John Jay, Federalist No. 5:
"Should the people of America divide themselves into three or four nations, would not...jealousies arise? Instead of their being 'joined in affection and free from all apprehension of different interests," envy and jealousy would soon extinguish confidence and affection, and the partial interests of each confederacy, instead of the general interests of all America, would be the only objects of their policy and pursuits. Hence, like most other bordering nations, they would always be involved in dispute and war, or live in the constant apprehension of them...
"The most sanguine advocates of three or four confederacies cannot reasonably suppose that they would long remain exactly on an equal footing in point of strength...Independent of those local circumstances which tend to beget and increase power in one part and to impede its progress in another, we must advert to the effects of that superior policy and good management which would probably distinguish the government of one above the rest, and by which their relative equality in strength and consideration would be destroyed. For it cannot be presumed that the same degree of sound policy, prudence and foresight would uniformly be observed by each of these confederacies for a long succession of years..."
But might this not argue indeed for separate confederacies? Jay assumes that management is the product of good fortune. But Sir Arnold Toynbee, a century and a half later, argued that mimesis or imitation is the hallmark of a rising civilization. Might not independent confederacies permit experimentation and learning which would potentially be imitated by the other confederacies? Management is a process of learning, and learning is possible through experimentation. The decentralization of decision processes permits learning. So the decentralization of federal power permits innovation that would not exist in a centralized federal structure.
Jay feared that less successful confederacies would fear more successful ones. Might not they decide to imitate the more successful ones instead?
In the Federalist Number Six, Hamilton argued that separate federations would likely lead to conflict and war:
"Has it not...invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility or justice? Has republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies?...Are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships and desires of unjust acquisitions that affect nations as well as kings?...There have been almost as many popular as royal wars...it has from long observation of progress of society become a sort of axiom in politics that vicinity, or nearness of situation, constitutes nations natural enemies..."
But decentralization need not mean de-federalization. The states can remain in unity, as a single nation, but choose separate policies voluntary. The enmity of proximity can be induced by forced collaboration and participation in programs whose values many members of society do not share. The forcible extraction of assent to programs that only a portion of the population favors can give rise to the same resentment as that which neighboring states feel toward each other. The unity of a federal republic need not mean the unity of choice of consumption or or ideal.
Hamilton makes a similar claim in Federalist number 7:
"Competitions of commerce would be another fruitful source of contention. The States less favourably circumstanced would be desirous of escaping from the disadvantages of local situation and of sharing in the advantages of of their more fortunate neighbors. Each State, or separate confederacy, would pursue a system of commercial policy peculiar to itself. This would occasion distinctions, preferences and exclusions, which would beget discontent. The habits of intercourse, on the basis of equal privileges to which we have been accustomed since the earliest settlement of the country would give a keener edge to those causes of discontent than they would naturally have independent of this circumstance. The spirit of enterprise, which characterizes the commercial part of America, has left no occasion of displaying itself unimproved. It is not at all probable that this unbridled spirit would pay much respect to those regulations of trade by which particular States might endeavor to secure exclusive benefits to their own citizens."
Hamilton's concerns need not materialize in a hyper-federalized America. In Hamilton's time, geographic differences were of great importance. Modern management methods and technological advances had not yet made the importance of process and strategy so evident as they are today. Better economic success can be imitated, especially by flexible firms that are young. It is the centralization of American buisness, its scale, that has engendered the inability to imitate Japanese processes. The misallocation of credit toward failed, large firms has prevented the formation of smaller, more nimble automobile firms.
Hamilton also argues that "the public debt of the Union would be a further cause of collision between the separate states." But hyper-federalization need not involve repudiation of debt or individually-based federal taxation. This system has been instituted and need not be repudiated until the debts have been satisfied on the basis on which they have been incurred.
