In George Will’s Washington Post column mentioned below by Lew and Chris Manion, Will gets his American history all backwards. He blames the adventure in Iraq on “Jeffersonian democratic universalism.” Wrong, George. This is a Lincolnian idea — fighting a war and killing thousands, supposedly in the name of “all men are created equal,” including equal rights to democracy. Lincoln didn’t believe this, of course, but Neocon High Priest Harry Jaffa has made this theory the centerpiece of his bizarre and ahistorical rendition of American history. All of his barking acolytes, many of whom are in or influential with the Bush administration, fall in line. Perpetual war for the perpetual global pursuit of democracy is derived for Lincoln, and hence from Hamilton, whose overblown reputation is fabricated even further by Will.
As neocon Walter Berns writes in his book, Making Patriots, Lincoln is supposedly our “national poet” whose political speeches about the alleged glories of democracy are supposed to inspire young Americans to join the military and kill foreigners by the thousands so that they (the foreigners) may enjoy good old American style “democracy.” (See my LRC article, “Making Cannon Fodder).
The Hamiltonians were Federalists. When the Federalist Party dissolved, the Hamiltonians in American politics became Whigs, and then Republicans. So George Will, you cannot blame this mess on the Jeffersonians; it is pure Hamiltionian/Lincolnian ideology. The neocons keep quoting and citing Lincoln, not Jefferson, to “justify” their crazed adventure in the Middle East.
It was Hamilton who had such great confidence in a “wise executive” and who favored governmental planning, central banking, protectionism, and corporate welfare. The Jeffersonians opposed all of this because they were the realists. The Hamiltonians were (and are) the statist utopians, inspired by Rousseau as much as anyone.
1:21 pm on May 27, 2004
