It's always interested me how the country was riven from the beginning by two different but fundamental political values constellations, the first, a static, rural, agrarian populist values of the 19th Century Democrats, and the other the dynamic, economic growth values of the Federalists, Whigs, and eventually the Republicans. Following Mark Twain we could call the two parties that took shape around these values constellations Finnians and Sawyerans, but let's keep it in the political sphere and call the first group Jeffersonians and the second Hamiltonians.
As with all things human, these kinds of values constellations, insofar as they live in individuals and groups, have both a light or ideal side, and a dark, shadow side, and too often the dark side drives an agenda that uses the rhetoric of its ideal side as a cover. So first let's take a look at what this means for both groups.
The Jeffersonian constellation in its ideal form celebrates rural, traditional values and the simple pleasures of family, community, nature. Jeffersonians comprise both hippies and rednecks in that sense. They compose the equality party.That this group historically also justified and fought for the preservation of a slave society and the segregationism that followed upon its destruction by the Civil War is a contradiction to be explained another time. But the basic essence of the Jeffersonians from the beginning was to represent the the common man vs. a financial elite. It was the party that represented the yeoman farmer, the Jacksonian redneck, the Irish immigrant, the turn-of-the-century unionist against the bankers and industrialists whose power increased as the country's history unfolded.
In the cultural sphere Jeffersonians eloquently expressed their worldview and values through writers like Thoreau and more recently the Vanderbilt Agrarians, who wrote about preserving the heartland values of America against the destructive, alienating, isolating impacts of industrialization and the corporatizing of America. Today that intellectual legacy has been passed on through writers like Wendell Berry, Crunchy Cons like Rod Dreher, and Toquevillian conservatives like Patrick Deneen. But there is a Jeffersonian left wing, too, found especially in the more cosmopolitan, urban and university centers where the environmental and simple-living movements thrive, and where people organize to protect Main Street from the predations of Wall Street. Anybody who has ever questioned the assumptions behind the truism "Grow or Die" or who is revulsed by urban suburban sprawl and the developers who promote it knows at least a little from his own experience the aesthetic and moral roots from which Jeffersonianism grows. Jeffersonians are the Club for No Growth.
The shadow side of Jeffersonians manifests in their tendency to promote cultural, political, and economic stagnation. One finds this group's dark side a kind of good 'ol boy or hippie complacency and anti-intellectualism; a primitive religiosity, a parochial insularity that breeds nativist distrust if not hatred of the Other; a tendency to stew in irrational, often violent resentments, and to defend traditional ideas and practices for their own sake, no matter how little sense they make, and its resistance or just plain lack of interest in improvements, progress, growth--"If it was good enough for grandpa, it's good enough for me." The dark side of the Jeffersonians manifests in the resentment-driven mob too easily manipulated by demagogues like Huey Long and George Wallace. We see the shadow side in Timothy McVeigh, in the militia groups, in the Klan, and most recently in the ignorance and irrationality that drives the Teabagger movement.
The Hamiltonians, in contrast, are impelled by their desire for individual, cultural, political, and economic growth and progress. They are the party of entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, and local chambers of commerce, of millionaires and people who aspire to become millionaires. They are the Liberty Party, and the party that seeks social as well as individual progress. They are the party of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln in the 19th Century, and of Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy in the 20th Century. They are the party of Yankee ingenuity and "Yes, we can." Of putting men on the moon and of initiating Wars on poverty. They are the party of abolitionists in 19th century and the party embraces everyone from Norman Vincent Peale to Martin Luther King in the 20th century. In their ideal mode, they are the party which thinks that what makes America great is its rights traditions and its empowerment of the individual to be everything he has the ambition to be. They compose the party of all those who dream of something better for themselves and for the world.
If the ideal side of Hamiltonia is a passionate belief in the advancement of the human spirit, the dark side is disconnection in a kind of Ayn-Randian narcissism. Jeffersonians are romantics and tend to be nostalgic for lost connections destroyed by modernity. Hamiltonians are pragmatic and optimistic. They are all about the future and what comes next, and could care less about past and its destroyed traditions, which they see as useless, unnecessarily restrictive baggage.
If George Bailey is a Hamiltonian idealist, Mr. Potter is the Hamiltonian shadow. If the 19th century abolitionists were Hamiltonians, so were the Robber Barons. The first group was ambitious about moral and social progress, the second more about their own progress defined by their individual ambitions and fantasies. If stagnation best describes the dark side of the Jeffersonians, a kind of restless narcissism defines the dark side of the Hamiltonians. I mean by that the peculiar restlessness that Toqueville commented upon, that drives a typical American to move from one homestead to start another before the house he's building on the first is finished. There is in the Hamiltonian precincts of the American soul a kind of rootless anomie, and emptiness, chronic dissatisfaction, a homelessness, a never arriving, and this longing to re-invent oneself as if one were a blank slate that one could erase and draw something completely different, to reinvent oneself apart from any connection to family and community of origin. Fictional examples that embody this type are Jay Gatsby and Mad Men's Don Draper and Peggy Olson.
I don't have time to develop these ideas much this week, but I think it would be interesting to explore how these two values constellations play out in both our political and cultural life, and I'll try to do that in coming weeks. But here's the takeaway for today: I think this typology helps us to understand better why we are so confused in our cultural self understanding and why our political rhetoric and politics in general are so surreal and debauched. Why? Because policy is so often determined by the dark side of these constellations while justified by the rhetoric of the ideal side. The disconnect is what gives us all this feeling of surreality and that everything any politicians says is pure b.s.
And it affects the way the two groups interact. Jeffersonians tend not to see the dark side of their politics while seeing themselves only in the light of their Jeffersonian ideals. At the same time they see only the dark side of the Hamiltonians who, on the contrary, see themselves only in terms of their own ideals. And as the Jeffersonians do unto as the the Hamiltonians, so the Hamiltonians do unto the Jeffersonians. Jeffersonians see Hamiltonians as clueless, careerist, soulless, unprincipled, ambition-and-greed driven yuppies and technocrats, and Hamiltonians see Jeffersonians as ignorant, irrational rednecks. Jeffersonians see themselves as defending wholesome heartland traditions and values, and Hamiltonians see themselves as promoting the growth, prosperity, and progress that has made America great.
Each group tends to see itself only in the most positive light and the other in the most negative light. But the problem lies not in that each unfairly negatively stereotypes the other, but that those negative stereotypes are, in fact, more accurate than the positive fantasies each group has about itself. American politics is dominated not by its ideals, but by its shadow, no matter which group is dominant.
That's the bad news. The good news is that the ideal sides, while dormant, can be awakened. And that's the job I'd like to see someone like Obama tackle. I believe he can do it, and I think that's the key to his development of the missing narrative of his presidency. If he would only embrace it and fight for it. He--or somebody-- needs to evoke in the nation the better angels of its nature, and that means both the good angels of the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians. Because if those two positive, archetypal aspects of our national soul can come out the shadows to take over our national conversation, we can heal. If that can be effected, then maybe our political representatives can push all the futility that derives from this impotent wrangling to the side and actually move us toward some semblance of political and cultural health.
The integration of both sides of the better angels of our nature would look a lot like Frank Capra's imagination of America translated into a 21st Century key. Capra got it: it's about the individual and its about connection and finding the balance between them. That's what Deeds, Smith, and Bailey embody for our national imagination of ourselves--the integration of both sides of the better angels of our nature.