Showing posts with label Federalists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Federalists. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Friday, December 12, 2008
David Horowitz on the Birth Certificate: An Anti-Federalist's Response
David Horowitz recently wrote an important Frontpagemag editorial that argued that conservatives should drop the birth certificate issue:
"64 million Americans voted to elect Barack Obama. Do you want to disenfranchise them? Do you think it's possible to disenfranchise 64 million Americans and keep the country? And please don't write me about the Constitution. The first principle of the Constitution is that the people are sovereign. What the people say, goes. If you think about it, I think you will agree that a two-year billion dollar election through all 50 states is as authoritative a verdict on anything as we are likely to get. Barack Obama is our president. Get used to it."
David and I exchanged several e-mails over this point last week. I disagree not so much with the possibility that the birth certificate may be ok (who knows?) but with David's claim that democracy ought to trump constitutional parameters and restrictions.
Majority rule was not contemplated when the nation was founded. The Progressives such as Herbert Croly argued for Rousseauean general will and unlimited democracy. Whether their agenda was this or whether Croly and his partner Walter Weyl were just re-processed Fabian socialists interested in furthering a Europeanized American elite is a matter for debate. But Croly's and the other Progressives' contempt for the founders together with their advocacy of unlimited, socialist-style state power reflected the essence of European statism and remain the essence of American P(p)rogressivism. Weyl's and Croly's Progressivism cannot be called conservatism in the American sense, yet the leadership of the Republican Party has discarded the last remnant of Jacksonian democracy, the "Reagan revolution", and adopted the Progressive platform. Thus, today we have no conservatives in Washington but rather a Progressive Party and a progressive one.
When the current Constitution was framed there were two schools of thought, the Federalists and the anti-Federalists. We remember the Federalists such as Hamilton and Madison, who wrote the Federalist Papers and the Constitution, but we don't have so clear a memory of the anti-Federalists, to include George Clinton, Robert Yates, Sam Adams and Richard Henry Lee. The anti-Federalists were in a number of senses more modern, or perhaps post-modern, than the Federalists.
The Federalists were proto-typical Progressives in the sense that they advocated centralization and a strong federal government. They were advocates of economies of scale that carried forward via the Progressives into the twentieth century. But the Federalists, like Madison, did not reject the basic notion of limited government. Madison argued that a durable Constitution would serve as a more potent limit on tyranny than would Jeffersonian generational revolutions.
The Federalists feared what de Tocqueville called "tyranny of the majority", and the most important theme that runs through the Federalist Papers, such as number 10, is fear of faction, specifically (emphatically) including majority faction. The Federalists did not advocate rule of the majority. They limited popular vote to vote for the House. The Senate was to be elected by state legislatures and the president by the Electoral College. Article II Section I of the Constitution does not provide for popular election of the president:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
Although the Electoral College has received a great deal of criticism among pissant progressives, the recent election seems to me to confute the progressives' claims for unlimited democracy. The absence of a competent media in the United States means that popular opinion is misguided and that democracy necessarily devolves into a contemptible failure here. Conservatives ought to begin to fashion alternatives to the Progressive propaganda into which they have been indoctrinated at Columbia and elsewhere.
As unlikely supporters for ignoring the Constitution as were the Federalists, the anti-Federalists would have been much less likely to support ignoring Article II's natural born citizenship requirements (were they alive today) for they were opposed to a central government period. They would have scorned the idea that popular elections would have any meaning for the very reasons I adduce: the public has no way of evaluating candidates elected on so vast a scale, so large scale democracy must fail. 64 million Americans must be wrong because it is impossible to obtain good information. This is because of constraints on the media's ability to ask relevant questions, its cognitive limits on rationality, not just because it is owned by media conglomerates and biased in the progressive direction.
The anti-Federalists favored small batch production, small units, and local responsiveness. They were post-modern (as well as pre-modern). They favored local democracy in many cases, but not national democracy, an idea that they would have scorned.
There is a true question that no historian has asked as to whether adoption of hyper-decentralization in that early period, as the anti-Federalists favored, would have resulted in a more dynamic, more competitive and more productive American economy than the centralizing approach that Hamilton advocated. Progressivism has claimed that big business makes consumerism possible, but the facts do not seem to support this claim. Production methods of the 21st century are more consistent with the idea of "just in time" decentralization than with large-batch centralization. Perhaps the sub-optimal centralization of the Federalists and the Progressives could have been avoided. A more decentralized America would not have permitted as much lackadaisical big business, waste, railroad-related corruption and big city sleaze of the very kind that resonates today in Chicago.
