him an enemy of liberty. Nevertheless that was not his motivation, so we cannot assimilate Cooper, or Jefferson or Jackson, into a Tradition of Bad People. Nor can we set against them a Tradition of Good People that includes the anti-slavery Whigs, early Republicans and New Deal Democrats. The same goes for "virtue"-based accounts of history: that the Republicans were virtuous in Lincoln's time, but then they were not. The early Republicans were virtuous, but a "decrease in virtue" is not a historical mechanism unless we want to revive the ghost of Gibbon; we have to explain how people got less virtuous while thinking of themselves as virtuous without simply positing a slackening of moral force. That is, human action has to be posited in terms of certain values or ends taken up by humans, whose perspectives the historian can imaginatively enter, even while this action finds itself constrained by various economic and social factors, and then much of the strangeness of the past comes to light. Therefore when I hear about the work of Heather Cox Richardson, which posits American history as being that of two traditions of liberty and hierarchy; or a claim that Republican history is one where virtuous founders of the G.O.P. backslid into industrial oligarchy, all I can feel is that this does not seem to me to be a historical explanation (even though Heather Cox Richardson is much more well-informed on history than I am and surely I'm critiquing the summarized presentation of the work, not the careful accumulation of details); it seems that a material account would make sense of why the postwar G.O.P. turned to capital, instead of simply positing moral decay.

This is surely enough background for us to look at the contemporary situation. The most striking evidence of the party-switch is the process of the absorption of the Southern Democrats, including the 1948 "Dixiecrats," into the Republican Party. Under this analysis, the Southern Democrats should be thought of as in their own way descendants of the same Democratic tradition. If the racial basis of Home Rule and the fact that the Civil War was fought over slavery were effaced, you could even paint the Southern Democrats in a positive or left-wing light; this was why we see this attitude, perplexing to us, toward Lincoln among the Communards of the Paris Commune.

Second, as the Commune began to assume the character of an insurrection in the eyes not only of monarchists but of the French liberals led by Thiers, Lincoln’s reputation as the enemy of rebellion eclipsed all other aspects of his image. Even before the Communards seized control of Paris, they looked with disdain at centralizing tendencies in the United States that they regarded as authoritarian. They knew, for example, as all readers of French newspapers knew, that Napoleon III supported President Andrew Johnson’s attempts to undermine congressional Reconstruction. Then, when the U.S. Congress gained the upper hand and imposed military force on the South to effect Reconstruction, French republicans saw evidence of a conservative counterrevolution. Gustave Cluseret, the former Union general and future Communard, said that Americans had “spit on their fathers” and become “conservatives.” Such attitudes among the Communards must have seemed well founded once the Commune seized Paris, and Thiers called publicly for the army to suppress the radicals as Lincoln had suppressed the Southern secessionists. For the Communards, Lincoln and the United States came to stand for autocracy. The leaders of the movement even attempted to expel from Paris the American ambassador, Elihu Washburne, a former U.S. congressman and an old friend of Lincoln’s from Illinois. [Emphasis mine] ¹⁴

The purpose of this is not to tar Lincoln as a reactionary, or to carry water for the rejection of Reconstruction, or to compare Reconstruction with the bloody liquidation of the Paris Commune by Adolphe Thiers. If anything, if a liberal democratic republicanism could find fault with Reconstruction and therefore implicitly carry water for the Klan, so much the worse for liberal democratic republicanism! We have to understand the point from which it was consistent for many abolitionists, like many of the pre-war War Democrats (consider Samuel J. Tilden, who was not an abolitionist but an anti-slavery "softshell" who later ran against Hayes in 1876), or even abolitionist Republicans, like Horace Greeley who ran on the Liberal Republican ticket against Grant, to later reject Reconstruction. It may very well be that the Democrats are to the Republicans what the Radical Whigs were to the mainstream Whigs, and that there might well have been an “authentic” discourse of "liberty" amongst them.

This is what should contextualize the "liberal," even the abolitionist rejection of Reconstruction. We can say that some of this comes down to a liberal rejection of the standing army as inherently corrupting republican virtue, as well as a liberal insistence on property rights of the defeated. It is here that we can see why the Democratic-descended Free Soil factions of the Republican Party ultimately defected against Grant and ran Horace Greeley on the Liberal Republican fusion ticket with the Democrats. Greely himself was a Whig-Republican. Given that he identified with Fourierist socialism, it may be that he was the only major-party presidential nominee who at one point identified with socialism (even if it does not mean the same thing as modern socialism). One wishes that Hunter S. Thompson could have repeated his gonzo reporting of the 1972 McGovern campaign but with Greeley's 1872 campaign. He could even use the same title Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.

