American Political Thought. Ken Kersch

that sustained the ancient Greek and Roman republics, the Antifederalists, it has been observed, celebrated the political life of small, pastoral republics, comprised of a virtuous and engaged citizenry. They were ever alive to the threats to self-government posed by moral corruption and decline, fomented by distant elites, lacking in patriotism and lusting for power. Rule by these corrupt and distant elites was heedless, if not a self-conscious enemy, of the institutions of local civil society – family, church, school, and local government – which promoted and sustained character and civic and Christian virtue. All this portended either decline or tyranny. As such, the Antifederalists affirmatively advanced the republican values of active political participation aimed at the common good, sacrifice, localism, and the promotion, both institutionally and otherwise, of civic and personal character and virtue.

      Against this resistance, which might well have succeeded, it helped that the Federalists counted some of the new nation’s most illustrious figures – not least the revolutionary hero George Washington, who it was understood would serve as the nation’s first President – among their number. Although published in New York with an eye to the ratification vote there, The Federalist essays were widely distributed. The Federalists quickly agreed to add a Bill of Rights immediately after the document’s ratification. The politically savvy Alexander Hamilton fashioned a brilliant financial plan – soon to be implemented via the plan set out in his Report on Credit (1790) and Report on Manufactures (1791) – that made it in the interest of the country’s business and financial classes and the highly indebted states to support ratification. In a sop to the commercial and financial periphery, the country’s capital city was moved south from the northern financial centers of New York and Philadelphia to Virginia (today, Washington, DC).

Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian Visions

One of the more notable features of American political thought is the longevity of the original Federalist–Antifederalist debates, which in many ways have continued to define American political oppositions to the present day. Once the Constitution was adopted, the former opponents of the Constitution almost immediately – and, some have recently argued, strategically, and perhaps insincerely – sloughed off their resistance like an old skin, becoming as fervently loyal to the Constitution as the most ardent Federalists.⁹ The new institutions of government were up and running. In that sense, things were settled. Vehement debates over the concrete assertions of powers by these institutions – about distant national power, consolidation, and threats to rights – were, however, carried forward, now transposed from debates about constitutional design into debates about constitutional interpretation.

      These antagonisms moved into a new stage almost immediately during the First Congress. Within President Washington’s administration – which understood itself as unaffiliated with anything so disreputably factional as a political party – Alexander Hamilton, now Secretary of the Treasury, worked to advance the Federalist program of a powerful central government, including a strong federal judiciary. Thomas Jefferson, now Secretary of State, while a supporter of the Constitution, took up many concerns and themes of the now ostensibly defunct Antifederalism: pushing for the decentralization of power and a weak federal judiciary. Each was convinced that the plans, policies, and plots of the other menaced fundamental rights and rendered precarious the nation’s hopes to stand before the world as a beacon of liberty.

      A proponent of a prosperous commercial republic that would compete on the world stage as an industrial powerhouse, Hamilton had linked the new government closely to powerful capitalist and financial interests, in the process confirming the worst fears of the country’s erstwhile Antifederalists. In time, convinced that the President was fatally in sympathy with Hamilton, Jefferson left Washington’s cabinet, recruiting his fellow Virginian James Madison to his cause. In this way, the country’s two-party system – in its first iteration, the Federalists versus the Democratic-Republicans – was born. So, too, was a template for debate that pitted proponents of a strong central government against those championing decentralization and states’ rights; proponents of the federal courts as guarantors of an individual liberty endangered by the tyranny of the majority against those who held federal judges to be unelected, life-tenured elitists less committed to the dispassionate application of laws than to imposing their own politicized understandings on the polity by fiat; and proponents of one political party as the friend of freedom against the opposition as its most implacable foe.

Because they considered a powerful strong and active central government a crucial tool in setting the nation’s direction and meeting its problems, and because they believed a feeble government stinted on guaranteeing liberty and promoting justice, Hamiltonians were proponents of the broad construction of the federal government’s constitutional powers. In this, they emphasized that government’s inherent powers in service of its legitimate ends. They looked to the nation’s vibrant urban centers as critical to the development of a vibrant commercial republic. As proponents of business and commerce, they also prized the rights of property, regularity, stability, and institutional and social order.

      Because they hewed to a republican faith in a “constitutionally and conscientiously democratic” people, in whose wisdom and judgment Jefferson – unlike his compatriot Madison – had surpassing confidence and trust, Jeffersonians called for the devolution of government downward, from states, to counties, to small, locally governed “ward republics” of self-sustaining – independent – yeoman farmers. Like the ancient Athenian Aristotle, they believed that the people’s virtues would be cultivated through their active participation in the responsibilities of governance. As Jefferson explained in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), the self-sufficiency and independence of farmers – which, given slavery, of course, was anything but – was uniquely conducive to the development of the liberal, democratic, and egalitarian character that he placed at the core of the nation’s promise. For these reasons, Jefferson championed universal public education that would similarly cultivate a republican spirit, character, and virtue. (He regarded his founding of the University of Virginia as one of his greatest achievements.) These views underwrote the Jeffersonians’ vigorous advocacy for the reserved powers of the states, to the point of insisting on the right of states to resist unconstitutional federal laws, like the Alien and Sedition Acts (see The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, 1798). They also underwrote suspicion about the powers of judicial review claimed by the federal courts – which they understood as not only parts, but also agents of, the national government.

      Unlike the consummate New Yorker Hamilton, the Sage of Monticello loathed cities, with their bustling web of often far-flung and anonymous interdependencies. Cities were seedbeds of vice and scourges of virtue. Jeffersonians celebrated rural, agricultural life; the property-holding, ostensibly independent yeoman farmer; the common man; deliberative, participatory majoritarian democracy (rule by popular will) – albeit with appropriate protections for minority rights; and even orneriness and resistance. (Jefferson’s heart leapt with excitement – at least when he was not President – when the people resisted moves to trench upon their fundamental rights.) Although a profoundly compromised proprietor of what was, in effect, a slave labor camp at Monticello, Jefferson was nevertheless, as a political theorist at least, perhaps the founding era’s most fervent proponent of equality, which he held a hallmark of republicanism. His condemnation of hierarchies, for example, especially hereditary ones, informed his campaign for placing sharp limits on the inter-generational inheritance of wealth.

While he criticized what he held to be artificial aristocracies, Jefferson celebrated natural aristocracies – the aristocracy of talents. He was a tireless proponent of what we today call the equality of opportunity. His support for public education and his founding of the University of Virginia evinced a commitment to the notion that, if a fair and equal start in life is given to all without distinction, those who cultivated their individual talents and virtues would – and should – rise. The belief in such opportunities, with the promise that merit would be rewarded, of course, is one of the surpassing appeals of the liberal world-view, and of an exceptionalist reading of American political culture as the world’s pre-eminent land of opportunity.

      In the broadest sense, like the pioneering Enlightenment scientists