Democrats & Humanitarians...In Name Only

Consider the following names of these countries:

• People's Democratic Republic of Algeria
• People's Republic of Bangladesh
• People's Republic of China
• Democratic People's Republic of Korea
• Lao People's Democratic Republic
• Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya

I wanted to post these names to exhibit one commonality with all of them: none of these nations are for the "people", but rather for a ruling elite who hold onto power tightly and with significant firepower. None of them are "democratic", either. There is a simple, immutable point that I made whilst speaking with a friend a while back about such things: that any nation that has to inculcate "democratic" into its title is, without exception, undemocratic. More than likely, it is a brutal dictatorship. (Can anyone say that North Korea, aka "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is anything approaching? Additionally, it is barely a republic, but rather a monarchy of sorts, with Kim Jong Il grooming his son to take over after he passes, just as he took over from his father Kim Il Song.) Perhaps one of the more interesting choices of names was the German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany or communist Germany. The contrast of this name with its western counterpart, the Federal Republic of Germany, and you get the idea. Kind of hard to justify one name against the other when the denizens of the German Democratic Republic were continually shot attempting to cross over into the Federal Republic of Germany; one would think the opposite would've occurred, one being a "democratic republic" and all. The truth of the matter was that East Germany was one of the most oppressive police states in history, certainly in European history. But the title certainly belied that, at least to the eye and the ear. Certainly Libya, given its terrorist history (Flight 103 in 1988, which I actually took six months prior) and current internecine butchery, doesn't qualify as for the "the people".

The wider implication behind this is simple: dictatorships know that they're truly illegitimate, ergo they go to great lengths both in spoken and written word. Orwell keyed in on this in 1984, with his labeling of the edifice dedicated to torture as the "Ministry of Love". In the real, non-fiction world, this would be the equivalent of "Arbeit macht frei" (translated, "Work will set you free", stated in sign at the entrance of several work/death camps by the Nazis, the implication of hope where none truly existed.) I recall during my college years a professor, who's name still stays with me but will not be published here, who said that the Soviet Union made a point of glorifying greater citizen participation in its elections simply because an overwhelming majority brought themselves to the polls, and as a result, bestowed upon themselves greater democratic credentials than the United States. Not lost in this was that there would be only one candidate per office, and that any unfortunate soul who failed to show to the voting location would be paid a visit or called to ensure their presence. Again, the show of democracy was more important than the reality of it, and considerably more importance, the show of humanitarianism was more important than an actual policy of it.

Men of power are fully aware of their wrongdoing. Titles and words matter to them, for in some respects, rhetorical cover for tyrannical murder serves as some semblance of spiritual emollient for them. But the conscience knows something that words can't gloss over.

At least I hope it does, if there is any justice in the world.

The Competing Visions of Alexander Hamilton & Thomas Jefferson

Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson could be the two most intellectually important figures in American history. (James Madison also deserves honorable mention.)

And they hated each other.

On the one side there was Hamilton. Born in the West Indies, Hamilton was the illegitimate son of a ne'er-do-well Scottish nobleman and a still married (she fled her first husband to escape an unhappy union) mother. His childhood got off to an unfortunate start, and it stayed that way. The chain events of his life read like a modern-day tale filled with dysfunction, abandonment, and alienation. His father abandoned his mother; his mother died of fever; her first husband successfully claimed her estate as his own, leaving the illegitimate Hamilton and his younger brother with nothing; subsequently adopted by a cousin who then committed suicide thereafter, he was permanently separated from his brother as a result. Hamilton's saving grace(s) were books. Denied legitimacy by the Church of England due to being born out of wedlock, he was excluded from Anglican financed religious and educational studies. As a result, Hamilton was occasionally tutored privately, and attended Jewish private schools on occasion. Working as a clerk for an import/export company as a young man in St. Croix, Hamilton penned an essay for a local newspaper that so impressed the publishers and the readers that a collection was taken to send Hamilton to America to get a proper education; he eventually landed at King's College (now Columbia University).

Thomas Jefferson's upbringing couldn't have been more different. One of ten children born into a prominent Virginia planter family, Jefferson was brought up in wealth and privilege. When his father passed, a 14-year-old Jefferson inherited 5,000 acres of land and dozens of slaves. He attended the best schools and was tutored by the best educators available, learning Latin, Greek, and French in his early teens. In short, an upbringing diametrically different than that of Alexander Hamilton's.