In any case, we have to understand why ardent abolitionists and even supporters of civil rights (like even Rutherford B. Hayes, who actually stopped Reconstruction) could be swayed in this manner. A nationalist in the Whig mold could run on the idea of national reconciliation while a liberal could run on the poisonous effect of sustained military occupation, property rights violations, the suspension of habeas corpus; indeed it seems that many assumed that the suspension of Reconstruction could lead to reconciliation and biracial democracy in the South. Especially if Northern politicians were given to Redeemer propaganda about corrupt carpetbaggers, which could fit a general critique of the postwar Republican Party as being dominated by corrupting capital and spoils. It is from this point of view that we can understand an anti-racist small-d democratic or small-r republican ambivalence toward Lincoln or even Reconstruction, even if the reputation of the latter has recovered immensely after the recognition that formal rights are empty without enforcement against extrajudicial violence. Before the recent revival of Lincoln, the countercultural reading was: sure, slavery was terrible, but I'm sure that the old man was just out to save the Union and his own hide, he was a racist, he didn't care about slavery until he really had to. This is perhaps a testament to the awkwardness around Lincoln in a republican discourse, even amongst modern anti-racists, given Lincoln's own ambivalent racial views. Here is an example of some of the French ambivalence over Lincoln that we might find understandable:

A final reason why Lincoln could never have retained much of a purchase on the imagination of French intellectuals has to do with a fundamental difference in the way that those intellectuals and Lincoln thought about citizenship. In the same way that Frederick Douglass remained skeptical about the president’s commitment to equality—Douglass called Lincoln “the black man’s president” immediately after the assassination in 1865 but then “the white man’s president” in 1876—French republicans knew that Lincoln did not share their belief in the principle of universal citizenship. Much has been made of the fact that Lincoln paid for the burial of his friend and personal assistant, the African American William d’Fleurville, and had the single word “Citizen” inscribed on the headstone. But French intellectuals knew that Lincoln’s idea of “citizen” was quite different from the “citoyen” of the French Revolution, especially when it came to black Americans. Consider the contrast in the way that he described foreign-born and African American soldiers for the Union. At the outbreak of the war, he authorized Secretary of War Simon Cameron to be favorable to a person who Lincoln called “a Polish gentleman, naturalized, [who] proposes raising a Regiment of our citizens of his nationality, to serve in our Army.” Notice how he emphasized naturalization, an avenue toward citizenship not available for African Americans until 1870, and also how he spoke of “our” citizens, even though they were of “his”—the Pole’s—nationality. Later that year, he made a similar endorsement, this time of a request for a Mexican-born Californian to raise a cavalry regiment of what Lincoln called “native Mexican citizens of California”—in other words, people born in Mexico, but now citizens of the United States, by way of California. Lincoln came to think at least as highly of the soldiering abilities of African Americans. He endorsed their service in the Emancipation Proclamation and came to praise it on many later occasions. But never did he use the word “citizens” to describe black soldiers, though he used precisely that word to describe foreign-born soldiers, and though these African American soldiers were citizens by law. ¹⁵

We can see that this is the ambivalence that has led Lincoln, among all figures in the American tradition, to receive a Straussian reading. This was famously done by Harry V. Jaffa. ¹⁶ If I were to offer a falsifiable claim to my theory, it is that a similar Straussian reading is not available for Roosevelt. If there was such a reading, it would be selective, constrained to the later portions of the Second World War, with much less applicability to the New Deal and the first two terms. With Lincoln, unlike Roosevelt, there is a sense of Decision and Will and the Nation and Founding, which is surprisingly translatable into the language of some of the interwar conservative revolutionaries, even if the difference remains that Lincoln was and remains a devout republican (hence why he has been ignored by the Straussians on the other coast). Roosevelt on the other hand was a manager who experimented, sometimes without an apparent logic. This gives him a "ludic" character compared to Lincoln, and his greatness is usually not attributed to his great moral character the same way that we talk about "Honest Abe."

