Bernie and Thomas and Alex

Thomas Jefferson, that is, and Alexander Hamilton. (With whom I'm currently a bit obsessed, having seen Hamilton on Broadway this past weekend.)

Because, you see, I'm pretty sure Bernie Sanders would be on Team Jefferson. And... Team Jefferson is wrong. Thomas Jefferson was wrong, about, like, most things. Not everything: I like much of what he has to say about religion, and he was on the right side of the "is it okay to be an opposition party?" thing. Essentially everything he thought about the Constitution was wrong, though, as was his notion that America should be all rural and agrarian and stuff. Oh, and the whole "holding slaves" thing. True, he had relatively anti-slavery principles, but he also had lots and lots of slaves. His whole humble, man-of-the-people thing was basically a lie; he was an artistocrat. Hamilton was, as the first song from Hamilton so powerfully illustrates, the "bastard, orphan" who "gr[e]w up to be a hero and a scholar." Oh, and who opposed slavery. But no, he's the monarchist and the elitist, apparently.

Now the point isn't that Sanders likes all of these things about Jefferson. He certainly disagrees with at least the slavery thing, and he's probably not a strict constructionist. But I'm sure he loves Jefferson's whole egalitarian shtick, despite its being basically a lie, and he probably has at least some sympathy for the rural/agrarian thing.

Oh, and then there's the Bank. The First Bank of the United States, championed by Hamilton and opposed by Jefferson. I'd be shocked if Sanders isn't on Jefferson's side there (on policy if not on the constitutional issue). Which... is bad. It also puts him in the company of Andrew Jackson, whom liberals have recently had the decency to recognize as a slave-owning, native-slaughtering, paranoid villain, not a populist hero.

And this actually ties into the thing that maybe bothers me the most about the prospect of Bernie Sanders becoming President: he's against the Wall Street bailout of 2008. Indeed, he doesn't even seem to know that the American taxpayer made money out of the bailout, because we got paid back more than we paid out in the first place. (Bernie keeps using the line that "America bailed out Wall St., now it's time for Wall St. to bail out America" in describing his proposed speculation tax.) And again, this is wrong. Really, really wrong. If Sanders had been President, and had vetoed the law (which he voted against in the Senate), we actually would've had another depression. It would've done enormous damage to the world economy. But, you know, it was a bailout, to the banks. The big banks at that. And banks are bad, especially the big ones--as Jefferson and Jackson knew.

I find this legitimately troubling. Either he's being disingenuous here or he really doesn't understand some things about how the economy works. And I really would worry that, if some similar sort of financial crisis came up, he might not be willing to do what had to be done to prevent collapse, even if it didn't really sit comfortably with his general ideology.

Now, perhaps the most favorable part of the Jefferson comparison is that when push came to shove, and Jefferson had an opportunity to radically change America's destiny forever, but he had to violate his constitutional principles in order to do so, he did it. That's the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which a Jeffersonian strict constructionist would've thought unconstitutional. So maybe if push came to shove, Sanders would listen to the advice of mainstream economics and do what was necessary. But... maybe? He might actually not do that; at the very least I'd like for someone to interrogate him a bit more about this.

Until they do, his resemblance to Jefferson is a little bit troubling.