Competing Visions For The Young Republic-Thomas Jefferson

"I think our government will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural."-Thomas Jefferson

Like many of his day, Jefferson did not consider himself to be an American first; he was a Virginian. The perception of the day was that one hailed from their state, not from America as a whole. It was provincialism of the first order. (One could even say this about George Washington, though less so; Washington's policy preference whilst president clearly angled towards Hamilton. More on that later.) All forms of centrality of government were anathema to Jefferson. He had no interest in a strong, central core to the United States. His vision was of a nation of gentlemen-farmers, where local issues were decided on a local level, and that only in times of crisis would the other states form a union of sorts to fend off foreign threats. His distaste for central power can be thus summed up by an excerpt from a letter that he wrote to Abigail Adams in 1787: "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all." [One can detect elements of Tea Party sentiment in that one. It is always best to refresh one's memory with a dose of history just to remember that these sentiments are hardly original.] A considerably more chilling sentiment was revealed in another letter to a compatriot: "What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." This from the author of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson's vision for America can be succinctly summed up in the following passage from Paul Johnson's excellent "A History of the American People":

He believed that the new republic would flourish only if the balance of power within it was held by its farms and planters, men who owned and got their living from the soil. His reasoning was entirely emotional and sentimental, and had to do with the Roman republic, where Cicero had made the same point. Farmers, he believed, were somehow more virtuous than other people, more staunch in their defense of liberty, more suited to run a res publica.

In other words, Jefferson opposed any and all centralized, official institutions. That would include:

• A standing army and navy
• A national treasury
• A central bank

A betrayal of simple, agrarian republican virtues as Jefferson saw it, these were. Banking was "in infinity of successive felonious larcenies", as he wrote in a letter to John Adams, who was only slightly less suspicious of such things. (Jefferson's aversion to a national standing army no doubt derived from his knowledge of the actions of Sulla Felix and Julius Caesar, the two most culpable for extinguishing the Roman Republic.)



Competing Visions For The Young Republic-Alexander Hamilton

" If banks, in spite of every precaution, are sometimes betrayed into giving a false credit to a person described, they more frequently enable honest and industrious men of small or perhaps no capital to undertake and prosecute business with advantage to themselves and to the community." -Alexander Hamilton

Perhaps as a result of his experiences working in the import/export firm Beekman & Cruger whilst an adolescent in the West Indies, Hamilton had a nose for business, money, finance, economics and what made an economy tick. Many historians (Paul Johnson, Ron Chernow, Richard Brookhiser) have rated Hamilton as the only real bonafide genius amongst the first great American statesmen. He commanded artillery effectively during the Revolutionary War without the benefit of military training, but rather through reading about artillery techniques and strategy in books. He acted as Washington's aide-de-camp throughout the war, and was instrumental in no small way in getting requisitioned materiel to the right places at the right times. He kept squabbling amongst the officer class to a minimum, ensuring Washington's travails didn't get any worse than they already were at certain points. As president, Washington lent his complete confidence to all of Hamilton's financial blueprints: establishing a treasury, forming a central bank, and developing an industrial base in the United States. Nothing could be more horrifying to Jefferson than these concepts realized.

There had been personality conflicts between Jefferson and Hamilton for some time. Prior to Hamilton's appointment as the first Secretary of Treasury, Hamilton was instrumental in effectively arguing for the need to replace the failing Articles of Confederation in the Federalist Papers and at subsequent constitutional conventions. Jefferson, away in France on diplomatic mission, had no hand in the Constitution other than correspondence with fellow Virginian and constitutional architect James Madison. He was not wholly in disagreement with it, but he was extraordinarily uncomfortable without a strongly enunciated list of inherent rights, thus the Bill of Rights was added to the document.


When both were in the Washington's first administration, Hamilton proposed that all state debts get rolled into government treasuries. Initially against this, Jefferson reluctantly accepted Hamilton's proposition in return for Hamilton's agreement to move the seat of government south.* (See fuller explanation of this below.) Jefferson rued the day that he made this deal, called "the Compromise of 1790", but even this wasn't what permanently ruptured any and all relations with Hamilton. That would come about when Hamilton took it a step to far: the proposition of a national central bank in the form of the Bank of the United States. Nothing could have horrified Jefferson more, nothing could have cut right to the core of everything he envisioned the United States NOT to have morphed into. This may not have been too much of a surprise to Hamilton to have Jefferson come out against it, but he was terribly shaken by the schism with James Madison, his partner in writing both the Federalist Papers and the Constitution. Madison declared that, "In reviewing the Constitution, it was not possible to discover in it the power to incorporate a bank". Madison, no doubt in thrall of not only Jefferson but also his Virginian agrarian farming constituents tried to stop the central bank. Hamilton countered with a reading of the "necessary and proper clause" of the Constitution, driving the point home by reading an excerpt from the Federalist Papers (#44) in Congress, "No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power for doing it is included." Implicit in this reading of this excerpt of the Federalist is that the very person opposed to the central bank was the one that wrote that excerpt: Madison.

