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.

Alexander Hamilton: Still Winning

It is not that hard to see the first few decades of American politics as a big battle between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. They were the leading thinkers of the two earliest political parties, Hamilton's Federalists and Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans. They had many opposing views about government, politics, and the new American Constitution. Their feuding, as Secretaries of State and the Treasury in the Washington cabinet, was what created the two factions that went on to become the First Party System. And it's easy to think that Jefferson won. After all, when you think of Thomas Jefferson you think of the hero of democratic ideals who won the Revolution of 1800 and who is on Mount Rushmore. When you think of Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, you probably think mainly of the quasi-monarchist who was obsessed with economics and died in a stupid duel with Jefferson's Vice-President in 1801. And after Jefferson defeated Hamilton's Federalists in the 1800 election, the Federalists never won the Presidency back, instead petering out about two decades later and giving the D-R's a period of one-party rule. But here's the thing: not only was Hamilton right about just about everything that he and Jefferson disagreed about, but he also won. Overwhelmingly.

Because what matters, ultimately, is not the letters they put after the name of the guy in the White House. It's the trajectory of American public policy. And almost all of the policies Hamilton supported and Jefferson opposed ultimately became mainstream. Hell, the reason the Federalists died out was largely that the Republicans had decided to steal all of their good ideas (the American system of tariffs/internal improvements/national bank being a primary example). But the specific reason that I'm writing this post today is that I'm reading Hamilton's Federalist No. 78, his defense of judicial review. Because the thing is, people like judicial review. They accept it as natural and proper. How else could the branch of the government that commands neither purse nor sword, and depends on the executive for enforcements of the only power it does wield, its judgment, manage to become so powerful? The Supreme Court is powerful because every time it tries to make itself more powerful the people approve, and every time someone else tries to make it less powerful the people disapprove. The Court is way more powerful than Jefferson would have been okay with; indeed, it probably was so in his own time. That's because Hamilton was right about everything, and the American people, over time, have realized that. Even if they haven't realized that they've realized it.