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CHAPTER 1
THE PARTY OF THE PEOPLE
Thomas Jefferson and the Individual
As Democrats, our faith is in The People. Here, The People rule. We stand with the many against the few. These are the meanings of our oldest ideal: the Party of The People. At the same time, our credo holds that in America, the individual comes first. We base our politics on individual interest, not special, or bloc, interest. The philosophical coherence of our coalition depends fundamentally on the primacy of the individual citizen's interests. This primal credo is what holds all of our constituencies and ideals together. In the beginning, we built our political party balanced between the twin pillars of service to the community of The People and service to the individual. This remains our political genetics today.
America had won its War of Independence. The Constitution had been put in place. Those who were in control — the Federalists — disdained the poisonous effects political faction would bring to our national life. Then, an unexpected outside event would suddenly clarify the underlying divisions that existed here at home. Force fields of basic ideas about the meaning of the United States would align in opposition to each other.
THE FIGHT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WAS BORN TO WAGE
For us, this outside event was the French Revolution. It was to drive a white-hot carving blade through the history of America. It divided the American people by instinct. This was the first great forking off of American politics. It was to galvanize our own political party and cast its fundamental purposes. Everyone would understand the stakes, because everyone could understand the ideals that were at stake.
Who was to rule our country? Was a class of wealthy aristocrats to rule America? Or were The People to rule — the Common Man? This was the fight the Democratic Party was born to wage.
In the summer of 1798, John Adams was president. There was trouble in the Atlantic, and in particular with revolutionary France. Sporadically, hostilities at sea had begun, and Adams, who was sympathetic to England, found himself facing Federalist fever for full-scale war. Street fights were breaking out across the country, with pro-war Federalists wearing the black cockade in their hats, and their antiwar opponents, sympathetic to France, wearing the red one. As all this was going on, Alexander Hamilton was leading a faction of High Federalists who were determined to crush French-inspired sentiment for popular rule in America, once and for all. The specter of the French Revolution provided Hamilton the perfect political foil: an enemy abroad, with the blood-soaked mob loose in the streets of Paris, and an enemy at home, with the rising clamor of the populace for more democracy. He sensed that his moment was at hand, and he seized it. In the face of these supposed perils, what Hamilton demanded of the American people was "national unanimity."
The Federalist Congress imposed the idea of national unanimity on the country by passing the Alien and Sedition Acts that summer. These laws made it a crime to "write, print, utter, or publish" anything "scandalous or malicious" concerning the president or the Congress that might "bring them into contempt or disrepute." Prison could follow for anyone "opposing ... any act of the President of the United States." A very wide avenue for the High Federalists, who plunged ahead by fining — and jailing — Jeffersonian newspaper editors.
Jefferson and his growing band of partisans saw these laws for what they were — not legitimate national-security measures, but a flagrant attempt to crush domestic dissent and bully every American citizen into fall-in-line, lockstep political obedience. Jefferson predicted that when tempers calmed, "this reign of witches" would pass, but in the meantime, resistance was called for.
It was the fight that forged our political faction, but it was more: it was a nation-defining moment. Here was the elemental struggle in the political pit that would begin to make real the promise of the First Amendment to the American Constitution. In effect, the Jefferson-Hamilton clash over the Alien and Sedition Acts was about power and who would have it: the already powerful or The People? Here Jefferson found bedrock in the rights of man. The sovereignty of The People. The sanctity of individual conscience. Freedom of the mind. Freedom of speech. Freedom of political action. On this line of first human-rights principles, he would make his fight — not on some brittle states'-rights theory divorced from a larger purpose. He and his partisans appealed to national political opinion to turn back the autocratic spirit that lay behind the Alien and Sedition Acts.
At the start, it didn't seem to be working, as the Jeffersonian faction lost ground to the Federalists during the next congressional elections. Jefferson remained calm. In his mind, he could see the future of the Federalist Party begin to take shape, and it was a dead end.
Just so: the crude and willful imposition of the Alien and Sedition Acts marked the beginning of the Federalist finale. These grotesque laws were to bring them down, once and for all, when the citizenry realized, in time, the game that was afoot, and voted Thomas Jefferson into the presidency two years later, in 1800. He would put a stop to this slide toward elitist command in America.
JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRATS: WITH THE PEOPLE — AND WITH THE INDIVIDUAL
The name for our party that I like best was the most common name in use for us during the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this name is hardly ever used today. We were called, simply, "The Democracy." This was the battle flag we carried into national elections, and in the states we had names like The New York Democracy or The Democracy in Illinois. I like The Democracy because it seems to ignore the idea of faction and party. It implies legitimacy and permanence as well as the idea that if The Democracy is not in power at the moment, there is something amiss in the system, and the aberration is only temporary, awaiting correction.