Jefferson was on the fence. He was often a fellow traveler of the anti-Federalists and objected to centralization, but as president bought Louisiana and acted like a Federalist, establishing the navy and avoiding legislative restrictions on executive privilege and advocating use of state level sedition acts against his opponents.
The anti-Federalists lost the constitutional debate, although they are memorialized in the Bill of Rights, but the election of Jefferson in 1800 was a reassertion of a fossilized anti-Federalism within the Federalist system. Jefferson's election ended the Federalists as a political force, and both of today's political parties descend from Jefferson's Democratic Republicans. But both have rejected the decentralization in which Jefferson believed in principle.
Neither party has been perfect. The Democrats under Andrew Jackson smashed the central bank and emphasized states' rights, albeit for the wrong reasons. The centralizing, aristocratic, elitist element has always been present in American politics via the Whigs and the Republicans. But the decentralizing, anti-elitist element that started with the anti-Federalists and to which Jefferson and Jackson were sympathetic has all but died. This is the tragedy of American politics: our greatest tradition to which conservatism ought to be committed has been replaced by a pale copy of European monarchy, centralization and Fabian socialism via Weyl and Croly. The Republicans have become the Progressive Party and the Democrats the progressive Party. Meanwhile, the American people are scratching their heads.
The great confusion began with Abraham Lincoln, who was a Whig and a centralizer, but who adopted Jacksonian rhetoric that was carried forward by the Mugwumps. The Mugwumps such as Charles Sumner, EL Godkin and David Ames Wells adopted Jacksonian economics and favored the gold standard. But they had two interests that were consistent with their Whig roots and were the basis for the reassertion of centralization that was carried forward via the Progressives. These were a desire to rationalize government via civil service and an interest in establishing professions such as law and medicine.
The Mugwumps' fixation on professionalization and universities led directly to the modern American university's adoption of European standards, which in turn has been the major force for statism in American history. Thus, the modern university is a direct product of American political forces, notably the Republican Mugwumps' fascination with economic and sociological theory led them to send as many as 10,000 Americans to German and European graduate schools in the late nineteenth century. These young graduates came back and established anti-laissez faire centers at Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin and elsewhere via European-trained economists like John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely.
The Republicans thus reasserted themselves as a centralizing force in the late 19th century (the Republican cooptation of Jacksonian Democracy having lasted no more than 35 years, from the 1860s to the 1890s) and then the Progressives became the centralizing elitist force out of the remains of the late nineteenth century Mugwumps and Bourbon Democrats.
The Progressives were smart enough to assert European values in the name of the common man and trust busting, even though the effects of their programs were not so straightforward, and the Democrats then copied the Progressive Republicans in the 1930s, claiming to be for unions and the poor when they were really for Wall Street. The most important step Roosevelt took was abolition of the gold standard and freeing the Fed to create money, the greatest subsidization of business in American history.
Thus, by the 1930s the centralizing force had won, and the decentralizing, anti-elitist force ceased to be a political power except on the fringe. Of course, many and perhaps a majority of Americans still believed in the anti-elitism of Jackson and had decentralizing instincts, but the rhetoric of American politics became riddled with double talk, lies and deception ever since the Progressive era. The wealthy were able to pull off a centralizing coup, securing monetary-creation power for themselves while telling everyone, including idiots like William Greider, that the creation and handing of money to business interests was in the poor's interests. In a sense, through sleight of hand, a fringe elite has been running the nation ever since.
As a result, today we can truly say that America is a one party system, the Republicans who advocate for the Fed on behalf of the wealthy and say they are for free markets and competition, and the Democrats who advocate for the Fed on behalf of the wealthy but say they are for the poor.