Jefferson, for his part, considered the formation of the central bank a capital offense. Clearly he didn't recognize that the Constitution had effectively trumped state law for federal law. But that didn't stop him from having sentiments that said, "The power of erecting banks and corporations was not given to the general government; it remains then with the state itself. Any person to recognize a foreign legislature [he's speaking of the US Congress, btw.] in a case belonging to the state itself is an act of treason against the state. And whoever shall do so...shall be adjudged guilt of high treason and suffer death accordingly by the judgment of the state courts." Harsh words for this forerunner, the Bank of the United States, to our present central bank, The Federal Reserve. Jefferson hated it that much, and the man wholly responsible for it was his bete noir, Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton for his part saw no other way for the United States to compete and prosper. A student of Adam Smith (of "Wealth of Nations" fame and considered the father of modern economics), Hamilton saw the British economic model as worthy of duplication, to be expanded upon. It was industrialization, not agro-economics that would take the United States forward. Hamilton saw the United States for what it now is: an economic powerhouse. A sleepy agrarian economy of yeoman-farmers in the Jeffersonian mode was to be "scoffed [by Hamilton] as such puerile reasoning" (1). A few years later, Hamilton submitted his Report on Manufactures to Congress. Jefferson was apoplectic. It represented everything anathema to Jefferson's agro-utopian vision for America: industrial mills financed by speculation and loans from banks. It was shelved by Congress and was never translated into legislation, but it caused quite a ruckus. Jefferson "wondered somberly whether Americans still lived under a limited government....for Jefferson this [general welfare clause] 'permitted Congress to take everything under their management which they should deem for the public welfare'." (These sentiments echo through the ages right to our present day.) That said, the Report on Manufactures clearly had significant impact on the formation of industrialized America. Hamilton's vision won, as it should have.

Conclusion

This post probably came off overly negative towards Jefferson. It was not necessarily meant to do so. The importance of Thomas Jefferson with regards to enshrining the almost-libertarian mind-set into the American consciousness was and still is crucial. Jefferson was wrong about almost everything with regards to economics, but he was right about liberty and the vigilance required to maintain it. It is a vigilance bordering on paranoia, sometimes out of hand, but a necessary streak in the American. He, along with James Madison, were instrumental in getting a Bill of Rights inculcated into the American Constitution. (Even as he was in France on diplomatic mission.) He was wrong to some extent on insisting on the supremacy of state authority in comparison to federal authority, though not entirely: even to this day, some issues cannot be successfully decided and implemented in a "one size fits all" kind of way, taking into no account the differing peoples, cultures, and geographies of our states. He opposed a standing army, feeling that it was a threat to the nascent republic, yet founded the United States Military Academy at West Point. He hated the idea of a central treasury, yet found it very useful when he assumed the presidency. A mass of contradictions, that Jefferson.

Hamilton was right about finance, economics and a forward vision for the United States. He was wrong about many other things, not the least of which was his philosophy that the republic should be ruled by an intellectual elite. In this, Jefferson had the philosophical upper hand. One would think that the forerunner of the modern Republican Party would be Jefferson, given his "states rights" inclination, his distrust of banks (particularly a central bank) and his embrace of the agrarian ethos; that would be mistaken to do so. Jefferson is considered the godfather of the modern Democratic Party, mainly for his populist, anti-elitist sentiments. Conversely, Hamilton is considered to be the godfather of the Republican Party, as he was the advocate for the monied classes, the industrialists, the bankers, and the speculators. But he also favored a strong central government, one that was dominant over all state legislatures. This is a very Democratic sentiment. And so neither figure fits neatly into the ideological order of the modern American political parties.

Concerning the central bank, the Bank of the United States, it continued its charter with the federal government until Andrew Jackson, a Jeffersonian to the core, discontinued its charter. He subsequently moved all its assets into state-run banks; runaway inflation and the Panic of 1837 were the end result. Another panic, in 1907, led to the reformation of a central bank in 1913, this time under the name "Federal Reserve" . Like Jefferson, Madison, Patrick Henry, and Andrew Jackson (all southerners, not coincidentally) before them, we have those attacking the Fed, like Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). Some things never change. The ghosts of Hamilton and Jefferson are still squabbling, two centuries later.