The Democracy — there is dignity in it. It means something. It means here, The People rule. The People rule the nation and The People rule the government. In America, The People are sovereign. The People are meant to be in charge. As Democrats, this is our first political faith. The Democracy was a political coinage of the fiery Jacksonian Era, when our emotional commitment to rule by The People reached its zenith in American history. But its roots certainly run deeper, into the earliest days of the Republic, and particularly into the mind of Thomas Jefferson, whose words laid forth the liberal foundations for the subsequent expansion of the American people's powers and liberties.
Always, Jefferson understood, right from the start, there would be two parties in America: "those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes," and "those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe" guardians of the public interest, even as he allowed that the People's judgments were not always infallible. Why, he asked in his primal clash with Alexander Hamilton, does it make more sense to place your trust, faith, and fate in the hands of a clique of rulers than in the hands of the entire citizenry in its combined wisdom? He saw the danger to America as emanating not so much from the many (the People) as from the few (the wealthy and the operators of the governmental bureaucratic apparatus). Jefferson chose the many over the few.
To Hamilton, however, such notional meanderings were juvenile and even dangerous. Hamilton believed in neither the individual nor the entire citizenry. Instead, he saw the legitimacy of the government as based in the power and prestige of the few: the moneyed and aristocratic classes. He didn't fear the few; on the contrary, he wanted to see their power aggrandized. Hamilton feared the many: the mass, the hive, the grubby and common sort of people. His every stratagem, therefore, was aimed at aligning the interests of the holders of political power with the holders of economic power. This was the kind of instinct that later caused Woodrow Wilson to remark, in a devastatingly acid aside, that while Alexander Hamilton may have been a very great man, he wasn't a very great American.
Hamilton's purpose was to effect a grand political deal: in return for the support of the entrenched, Hamilton offered permanent protection of property and position. This was the quiet political purpose that lay behind his great economic reforms of the Washington administration that established a national market in goods and finance: the funding of the national debt, making good on the paper held by the financiers of the day; the high tariff wall for nascent industrialists; the national bank funded with public tax revenue, put out at loan for private profit, for credit-hungry merchants. It was the first really big backroom political deal in American history. It worked. This faith in an alliance between the wealthy and the leaders of the government, so as to secure the legitimacy of the central authority, is bedrock to the political myth of the Federalists.
Jefferson founded a political party to oppose this Hamiltonian tendency: the Party of The People. Our party. This profound branching off would define the future of American politics and shape the mind-set of Jefferson's progeny.
Hamilton saw the State. Jefferson saw the Nation.
Thomas Jefferson was the first and foremost exponent of the Common Man in American history, but it is critical to say right at the start that Jefferson did not see a common man who was mankind in the mass. Instead, Jefferson stood for the individual — the simple, separate person in all his reality and all his potential. To crippling ideas of class or blocs of people, our founder maintained a resolute hostility. Jefferson stood forthrightly at the side and in defense of the individual as Hamilton pleaded the special causes of class — the bloc of paper-dealing merchants in need of a bank, the bloc of landed aristocrats in need of a reserved-for-themselves legislative chamber, the bloc of industrialists in need of a tariff to protect their businesses. Hamilton's statecraft was built on class membership and bloc identity. Jefferson's statecraft was built on the individual as single citizen.
The supremacy of the individual's interests is not a right-wing idea. It is a Democratic Party ideal. Thomas Jefferson founded his political party — our political party — to uphold the sovereignty of individual conscience in America. We are the ones who introduced this political principle into the American conversation. We fought for this ideal over the bitter objections of our opponents. From the Democrats, therefore: the bedrock principle was the widest possible freedom for the private mind and the open action that might follow, out in the broad society. In this great ideal, which stands at the root of our national meaning, we found the key to our political dominance of the nation for the first six decades of the nineteenth century. These years were the high ascendancy of the Democratic Party in America, and even when we were kept from power after the Civil War, this ideal of ours still organized the political conversation of the nation and indeed perseveres unabated in the belief of millions of our fellow citizens to this day.
It is vital for Democrats to keep these two ideals in balance: the value of the big community of all the People together, who legitimize the Republic by asserting their sovereignty over the government, and the unbreakable dignity of the individual citizen, whose particular interest is the measure of whether the government is doing its job, and without whose trust the government cannot function effectively. The People, all together. The simple, separate person. Democrats must serve both these principles at the same time. Twinned, they formed our first purpose. The two ideals must be put together — today.
