You can never go back, but can you bring the best forward, and discard the mistakes?

The Return of the Jeffersonian Vision and the Rejection of Progressivism

We are once again—as in the days of the early republic and not in the heyday of the Progressives and the New Dealers—a republic of property owners.

“No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” So reads a portion of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights passed by the First Congress and ratified by state legislatures, sponsored originally by Thomas Jefferson’s friend and political ally James Madison. It echoed, of course, Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Madison and Jefferson followed the tradition of John Locke, the British philosopher whose Two Treatises on Government was taken as the justification for the transfer of power known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89—the subject of my 2007 book, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers. Locke believed that men could be free only if their lives, liberty, and property were protected by the rule of law. And he believed that only men with property could be relied on to self-govern.

Locke, therefore, thought that the responsibility for choosing legislators in representative government should be limited to property owners, as it was in elections to the House of Commons. In English counties, the franchise was limited to 40-shilling freeholders—owners of property that brought in two pounds a year. The franchise in the more numerous boroughs was limited in different ways, in some cases to the owners of specific pieces of property.

The American people, the property-owning majority, even in this time of economic distress, seem to be embracing instead a culture of independence, a culture as old as the republic itself.

The Founders anticipated a limited but broader franchise in America. They provided that senators should be chosen by legislatures, whose members were typically selected by a large electorate, and that members of the House should be chosen by voters with “the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.”

The Founders had different ideas of the worthiness of commerce. Jefferson envisioned a republic of freeholding egalitarian farmers. Alexander Hamilton envisioned a republic on the path toward commercial and industrial preeminence. But Jefferson’s vision was a more accurate picture of the United States in the early years of the republic, where land was plentiful and labor scarce, where the large majority of white men were farmers and most of them owned the land they worked.

In this freeholders’ republic, it was natural to move toward universal manhood suffrage, to allow every white male adult to vote. Some states took longer than others to reach this goal—South Carolina still had the legislature choose its presidential electors until 1860. But the principle was widely accepted elsewhere: since almost everyone owned property, everyone should be allowed to vote. There was a danger, recognized by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, that the poor would vote to strip the rich of their wealth and, in President Obama’s words to Joe the Plumber, “Spread the wealth around.”

The New Deal was an attempt to freeze an economy, then in a downward spiral, into one place.

Tocqueville pointed to another danger as well, the danger of what he called “soft despotism,” in which a seemingly benevolent government would channel citizens into docile obedience like a herd of sheep. But that danger seemed distant, even to Tocqueville, in an America whose dominant and more populist party, Andrew Jackson’s Democrats, opposed government spending on public works projects and feared the power of a central bank.

Up through the end of the 19th century there did not seem to be a significant tension between universal democracy and property rights. The Founders’ vision prevailed.

A New Vision Based on Fear

But that was no longer the case in 1910. By then, another vision was being advanced, the vision of the Progressives—the vision of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, of political philosophers Herbert Croly and John Dewey.

The Progressives explicitly repudiated the Founders’ vision of limited government. They argued that government needed to redistribute property, to take money from one group of citizens to help others, and to regulate economic activity in ways previously considered unconstitutional. The Constitution, they said, was a “horse and buggy” document, suited perhaps to the simpler society of the 18th century, but dangerously out of date in a complex industrial society which could not expect ordinary citizens to make their way without government guidance and assistance. They were acting, they said, in the interests of the people. Their critics said they were acting out of hunger for power.

I want to advance another thesis: That they actually acted more out of fear than of benevolence. They feared revolution. [...]

Read the whole thing. There is lots to chew on here. It's pretty clear where we went wrong. But can we make corrections, and make it right?
     

Hawaii or Alaska? Why not Hawaii AND Alaska?

I read an essay recently about someone's chance encounter with Obama in Hawaii, before he anounced he was running for POTUS. I got the gist of it just fine, but the conclusion, to me, was a bit off.

My Chance Encounter with Obama in Hawaii

It was three days before the New Year in late 2006, and I was eating a burger with the traveler and writer Paul Theroux on Oahu's North Shore. Beside us in the rickety little shack was a quintessentially Hawaiian group of Chinese Americans, African Americans, semi–Southeast Asians and kids who could have been any or all of the above, waiting for the dad in the group to bring over their avocado burgers from the counter. It took Paul and me a few seconds to realize that the dad in question — who looked like a skinny teenager — was, in fact, the freshman Senator from Illinois, who was expected to enter the presidential race in the next week or two.

We couldn't help breaking in on his private moment to say hello, and Barack Obama, intruded upon in a place he'd probably come to get away from people like us, could not have been more friendly and engaged; we felt we could have talked burgers — and places and books — with him all day. But you expect that of a politician, whose livelihood depends on winning hearts. The more remarkable thing, we both felt, was that this sparkling stranger was so much like the kind of people we meet in Paris, in Hong Kong, in the Middle East: difficult to place and connected to everywhere. Like the air of his home island (not really Eastern or Western, but a vibrant mingling of the two), he spoke for the dawning global melting pot of today. [...]

The article then goes on about how last century was the "American" century, but the 21st century is the "Global" century, and America, just like it's enemies, is refusing to climb aboard the fast moving train of what the rest of the world is doing. The rest of the world, which relates to images more than ideas, is unhappy with America. Obama is the answer to this "problem".

The Author compares Alaska to Hawaii. Hawaii is the melting pot, the future. Alaska is the America of his childhood; beautiful, but too self-reliant and fortune-seeking.

[...] Barack Obama the man is sure to disappoint some of the expectations his fans have; any man would, especially in the age of the 24/7 news cycle. But the past and the future that he speaks for are precisely the ones that belong so uniquely to the new century and the 95% of humans who are our neighbors at the global burger table. It's more than possible to make your fortune in Alaska — but I'd much rather find the future in Hawaii.

Now you can read the whole thing, there are a few good phrases in there ("...a world where people communicate more with images than ideas and assumptions travel faster than truths"). Yes, I get it. But I did find it had a tone that was somewhat irritating. The implication would seem to be that we should be less self-reliant and more conformist to what the rest of the world wants.

The global burger table thing is fine. Obviously that is happening. Obama as an image, the multicultural melting pot thing, fine. But the conclusion, that we have to choose the "future" - Hawaii, not the fortune seeking past, as represented by Alaska, doesn't cut if for me.

We are clearly moving into the future; we can only go forward. And as we go forward, change will come. Globalization is coming, and it's more a question of how and when, than if. But as we move forward, and as American changes, as it inevitably will, it is my hope we build on the firm foundation of what is the best from our past and present.

I don't think American exceptionalism is something to be ashamed of, just because some folks around the globe think we need to become more like them. My voting Republican in this last election wasn't about "fortune seeking", or living in the past. It was about insuring a future that will value and bring forward the best America has to offer, not only for ourselves, but for the global burger crowd too, which we are also a part of.

Those kids around the global burger table may find themselves in need of Alaskan oil one day. Self-reliance is not a bad thing, but even Alaskans know the value of neighbors they can rely on. None of us live in a vacuum. And Alaskans, I'm told, often spend their winters in beautiful Hawaii. Hawaii and Alaska both have much to offer.

The "either-or" analogy does not ring true for me, it's too restrictive. We need the best of both worlds, or should I say, the best of all worlds. Globalization will require some conformity, some compromise, by everyone. Yet as America does it's part and conforms with it, we need to be sure we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Having a seat at the global burger table and helping pay the bill doesn't mean we need to forget who we are or where we came from, or where we would like to go from here.