Instead of "party switch" a better term is party schism, wherein the Democratic Party was not able to maintain the same language game any longer. It split, and then the populist Dixiecrats had to find a way to translate their demands into the language of the Republicans until they were assimilated. This seems related to the decline of libertarianism, insofar as classic American libertarianism is quintessentially Jeffersonian, but now seems to have thinned out as an independent tradition. Under this reading, the rightward shift on civil rights in the Republican Party comes down to its ability to translate Dixiecrat concerns in a language that could convince the national party. It also probably comes from a rejection of populism and a belief that the civil rights movement demanded not only formal equality as un-raced citizens but also government defence of their rights qua black people. This is not unprecedented, since the pre-war Republican Party had in many ways shifted toward conservatism on racial matters.

Can we say that there was a similar "Hamiltonization" of the Democrats? It would instead have begun in the 1980s and the 1990s with Gary Hart and the Atari Democrats, when Big Tech entered the Democratic coalition. Technology plays an interesting role here since you can think of much of the interest in infrastructure as being in line with Federalist and Whig "internal improvements." They would be the West Coast analogue of the old Northeastern centers of industrial capital that reliably supported the Whigs. If the Democratic Party was Hamiltonian it would have integrated technology CEOs into government, and there would have been a lot more public-private collaboration on technology. There also would have been attempts to rein in Big Tech for the "national interest", i.e., defence and economic growth. What failed in this marriage was the "techlash" since the Democratic base, in the post-Jeffersonian rejection of monopoly and concentrated power, ended up spending their cultural capital attacking Big Tech for reasons good and bad, until the coalition could no longer hold. Notably, the Democratic machine would have no issue soaking up tech workers. It was the alliance with tech capital that was unstable.

Even the conservative Democratic establishment has had a "radical" background and this contributes to Democratic self-understanding. Consider that the Third Way Democrats were shaped by anti-Vietnam activism and were often veterans of the Eugene "Gene" McCarthy and George McGovern campaigns. Hillary Clinton "went clean for Gene" in 1968 and both Clintons would later work in McGovern's 1972 campaign. Gary "Monkey Business" Hart later became a neoliberal reformer. When he visited the Soviet Union and met Mikhail Gorbachev, Gorbachev told him (and this is true!) that the Soviet leader was the Soviet Gary Hart. ¹⁷ The unusual nature of the Democrats comes down to the post-Jeffersonian notion of a unity between "civil society" and "politics." That is, the media and popular culture and protests were natural extensions of politics, and that politics was conducted by arguing and regulating the public sphere. This rested on the idea that media outlets had the right to snoop around companies and monopolies to "speak truth to power" and that such journalism was in the service of Democratic values and an expression of the will of the people.

So we come up with the strange position wherein WIRED or the New York Times questioning power is metonymically the People questioning power; this has a pragmatic problem in considering whether the news media were part of the elite or not. The same goes for NGOs, universities, and agencies, which are identified directly with "the people" and therefore taken as being obviously neutral when this might not be so obvious to all. There is also an effect wherein politics becomes the non-ideological negotiations among blocs, working not for a pre-existing national interest but for intra-partisan status and respect. This often leads to impasses when dealing with the question of "internal improvements," if the game becomes zero-sum or even negative-sum, depending on the importance of such status games. Another problem arises when various minority groups are "counted" through their representatives, who are often an elite stratum. Therefore there is a principal-agent problem when there is a misalignment between individual voters and their representatives demanding recognition or concessions within the larger partisan structure.

This is really awkward with the recent rise of "abundance liberalism", the YIMBY movement, as well as even some strains of social democracy. If we see the programme set out by figures like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson we are most reminded of the internal improvements programmes of the Whigs and the Federalists. ¹⁸ In another world Ezra Klein would have been a Progressive Republican, mark my words. There is the inexplicable rejection of a lot of this by center-left liberals (the kind who say "bros" a lot) while it's perfectly comprehensible for both centrists and, surprisingly, left-wing social democrats. Opposition to YIMBY policy is in terms of threats to local communities, the destruction or transformation of existing life-worlds, which happens to be an actual age-old Democratic grammar.