So what does all this have to do with the Birth Certificate? The Constitution is in extremis. Ignoring Article II is one more nail in the Constitution's coffin. If you look back to the anti-Federalists, they warned of an over-powerful Supreme Court, fearing it would turn into a force for an aristocratic elite. Likewise, they opposed the central bank for the same reason. They were right. The Federalists believed that the Constitution would prove durable and serve as a restraint on centralized power.
But today even conservatives have forgotten that America is first a nation of liberty, not a democracy. Nor was it intended to be a democratic one, except according to the fringe Progressives who have come to dominate the central government, the very outcome against which the anti-Federalists warned.
"64 million Americans voted to elect Barack Obama. Do you want to disenfranchise them? Do you think it's possible to disenfranchise 64 million Americans and keep the country? And please don't write me about the Constitution. The first principle of the Constitution is that the people are sovereign. What the people say, goes. If you think about it, I think you will agree that a two-year billion dollar election through all 50 states is as authoritative a verdict on anything as we are likely to get. Barack Obama is our president. Get used to it."
David and I exchanged several e-mails over this point last week. I disagree not so much with the possibility that the birth certificate may be ok (who knows?) but with David's claim that democracy ought to trump constitutional parameters and restrictions.
Majority rule was not contemplated when the nation was founded. The Progressives such as Herbert Croly argued for Rousseauean general will and unlimited democracy. Whether their agenda was this or whether Croly and his partner Walter Weyl were just re-processed Fabian socialists interested in furthering a Europeanized American elite is a matter for debate. But Croly's and the other Progressives' contempt for the founders together with their advocacy of unlimited, socialist-style state power reflected the essence of European statism and remain the essence of American P(p)rogressivism. Weyl's and Croly's Progressivism cannot be called conservatism in the American sense, yet the leadership of the Republican Party has discarded the last remnant of Jacksonian democracy, the "Reagan revolution", and adopted the Progressive platform. Thus, today we have no conservatives in Washington but rather a Progressive Party and a progressive one.
When the current Constitution was framed there were two schools of thought, the Federalists and the anti-Federalists. We remember the Federalists such as Hamilton and Madison, who wrote the Federalist Papers and the Constitution, but we don't have so clear a memory of the anti-Federalists, to include George Clinton, Robert Yates, Sam Adams and Richard Henry Lee. The anti-Federalists were in a number of senses more modern, or perhaps post-modern, than the Federalists.
The Federalists were proto-typical Progressives in the sense that they advocated centralization and a strong federal government. They were advocates of economies of scale that carried forward via the Progressives into the twentieth century. But the Federalists, like Madison, did not reject the basic notion of limited government. Madison argued that a durable Constitution would serve as a more potent limit on tyranny than would Jeffersonian generational revolutions.
The Federalists feared what de Tocqueville called "tyranny of the majority", and the most important theme that runs through the Federalist Papers, such as number 10, is fear of faction, specifically (emphatically) including majority faction. The Federalists did not advocate rule of the majority. They limited popular vote to vote for the House. The Senate was to be elected by state legislatures and the president by the Electoral College. Article II Section I of the Constitution does not provide for popular election of the president:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
Although the Electoral College has received a great deal of criticism among pissant progressives, the recent election seems to me to confute the progressives' claims for unlimited democracy. The absence of a competent media in the United States means that popular opinion is misguided and that democracy necessarily devolves into a contemptible failure here. Conservatives ought to begin to fashion alternatives to the Progressive propaganda into which they have been indoctrinated at Columbia and elsewhere.
As unlikely supporters for ignoring the Constitution as were the Federalists, the anti-Federalists would have been much less likely to support ignoring Article II's natural born citizenship requirements (were they alive today) for they were opposed to a central government period. They would have scorned the idea that popular elections would have any meaning for the very reasons I adduce: the public has no way of evaluating candidates elected on so vast a scale, so large scale democracy must fail. 64 million Americans must be wrong because it is impossible to obtain good information. This is because of constraints on the media's ability to ask relevant questions, its cognitive limits on rationality, not just because it is owned by media conglomerates and biased in the progressive direction.
The anti-Federalists favored small batch production, small units, and local responsiveness. They were post-modern (as well as pre-modern). They favored local democracy in many cases, but not national democracy, an idea that they would have scorned.
