Hamiltonianism as an American Worldview is neither exclusive to the American Right nor exclusive to the American Left. The old Federalist Party, predating the ideologically straightlaced, mass mobilized parties of the 20th century, was diverse in terms of its intellectual content. Although the Party was well-known for its advocacy of a centralized Federal Government playing a predominant role in the US economy, this was not the only major position held by its members. What sort of role that would entail was left open insofar as the Party’s history contained appeals to prototypical conceptual models of State Capitalism, Syndicalism, Corporatism and Socialism.
The Party also emphasized the importance of the Federal Government being governed by the best and most qualified Americans as a “Natural Aristocracy”–a Federal Civil Service–presiding over the States. Its conception of Nationalism was neither a Liberal Civic Nationalism nor a Reactionary Ethnonationalism but a “Pluralist Nationalism” which believed in the existence of an American soul and national character distinct from the rest of the English-speaking world. This Federalist Nationalism professed some form of cultural and religious autonomy among ethnic minorities, an increased role for women within the national life, and opposed all institutional forms of Slavery on moral and ethical grounds. More importantly, Technology must conform to the values held by both the Constitution and National Culture of the American people. It cannot be allowed to replace the Natural Aristocracy with a Technocracy divorced from the everyday realities of the American people and their States.
The Party’s Worldview continues to endure and the Party itself can be resurrected, albeit in another form and under another name more attuned to contemporary times. Fragments of the Party can still be found within the American Left and the American Right. That is why I find myself agreeing with Julius Krein’s conclusions in the essay he wrote for the UK’s The New Statesman in late December 2023, “America after Neoliberalism.” If the potential for a new Federalist Party acting as the vanguard for the Hamiltonianism of the 21st century exists, then why has it not already overcome Neoliberalism? Is the current trajectory of American political discourse resembling a frantic defense of Neoliberalism and the Jeffersonian Empire of Liberty by the Democrats and Republicans of the Democratic-Republican Party?
Even though the Trump and Biden Presidencies have not done much to fully overcome Neoliberalism and the Empire of Liberty, plenty of geopolitical forces in America and abroad are pushing things toward a less Jeffersonian, more Hamiltonian outlook. Krein refers to this phenomenon in his essay as “Post-Neoliberalism.” There is a growing desire for a new Ideology which opposes the political, economic, and social tendencies of Neoliberalism. In essence, an Ideology that advocates revolutionary alternatives to the Market/Mixed Economy, the Fractional-Reserve Banking System, Parliamentary Democracy, the World Wide Web (WWW), and the OECD-Type Student Economy (and its student loans, STEM technocracy and academic Wokeism).
The contemporary conception of the Liberal Capitalist Parliamentary Democratic nation reached its maturity around the 1960s and 1970s. Its economic model readjusted itself to the circumstances brought on by the Death of Bretton Woods. It accounts for why Kapital has become abstract and become more intellectual rather than physical and concrete:
“The construction of this fissured economy was America’s response to the crises of the 1970s. Once it became clear that American integrated manufacturers could no longer dominate global production, US firms increasingly outsourced manufacturing and organised themselves around intellectual property and financial rents. These shifts were not always conscious or intentional, and factors beyond policy (such as technological change) played a role.
But neoliberalism essentially functioned as the ideological gloss justifying this transformation, and the associated policy changes were critical catalysts. For example, from the 1980s until the Trump administration, US trade policy consistently sought to reduce tariffs and other protections for domestic manufacturing, while strengthening intellectual property protections and foreign investor rights. In antitrust law, limitations on “vertical restraints” were gradually weakened, allowing firms like Apple to capture the lion’s share of profits, and exert effective control over outsourced suppliers and labour, without having to manufacture their products or directly employ (and share profits with) most of the workers involved. Patent laws became increasingly favourable to big business, and federal R&D policies were changed to allow for easier private commercialisation of government research. Changes in corporate governance increased the power of institutional asset managers vis-à-vis business executives. These changes were more important in creating the neoliberal economy than any tax cuts.