*Explanation: the State of New York had been decimated by the Revolutionary War both physically and economically. By comparison, Virginia had been only lightly affected and was financially solvent. Hamilton suggested that all states pool their debts into national debt, therefore enabling financially weak states to recover whilst stronger states shoulder more debt burden. "Assumption" as it is called, enabled the original United States (13 of 'em) to recover and prosper. Had Jefferson not agreed to this, certain northeast states that had been routed by the British would've gone under.

(1) Excerpt from "The History of the American People", by Paul Johnson

Other books consulted in the writing of this post:
a.) "John Adams" by David McCullough
b.) "Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow
c.) "Alexander Hamilton-American" by Richard Brookhiser

Thoughts On Rome, Comparisons To The United States

A few months back I picked up a book called "Are We Rome?", by a Vanity Fair writer named Cullen Murphy. Relatively well-written, Mr. Murphy delves into this oft-thought of question and essentially comes up with an over-arching thesis, simply put by an NPR reviewer as such,
"It's not so much America's tendency toward decadence and our astounding military might that make us like Rome. It's the dangerous blurring of public and private responsibilities, paired with an inflated sense of power that can blind us to what's happening beyond our borders." Some of this may be true, particularly the latter portion. As for the former, Mr. Murphy claims that massive public works and keeping necessary institutions run federally or municipally is the key to citizen cohesion. Case in point: Mr. Murphy claims that subcontracting things such as marital or business arbitrations to private entities, or worse, subcontracting prisons to private companies (like Wackenhut) are eroding our sense of shared mission. Perhaps true, but as someone with libertarian leanings that thinks that government should be the last, not first, solution to a problem that could be privately (and profitably) dealt with in an effective manner, I take issue with Mr. Murphy's thesis. The point of devolving certain municipal or federal powers to private entities (who are still subject to governmental oversight) is, simply put, done to lessen the burden of the taxpayer. Additionally, anything that can lessen the intrusiveness of government, even if it is for things like securities or real estate arbitration, is a good thing. Better that people who know better arbitrate on matters particular to a given industry have the ultimate say-so in it. They also serve to unclog the public legal system for cases that cannot be adjudicated any other way. Read the book if you wish. I learned a few things, despite my disagreements with it.

So...now that I got that out of the way, my true intent behind writing this post. A conversation that I had with a friend of mine a while back (who happens to have had a pretty impressive Jesuit education and a pretty good memory for what he was taught) turned to Roman history. I realized that I knew very little of it. (This is 2005, btw.) That, combined with the excellent HBO series Rome, sparked my interest. I consequently went on a six year bender of eating up everything on Rome that I could get my hands on. My father, schooled in this stuff more than I at the time (I subsequently passed him in this department) suggested that I start with Suetonius' "12 Caesars", written in 121 AD. Aside from the charge that I got from reading something nearly two-thousand years old, I found it eminently readable and translatable into real-world terms. From there I moved to Plutarch's "Lives", detailing prominent Romans and preceding Greek statesmen and making (sometimes) apt comparisons between them. Then onto contemporary historian Tom Holland's "Rubicon-The Last Days of the Roman Republic", an absolute stunner and the perfect guidebook if you were watching HBO's "Rome" series. (Better to track the personalities and the consistencies/inconsistencies of the show, you see...) Then onto Livy, an excellent book about Cicero ("The Life & Times of Rome's Greatest Politician"), and of course, the truncated (but still exceptionally dense) version of Edward Gibbon's "Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire". (The first volume was published, interestingly, in 1776. Gibbon was a Member of Parliament who undoubtedly was involved in discussions and debates regarding that rebellious North American colony we now live in.) A few books on the Greco-Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian War, Alexander the Great, and some classical philosophy rounded out my reading list for the last six years. Proceeding all of this were bios on Adams, Hamilton, and Washington, as well as the excellent 1776 by David McCullough. Oh...and the comprehensive "History of the American People" by Paul Johnson....1000 pages of bliss, it was.

Pardon the self-indulgent listing of all and sundry that I've read for the last six years, but it brings me to a salient point: One cannot understand the linchpins of our republic if one doesn't have an understanding of Greco-Roman and Anglo-Saxon history, politics, and philosophy. (Particularly the latter.) One cannot "get" the thinking of the Founders (who signed the Declaration of Independence, as well as fought the war for it) or the Framers (those who devised, edited, debated, and ratified The Constitution) unless one knows the history that they knew. It cannot be accurately understood through any other lense.