Strangely, some strands of social democracy and socialism can be quite YIMBY, pro-development, in a way similar to centrists but different from the mainstream Democrats; this makes sense if you think of this as being about local community figures wanting involvement in local projects, as well as preserving the value of territory. A Hamiltonian nationalist government, even one that was progressive, could dictate internal improvements and address the side effects, at best, through compensation. The law of modern liberal discourse, as I often see it, is that a policy is bad if you can imagine some sympathetic figure being hurt by it. This can lead to rejection of Kaldor–Hicks, or potential Pareto, improvements simply because some parties bear uncompensated losses. Obviously this cannot be dismissed easily since it is very easy for centralized developers to act with impunity, especially against minority communities. But the same often holds for upper-middle-class liberals, too, who have much less to lose in this way (other than their property values).

If I were to be provocative, I would say that the downwardly mobile PMC today is closer to the old yeoman farmer in temperament, and perhaps the old distressed artisan in economic status. The credential is the "productive property" promising autonomy and social standing while also requiring a larger institution. This is stronger especially with homeownership, which leads into the paradox where one can support national redistribution and liberalism while defending property values against development. This is like the artisan who faces the threat of industrialization and resists working "just" a wage-labour job. Professional jobs (especially "creative" jobs) often pay in status. There is often an oversupply of workers in professional jobs compared to demand (academia also included). This causes resentment toward the very administrative and corporate organizations that professional workers are dependent on. ¹⁹ Most of all, it is perhaps understandable why abolishing student debt has been a great interest of young Democrats, since it echoes the same call for inflation that appeared in William Jennings Bryan's free-silver movement. Democrats then and now have an interest in higher inflation, since low growth is the bigger killer. To be more precise, the burden of inflation falls on members of both parties, and it is rather that full-employment and debtor constituencies tolerate inflation more than other creditor constituencies. Scapegoating high finance, whether Wall Street or BlackRock, was not at all alien to Andrew Jackson.

The impression one gets is that there are many factions which would prefer to jump ship to a liberal or progressive Hamiltonian party, if one could exist, and this includes both the socialists and the centrists. ²⁰ The Biden administration was an experiment with Hamiltonianism. It is not, however, an experiment I expect to see repeated soon. The Biden administration retained Trump-era tariffs and economic nationalism, and then adopted an unusually explicit national industrial strategy, especially for semiconductors. It doesn't seem coincidental that the Sanders left was included in his administration, though Sanders had his own reservations. He saw it as corporate welfare, though he supported rebuilding semiconductor production in the US. At the same time under Lina Khan of the FTC, it supported a neo-Brandeisian attack on monopoly. This is especially awkward as many (but not all) instruments of industrial policy assume some level of corporate welfare and monopolization. I am not sure if they were able to really reconcile Brandeis and Hamilton.

The Republican Party on the other hand should be thought of as the biggest hedge against inflation, which helps explain how it has maintained an alliance of fixed-wage earners and industrial capital. Both are hurt when inflation hits and it is not a coincidence that much of the backlash to recent liberal policy has been on the rate of inflation. There appears to be a barely-concealed international desire for deflation amongst the common man. Or as the economists put it, the Happy Fun Totally Not Chaotic Times, but that's how you get everything costing as it did in 1995. It does seem that higher wages for service workers and full employment raise prices. It seems that many people don't actually like living in such a society. This is also why the key to our present moment comes from the 1970s with the oil shock and stagflation, and the loss of a neat trade-off between unemployment and inflation. To be more precise, the collapse of faith in a stable, exploitable long-run trade-off between the two. Such is the effect of the almighty Phillips Curve on our politics. That is, to the extent that there was a trade-off between unemployment and inflation, one could presumably negotiate trade-offs between the groups hurt most by unemployment and hurt most by inflation. It's much harder, I suspect, when there is no longer a neat trade-off as a policy lever. Perhaps this is the cause of modern populism. It's times like this that make me contemplate becoming a monetarist. At least I'd like to have seen what Friedman & Schwartz would have written in A Monetary History of the United States if Bryan had won in 1896. Maybe not.

It is on this cheerful note that I finish this essay. I hope that, at the end of this dizzying spiral, I have brought the reader to the conclusion that I originally came to: according to the account given here, the G.O.P. has always been a party of restorationist conservative (not necessarily in the culture-war way) nationalist republicanism associated with business elites. The Democratic Party has been a coalitional community-first power-suspicious "populist" democratic movement. It is true that much of the argument here has previous antecedents. Besides, I often argue from analogy rather than from the archive. The purpose of good writing is forming striking connections, and it is my hope that I have done so.