The fissured economy generated early returns, but its costs and contradictions have grown burdensome. Unlike the virtuous cycle of Fordism – in which high investment drives high wages which drive strong demand – the sequestration of corporate profits away from the most labour- and capital-intensive pieces of corporate value chains breeds financialisation, stagnation and heightened inequality. Despite ideological pretensions of fiscal rectitude, the neoliberal model relies upon debt to sustain consumption, exacerbating household precarity and systemic financial instability.”
The only problem that Krein (and this Author by extension) are noticing is the obvious absence of such an Ideology. Going by my own personal political experiences over the past decade as an example, I find it extremely unlikely for today’s Marxist-Leninists and Fascists to have all the answers. Not only were they vanquished by Neoliberalism in the two World Wars, of which the Cold War was merely the extension of World War II, they also do not carry enough support in the Western world, much less America. Sure, there are all kinds of parties, organizations, movements, and so forth in various parts of the world, but how close are they to challenging Neoliberalism at the geopolitical level? Can anyone imagine these people governing a great power comparable to that of the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union, or even America?
“A true post-neoliberal developmental agenda, aimed at reshaping corporate incentives – altering “predistribution” rather than redistribution – fits awkwardly with both legacy political coalitions. The progressive self-image, which emphasises a moralistic and symbolic-identitarian welfarism, has little space for new state-capitalist development coalitions with essentially nationalist ambitions. Those elements of the New Deal are distant memories. Conservatives, meanwhile, have for decades indoctrinated themselves in the belief that the state can only hinder economic progress, inflected with the right’s own identitarian commitments. Social conservatives, although no longer true believers in neoliberal policy, remain suspicious that any expanded state power will only be wielded against them. Considerable factions of both parties’ donor and intellectual networks, who remain wedded to neoliberal arrangements, whether for material or idealistic reasons, are of course eager to sharpen these divides.
A true post-neoliberal developmental agenda, aimed at reshaping corporate incentives – altering “predistribution” rather than redistribution – fits awkwardly with both legacy political coalitions. The progressive self-image, which emphasises a moralistic and symbolic-identitarian welfarism, has little space for new state-capitalist development coalitions with essentially nationalist ambitions. Those elements of the New Deal are distant memories. Conservatives, meanwhile, have for decades indoctrinated themselves in the belief that the state can only hinder economic progress, inflected with the right’s own identitarian commitments. Social conservatives, although no longer true believers in neoliberal policy, remain suspicious that any expanded state power will only be wielded against them. Considerable factions of both parties’ donor and intellectual networks, who remain wedded to neoliberal arrangements, whether for material or idealistic reasons, are of course eager to sharpen these divides.
Thus, bipartisan disaffection with a generic ‘neoliberalism’ tends to quickly crystallise into entrenched partisan positions. These quarrels have shifted somewhat: the old battles over privatising social security and repealing Obamacare have faded (though they still occur occasionally) after Trump declared peace in the Republican war on entitlements. Spending battles in general have become increasingly farcical, as seen in the recent Republican Freedom Caucus brinksmanship over a government shutdown, averted by party leadership at the last minute. Instead, both parties are invested in pushing seemingly shared economic concerns in polarising directions: progressives focus on racialised inequality while conservatives decry “woke capital” and cultural elitism; displaced Appalachian coal miners are pitted against precarious urban service workers, Rust Belt factory workers against student-loan borrowers. Post-neoliberal energies are thus reduced to culture war tropes, while the potentially unifying concerns surrounding the vicissitudes of the fissured economy are muted.”
Since the 1960s and 1970s, neither the Marxist-Leninists nor the Fascists have been able to gain an actual foothold in the Empire of Liberty. Nations throughout the Western world have become fragmented along increasingly racial, sexual, and subcultural lines. It is no longer conceivable to envisage a mass mobilization of everyday people to rally around those Ideologies. If the excessive historical baggage was too much for others to bear, there is also the issue that neither can be expected to work together over the long term, given their recent behaviors in the Western world. Consequently, this has led to the lack of real opposition to Neoliberalism and the lack of what can and should come after Neoliberalism. Even if the Marxist-Leninists and Fascists were to succeed in Entryism by taking over political parties, organizations and movements, it is not like any of them are going to be reliable vehicles against Neoliberalism. As Krein noted:
“The [American] Right has essentially abandoned any pretence of having a positive project, as evidenced by the Republican Party’s inability to put forward a policy platform in the last two election cycles, and the difficulties faced in simply electing a speaker of the House. Conservative donors seem satisfied as long as the [Republicans] can function as an oppositional force, obstructing Democratic initiatives and keeping taxes low. Right-Wing media, intellectuals and voters, meanwhile, seem happy as long as they are entertained, and have few expectations of candidates beyond symbolic affirmation and meme generation.