There is a true question that no historian has asked as to whether adoption of hyper-decentralization in that early period, as the anti-Federalists favored, would have resulted in a more dynamic, more competitive and more productive American economy than the centralizing approach that Hamilton advocated. Progressivism has claimed that big business makes consumerism possible, but the facts do not seem to support this claim. Production methods of the 21st century are more consistent with the idea of "just in time" decentralization than with large-batch centralization. Perhaps the sub-optimal centralization of the Federalists and the Progressives could have been avoided. A more decentralized America would not have permitted as much lackadaisical big business, waste, railroad-related corruption and big city sleaze of the very kind that resonates today in Chicago.
Jefferson was on the fence. He was often a fellow traveler of the anti-Federalists and objected to centralization, but as president bought Louisiana and acted like a Federalist, establishing the navy and avoiding legislative restrictions on executive privilege and advocating use of state level sedition acts against his opponents.
The anti-Federalists lost the constitutional debate, although they are memorialized in the Bill of Rights, but the election of Jefferson in 1800 was a reassertion of a fossilized anti-Federalism within the Federalist system. Jefferson's election ended the Federalists as a political force, and both of today's political parties descend from Jefferson's Democratic Republicans. But both have rejected the decentralization in which Jefferson believed in principle.
Neither party has been perfect. The Democrats under Andrew Jackson smashed the central bank and emphasized states' rights, albeit for the wrong reasons. The centralizing, aristocratic, elitist element has always been present in American politics via the Whigs and the Republicans. But the decentralizing, anti-elitist element that started with the anti-Federalists and to which Jefferson and Jackson were sympathetic has all but died. This is the tragedy of American politics: our greatest tradition to which conservatism ought to be committed has been replaced by a pale copy of European monarchy, centralization and Fabian socialism via Weyl and Croly. The Republicans have become the Progressive Party and the Democrats the progressive Party. Meanwhile, the American people are scratching their heads.
The great confusion began with Abraham Lincoln, who was a Whig and a centralizer, but who adopted Jacksonian rhetoric that was carried forward by the Mugwumps. The Mugwumps such as Charles Sumner, EL Godkin and David Ames Wells adopted Jacksonian economics and favored the gold standard. But they had two interests that were consistent with their Whig roots and were the basis for the reassertion of centralization that was carried forward via the Progressives. These were a desire to rationalize government via civil service and an interest in establishing professions such as law and medicine.
The Mugwumps' fixation on professionalization and universities led directly to the modern American university's adoption of European standards, which in turn has been the major force for statism in American history. Thus, the modern university is a direct product of American political forces, notably the Republican Mugwumps' fascination with economic and sociological theory led them to send as many as 10,000 Americans to German and European graduate schools in the late nineteenth century. These young graduates came back and established anti-laissez faire centers at Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin and elsewhere via European-trained economists like John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely.
The Republicans thus reasserted themselves as a centralizing force in the late 19th century (the Republican cooptation of Jacksonian Democracy having lasted no more than 35 years, from the 1860s to the 1890s) and then the Progressives became the centralizing elitist force out of the remains of the late nineteenth century Mugwumps and Bourbon Democrats.
The Progressives were smart enough to assert European values in the name of the common man and trust busting, even though the effects of their programs were not so straightforward, and the Democrats then copied the Progressive Republicans in the 1930s, claiming to be for unions and the poor when they were really for Wall Street. The most important step Roosevelt took was abolition of the gold standard and freeing the Fed to create money, the greatest subsidization of business in American history.
Thus, by the 1930s the centralizing force had won, and the decentralizing, anti-elitist force ceased to be a political power except on the fringe. Of course, many and perhaps a majority of Americans still believed in the anti-elitism of Jackson and had decentralizing instincts, but the rhetoric of American politics became riddled with double talk, lies and deception ever since the Progressive era. The wealthy were able to pull off a centralizing coup, securing monetary-creation power for themselves while telling everyone, including idiots like William Greider, that the creation and handing of money to business interests was in the poor's interests. In a sense, through sleight of hand, a fringe elite has been running the nation ever since.