The trouble is that they are difficult to put together. They often seem opposed. Sometimes, as in the present time, Democratic politicians seem to insist on pitting these two principles against each other, highlighting their contradiction instead of trying to bridge it, and refusing to do the hard intellectual work of composing contradictory myths and ideals and making them compatible. Politicians like this have lost an understanding of the fundamental political psychology of the Democratic Party.
THE NORTHERN TOUR AND THE POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
In May and June 1791, when Jefferson was secretary of state and Madison was his floor-leader lieutenant in the House of Representatives, the two men were in maneuver against Alexander Hamilton and his centralizing policies at Treasury. Jefferson was in George Washington's first cabinet, but in reality, he was moving into opposition. Things were not going his way. Jefferson was under pressure and experiencing very bad headaches as the advantage seemed to be sliding toward Hamilton and his faction. The secretary of state and the congressman needed a break — or so they said. Late that spring these two set off on a "northern tour" through New York, Vermont, and Connecticut. There were two purported goals for this "botanizing excursion" up north: to investigate the potential for a domestic maple-sugar industry to replace the slave-based cane trade with British island possessions in the Caribbean, and to survey the habits of the Hessian fly, a pest on the wheat crop. But though some controversy and mystery surrounds the purposes of their trip, it's likely that Jefferson and Madison were doing more than chasing butterflies. Clearly, they had politics on their minds.
New York and the New England states were unknown territory for the Virginians. The political cultures of these states were radically different from Virginia's. There was no acknowledged leading gentry in the Green Mountains of Vermont as there was in the sedate and settled Piedmont Virginia countryside where Jefferson and Madison lived. Control of the street was what galvanized the gritty politics of New York City. Connecticut, at the time, was probably the archest anti-Jeffersonian Federalist stronghold in the nation. Yet north went Jefferson and Madison, and they went because these places and people were so different from what they knew, not because they were similar.
They met for backroom meals with local anti-Hamilton political factions and newspaper editors along the way; with the leaders of the urban machine that had just seized control of New York City from Hamilton and his friends; in Vermont with the ardent Jeffersonian governor, who had just been elected to the Senate; and at the end of the trip with Philip Freneau, a college friend of Madison's, for the purpose of persuading him to establish the National Gazette at Philadelphia, which he did several months later, and which became the principal anti-Hamiltonian newspaper in the country. Soon talk started to surface of a tacit alliance between anti-Federalist politicians in New York and New England and the great planters of the South.
Democrats think of themselves these days as the party of government, as having the instinct to govern. It might be true, but we did not start out this way, and the way we started continues to inform the political psychology of our party even today. At base, we are a party of scrappers; we are intellectual scavengers and opportunists; irony is the principal hallmark of our tradition of ideas; disunity is perhaps the only constant of our long and storied history. In the beginning, we were not the party born to the task of governing; that was the Federalists, and they governed effectively for the first dozen years, with a clear and coherent idea of where they were going and what they were doing and who they were doing it for.
We, on the other hand, were a party born to the tasks of opposition. We jerry-rigged a ragtag and disjointed gaggle of partisans — you could almost say a party of leftovers — each with a different reason to oppose the Hamiltonian juggernaut. We were the Scots and Scotch-Irish immigrants moving, with a chip on their shoulder, out into the western reaches, away from the English on the established coast; we were the new and overlooked urban laborers; we were the small farmers and landholders so beloved of Jefferson; we were the great plantation owners of the South who had been outfoxed by Hamilton's dealers in financial paper; we were the creators of the urban machines; we were the pro-French. It made no sense at all. Yet this was how Jefferson set it up in the beginning, and by quite deliberate design.
From Jefferson on down, deep Democratic politics has never been just about getting more "people like us." Recovering the essence of our political party as a broad coalition of eclectic ideas requires reasserting a definite and specific kind of temperament. This is much more than a polite, momentary tolerance of differing self-interests and beliefs that might appear to run counter to our own. Indeed, the genuine Democratic temperament is in no way passive. Instead, it is politically aggressive. It demands a red-blooded and determined effort to seek out new ideas, and to sweep in more wide-flung views, not fewer. It respects ideas. It does not fear the clash of ideas; it embraces the thought that the clash itself can bring forth the best out of ideas that might seem at first to be poised in opposition to each other. This is the kind of party we need to rebuild in order to pursue the great self-rule goal of The Democracy. This is the temperament Democrats need as they think and act inside the Democratic Party today.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Soul of a Democrat"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Thomas B. Reston.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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