The Republican retreat from policy is in part an outgrowth of the catastrophes of the George W Bush administration. As Donald Trump proved in 2016, this conservative “establishment” had become – rightfully – discredited, even among Republican voters, and its policy apparatus has continued to atrophy. Many establishment conservative pundits and intellectuals effectively left the party after Trump’s election.”
“The [American] Left, by contrast, is still project-oriented, but it seems to be oriented more around a project-NGO than a project-state, showing little interest in building large democratic majorities. As Justin H Vassallo put it, the progressive left is neither a “shrewd coalition partner” for elected Democrats nor a “credible, independent political force”, limiting the potential appeal of “Bidenomics” and other agenda items. Its principal projects of environmentalism and (in a word) “wokeness”, far from serving as the foundations of a new national project, often function to undermine the formation of any broad-based consensus. Thus, despite the dismal and divided condition of the Republican Party, Democrats face a Republican House and uncertain election prospects.
Progressive environmentalism – even assuming the most alarming interpretation of climate change – suffers from numerous and seemingly self-imposed blind spots. It fixates on disrupting everyday lives – recently launching a crusade against gas stoves, for example – while it scarcely mentions, at least in the United States, the massive estates and private jets of billionaire donors. It focuses almost entirely on penalising fossil fuels, domestic industries and the regional economies they support, while mostly ignoring trade-driven environmental arbitrage and pollution offshoring. These obvious class and sectionalist biases undercut its self-proclaimed urgency, as does its litigious opposition to virtually any new construction, including of clean energy projects. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club are often the fiercest opponents of new solar and wind fields, and battery production facilities. Some ‘supply-side progressives’ have recently taken an interest in permitting reform to rectify this, but reorienting a movement steeped in de-growth ideology is no easy task.”
In essence, it cannot be overstated that decades of Neoliberalism caused tremendous damage to the abilities of entire nations, not just America, to envisage alternatives to it. Barring the fact that today’s Marxist-Leninists and Fascists can barely get their own acts together, Neoliberalism has begun to disintegrate, and there is not even the slightest clue on what should come after it. As a result, today’s geopolitical climate resembles a nihilist void comparable to what was seen during the Death of Bretton Woods during the 1970s. It is a world order where the Empire of Liberty is on the retreat because its own decline was self-inflicted, even as the Jeffersonians vigorously search for scapegoats, from Mainland China and Russia, those aforementioned Marxist-Leninists and Fascists who wield no political power, to Wokeism and the Technocrats.
From a Hamiltonian perspective, it is significant that Krein and I are in steadfast agreement that the ideological void left by Neoliberalism is going to someday be filled by new Ideologies or old ones which remain capable of change. It remains an open question as to what those Ideologies would be, but we would like to believe that Hamiltonianism will find its place somewhere.
Here, I am reminded of those German Revolutionary Conservatives because I can now be given the assurance that contemporary America is facing a philosophical problem like what confronted Weimar Germany in the last century. An old order has decayed to the point that it could collapse on itself when faced with existential crises. Revolutionary desires for change are coinciding with technological advancements. That persistent imperative to distinguish between what is capable of enduring change and what is incapable because they are products of specific historical epochs.
In contemporary America, it is senseless to restore the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s or the Great Society of the 1960s. Both represent attempts to continue the New Deal of the 1930s and thus should be recognized as outdated, outmoded products more attuned to their historical epochs. Everything points back to the 1970s as the decade which laid the groundwork for the contemporary world of the early 21st century. The legacy of the Federalists and Hamiltonianism, meanwhile, will remain timeless insofar as they represent the only key evidence that America was not entirely founded as a Liberal Capitalist experiment tasked with spreading Neoliberalism worldwide. If there is any hope left for any conception of America after Neoliberalism, then the Federalists and Hamiltonianism will be playing some integral role.
Categories: Philosophy
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