As a result, today we can truly say that America is a one party system, the Republicans who advocate for the Fed on behalf of the wealthy and say they are for free markets and competition, and the Democrats who advocate for the Fed on behalf of the wealthy but say they are for the poor.
So what does all this have to do with the Birth Certificate? The Constitution is in extremis. Ignoring Article II is one more nail in the Constitution's coffin. If you look back to the anti-Federalists, they warned of an over-powerful Supreme Court, fearing it would turn into a force for an aristocratic elite. Likewise, they opposed the central bank for the same reason. They were right. The Federalists believed that the Constitution would prove durable and serve as a restraint on centralized power.
But today even conservatives have forgotten that America is first a nation of liberty, not a democracy. Nor was it intended to be a democratic one, except according to the fringe Progressives who have come to dominate the central government, the very outcome against which the anti-Federalists warned.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Factionalism and the Two-Party System
Americans may stick to the two-party system as an artifact of the founding fathers' fear of faction. By limiting the number of parties to two Americans limit the number of explicit political divisions.
In Elkins and McKitrick's Age of Federalism* the authors emphasize the universal fear and dislike of faction among the public and the founding fathers in the 1790s and earlier. This came in part from the belief that competition among factions had divided and harmed democracies in antiquity. Madison and Hamilton wrote about this in the Federalist, but the discomfort with factions or private associations of any kind (other than religious ones) was widespread. One exception was the Sons of Liberty during the revolutionary period and another, which Elkins and McKitrick don't mention in their masterful work, was the Freemasons. Also, there were incipient labor unions in the 1790s. Labor courses don't typically discuss the dislike of labor unions evidenced in the famous Philadelphia Cordwainers case as associated with a broader distrust of associations of any kind, but that may have been the case. In the Cordwainers (shoemakers) case a Philadelphia court held the union to be a criminal conspiracy. The criminal conspiracy doctrine was changed in the 1830s under the means-end doctrine enunciated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Hunt. The point is, though, that the shift in attitudes toward unions coincided with a shift in attitudes toward associations more generally. Usually the shift is described as responding to greater power of workingmen in the 1830s associated with Jacksonian presidency.
But the point is that in general private associations of any kind were viewed with suspicion, and minor political parties may be sensed in this way.
During the 1790s, Elkins and McKitrick point out, there was the rise of an early association called the Democratic Societies. The purpose of these clubs was mild, basically to discuss political issues and oppose corruption in government. President Washington viewed these clubs with suspicion, calling them "self-created societies" as did many leading politicians. Two Democratic Societies in Washington Town and Mingo Creek, Pennsylvania were involved in the Whiskey Insurrection in western Pennsylvania in 1791-4 in which tax collectors were tarred and feathered; Inspector of the Excise John Neville's house was burned after an open battle; and as many as 6,000 armed Pennsylvania militia massed on August 1, 1794. President Washington handled the situation masterfully and ultimately sent militia to quell the revolt, but there was no violence beyond scattered incidents.
Elkins and McKitrick point out that Washington blamed the Democratic Societies for the insurrection (p. 484):
"If Washington ever had a fixed obsession, it was these societies, "self-created in the sense of having no sanction in popular authority, societies which had been up to nothing but mischief since the first ones were formed...He had felt very early that if they were not counteracted they would 'shake the government to its foundations'; and 'now if this uprising were not subdued, we could bid adieu to all government in this Country except Mob and Club Govt.'"
Washington wrote that (quoted on p.494, Elkins and McKitrick)
"all combinations and associations under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities are destructive of this fundamental principle (of the duty of every individual to obey the established government)...They serve to organize faction; to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful enterprising minority of the community, and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans, digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests."
Elkins and McKitrick quote a Senate resolution recorded in the Annals of Congress:
"Our anxiety arising from the licentious and open resistance to the laws in the Western counties of Pennsylvania has been increased by the proceedings of certain self-created societies...proceedings in our apprehension founded in political error, calculated if not intended to disorganize our Government, and which...have been influential in misleading our fellow citizens in the scene of insurrection."
