I just uploaded the latest installments of research articles for Digital Library IV, which pertain to Hamiltonian Federalism and its rivalry with Madisonian Federalism over the definition of American Nationalism between the War of 1812 and the 9/11 Attacks. When read together, the research articles I chose paint a convenient narrative that American Nationalism is at its most influential whenever there is a national crisis affecting all Americans and the desire for the American people to work with the Federal government to address the national crisis. All of the worst tendencies associated with American Nationalism, ironically enough, stem from what the American people often perceive as a Federal government that is either incapable of any meaningful action or has become too complacent to respond to any emerging challenges.
We do find elements of this conclusion within economic discourse, where Hamiltonianism favors policies that involve the Federal government being proactive in economic life, whereas Madisonianism promotes the Market/Mixed Economy on behalf of Jeffersonianism. As if by some instinct whose presence could only be understood in a Hamiltonian context, Americans reflexively turn to the Federal government whenever they perceive economic life as either failing to fulfill its purpose or refusing to deliver the expected results. This sort of divergence between Hamilton and Madison has become the crux of a now-obscure theory called the “Split Personality Thesis,” which presupposes that because Hamilton and Madison’s views are diametrically opposed to each other, we can in turn read The Federalist Papers as two separate sets of documents.
The rivalry over opposing conceptions of American Nationalism would eventually find its way into Progressivism by the turn of the 20th century. However, the early Progressives bastardized the debate into one defined by either Liberal Nationalism or Racial Nationalism, of which white supremacy is a textbook example of the latter. In keeping with my conclusions in the last major post for the Blog, it has been argued that out of all of the known political movements in America, American Conservatism and American Progressivism are the ones closest to adopting the Federalist Tradition of Hamiltonianism. Unfortunately, there are plenty of arguments against the idea of either adopting it the Federalist Tradition, which just happens to be the topic of the ongoing two-part Blog post on the subject.
One of the research articles I included (or am planning to upload later, if it is not among the ones mentioned here) features a discussion about how American Progressivism and American Conservatism represent the sort of Nihilism admonished by the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler. Going by that author’s argument, I can conclude that American Progressivism and American Conservatism represent a sort of Good and Evil that must be overcome. To use the Nietzschean expression, whatever new-old Ideology manages to unite the American people around a shared Destiny and renewed sense of national purpose in Life, it must go beyond whatever is being offered by American Progressives and Conservatives. Neither is fit to inherit the Federalist Tradition of Hamiltonianism for a wide variety of well-known and very obvious reasons.
For those interested in reading the new research articles I uploaded to Digital Library IV, they are the following:
- A Modern Perspective on Hamilton and Jefferson
- “Mr. Madisons War” or the Dynamic of Early American Nationalism
- “Our Rights are getting more and more Infringed Upon”
- The Federalist on the Public Will: The Split Personality Revisited
- Varieties of American Popular Nationalism
- What does It mean to be an American?: Patriotism, Nationalism, and American Identity after 9/11
- Who Abandoned Whom?: Consistency of Constitutional Interpretations of Hamilton and Madison
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