The Constitution is a written document. This might seem like nothing, but consider that the British have a constitution, but it is NOT written one. The most successful and long-lasting republic in history, Rome also didn't not have a written constitution. These unwritten constitutions were based on customs and precedents, but could be revoked, twisted, perverted, and otherwise subjugated through sophistry and the ever-present reason used throughout the ages, national emergency. It is no small coincidence that the rhetoric coming from Washington DC these days always has a certain spin or urgency to it, and either is a war (war on poverty) or crisis (energy crisis, healthcare crisis, climate change crisis, etc.). Language like this has always been used to justify the seizure of the rights and/or property of private citizens....because to the ruling mandarins, it's all a matter of national security or public safety. To wit:

• Lucius Cornelius Sulla (referred to going forward as Sulla) sought to "restore the republic" after being cheated (unconstitutionally) by a rival general/statesman/populist (Gaius Marius) out of a military command. Sulla turned his army on Rome instead of Pontus (where his revoked command mandated he go to finish off a rebellious King Mithridates), breaking the most sacred of covenants-that no Roman general can march his army through the city gates under arms. Sulla then reversed the revocation of his command via the senate, marched out to Pontus, defeated Mithridates, turned back to Rome, and marched through the city gates under arms again. In his absence, rival Marius rigged the senate to appoint himself consul (the highest position in Rome prior to the demise of the republic) in perpetuity, also an unconstitutional act. On Sulla's return, Marius fled and eventually died of natural causes (such as they were), his allies were promptly proscribed and/or executed, and Sulla forced a senatorial decree appointing himself dictator. This was all done under the need for a "restoration of public order" and "public security". From there, Sulla waged a war of terror on his enemies and their allies, eliminating 9000 of them, mostly noblemen. After a year, true to his word to "restore the Roman constitution" (despite perverting it), he resigned.

• Julius Caesar was one of Marius' followers, a "populare" (a man of the people). Following the politics of Marius but the actions of Sulla, he too would march through the gates of Rome under arms and seize absolute power. His assassination would trigger a war between his followers (Caesarians) and the old guard seeking to preserve the last vestiges of the Roman constitution (Republicans). In the end and over several years, Caesar's nephew and posthumously adopted son, Octavian (Augustus), would also march through the gates of Rome under arms. Rome would never again be a republic, and its quasi-democratic government and constitution would be forever sundered.

From these two men one can glean several applicable and parallel things to our own republic, our constitution, and why there are certain amendments in it. For one, if it is written, they'll be no dispute about what it says and means. Of this there can be no dispute, as the main architects of the Constitution (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and to a lesser extent, John Jay) had an extraordinarily deep knowledge of Roman history, and knew full well what brought the republic down: the personal ambition of extraordinary men who's lust for power was lethally accompanied by legions dedicated to those men, not the republic itself. The fact that they could pervert and subvert a constitution that had no binding force, other than custom, proved too attractive to pass up. In the case of the United States, if someone of power breaks their constitutional vows, one can point to where in the Constitution it was broken. If you don't believe me, consider the pseudonym of the three authors of it whence publishing their thoughts vis-a-vis the Federalist Papers: Publius, as in Publius Valerius Publicola, one of the main conspirators that overthrew the last of the tyrannical kings, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, and established the Roman republic.

To conclude, I disagree with Cullen Murphy on why Rome crumbled. It spent more time as a republic than it did as a dictatorship, and conquered the entire Mediterranean basin during republican, not principate rule. To my mind, what brought it down was a gradually withering indifference to its constitution and its institutions. If there is a comparison between Rome and our nation, it is that. Under-educated snots like Washington Post writer Ezra Klein are a primary example of this. Stating that the issue with the text is "confusing" because it is "over one hundred years old" (it's 223 years old, mind...), and that it differs "from person to person" and "depends on what they want to get done" is a good example of a mindset that is prevalent amongst many, particularly on the Left. The Constitution protects the individual's freedoms, their property, and their freedom to worship. The Framers understood that these rights have to be enshrined IN WRITING so that people like Klein (and they are legion, and unlike Klein, in positions of actual authority in our government), should they choose to break it, can't rhetorically manoeuvre their way around something that is stated plainly in its texts. And if the Constitution is considered "too old" by people such as Klein, perhaps he should pick up a book and read about where the Framers got all these ideas from. Of course, if he has a problem with the 223 year old texts of the Constitution, I would imagine that 2000 to 2500 year old writings from the likes of Plutarch, Livy, Cicero, Cato, Sallust, Polybius, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and Suetonius would be way above his intellectual pay-grade. Fortunately, they weren't for Hamilton, Jay, and Madison.