Might this early distrust of associations, which had disappeared by the time De Tocqueville published Democracy in America in 1835, be the source of the American commitment to the two-party system? While the conflict between the Republicans and the Federalists in the 1790s amounted to a battle between centralizers and decentralizers; proponents of government subsidy to business and proponents of Whiggish suspicion of centralized authority, and so was unavoidable, might the fear of more factionalization than the Federalist-Republican or later Democratic-Republican division be the distant remnant of this early American fear of faction?
*Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
In Elkins and McKitrick's Age of Federalism* the authors emphasize the universal fear and dislike of faction among the public and the founding fathers in the 1790s and earlier. This came in part from the belief that competition among factions had divided and harmed democracies in antiquity. Madison and Hamilton wrote about this in the Federalist, but the discomfort with factions or private associations of any kind (other than religious ones) was widespread. One exception was the Sons of Liberty during the revolutionary period and another, which Elkins and McKitrick don't mention in their masterful work, was the Freemasons. Also, there were incipient labor unions in the 1790s. Labor courses don't typically discuss the dislike of labor unions evidenced in the famous Philadelphia Cordwainers case as associated with a broader distrust of associations of any kind, but that may have been the case. In the Cordwainers (shoemakers) case a Philadelphia court held the union to be a criminal conspiracy. The criminal conspiracy doctrine was changed in the 1830s under the means-end doctrine enunciated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Hunt. The point is, though, that the shift in attitudes toward unions coincided with a shift in attitudes toward associations more generally. Usually the shift is described as responding to greater power of workingmen in the 1830s associated with Jacksonian presidency.
But the point is that in general private associations of any kind were viewed with suspicion, and minor political parties may be sensed in this way.
During the 1790s, Elkins and McKitrick point out, there was the rise of an early association called the Democratic Societies. The purpose of these clubs was mild, basically to discuss political issues and oppose corruption in government. President Washington viewed these clubs with suspicion, calling them "self-created societies" as did many leading politicians. Two Democratic Societies in Washington Town and Mingo Creek, Pennsylvania were involved in the Whiskey Insurrection in western Pennsylvania in 1791-4 in which tax collectors were tarred and feathered; Inspector of the Excise John Neville's house was burned after an open battle; and as many as 6,000 armed Pennsylvania militia massed on August 1, 1794. President Washington handled the situation masterfully and ultimately sent militia to quell the revolt, but there was no violence beyond scattered incidents.
Elkins and McKitrick point out that Washington blamed the Democratic Societies for the insurrection (p. 484):
"If Washington ever had a fixed obsession, it was these societies, "self-created in the sense of having no sanction in popular authority, societies which had been up to nothing but mischief since the first ones were formed...He had felt very early that if they were not counteracted they would 'shake the government to its foundations'; and 'now if this uprising were not subdued, we could bid adieu to all government in this Country except Mob and Club Govt.'"
Washington wrote that (quoted on p.494, Elkins and McKitrick)
"all combinations and associations under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities are destructive of this fundamental principle (of the duty of every individual to obey the established government)...They serve to organize faction; to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful enterprising minority of the community, and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans, digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests."
Elkins and McKitrick quote a Senate resolution recorded in the Annals of Congress:
"Our anxiety arising from the licentious and open resistance to the laws in the Western counties of Pennsylvania has been increased by the proceedings of certain self-created societies...proceedings in our apprehension founded in political error, calculated if not intended to disorganize our Government, and which...have been influential in misleading our fellow citizens in the scene of insurrection."
Might this early distrust of associations, which had disappeared by the time De Tocqueville published Democracy in America in 1835, be the source of the American commitment to the two-party system? While the conflict between the Republicans and the Federalists in the 1790s amounted to a battle between centralizers and decentralizers; proponents of government subsidy to business and proponents of Whiggish suspicion of centralized authority, and so was unavoidable, might the fear of more factionalization than the Federalist-Republican or later Democratic-Republican division be the distant remnant of this early American fear of faction?
*Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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