Kill Your Idols VI: Needing to Get It Right, Research Time, 14/08/2017

I find it sadly fitting that I’ve spent the last week talking about the complex connections between state violence and fascist militias, then we get hit with an actual fucking Nazi riot. The fascist revolution of America appears to be here.

See, all these thoughts in my all-over-the-place analysis of patriotism’s psychology all had a central point. I’m drifting around a really curious concept of hegemony that Antonio Gramsci develops.

This weekend makes me wonder if the United States of America has
reached a turning point, whether it's no longer possible for extremist
white nationalists and multicultural pluralist democrats to live in the
same country and live loyally to the same institutions. It could be
either the beginning of the end of the American experiment, or the
threshold of a new era of freedom and justice. Or it could end up
being just one more flare-up in a long and terrifying history of
American racist violence.

There’s been a ton written on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in the last several decades of academic political philosophy. So I don’t want to get into a discussion over whether it was really Gramsci’s, or whether Anderson’s books got it right. Because I’ve been thinking this while reading some of Perry Anderson’s books on Gramsci and the Western left-wing tradition.

He’s a brilliant historian of ideas. The only thing that frustrates me about his work is that he’s such an accurate historian that I have no clue what his own philosophical ideas are. At least not in that abstract sphere of pure concepts.

I read his book on the politics and philosophies of the Indian nationalist movement against British rule, and he had plenty of his own ideas. But those were about political stances – the Hindu-centric nationalism of the Congress Party caused disasters, ethnic cleansing, and immense suffering among Indian Muslims and Dalits.

Anderson is, as you’d expect, not cool with that. His ideas are in the insight of his moral stances in his writing. But when it comes to philosophical concepts, he’s a very meticulous mapper of others’ territory. He doesn’t build his own worlds.

So his map of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is very insightful. In his long essay The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, Anderson was very faithful to Gramsci’s ideas as they are in the text. He even describes them as paradoxical and contradictory because Gramsci developed a very slippery conception of hegemony.

Sometimes, he spoke of hegemony as if it were about state control and influence of other states through the military. Domestically, sometimes he thought of it as state violence. Sometimes, it was the soft power of the state through cultural institutions. Sometimes, hegemony was ideological. Sometimes, it was just a matter of sanctioned gun violence.

It was rather difficult for me to find a good picture of Perry
Anderson where he didn't look kind of depressed. These days, I can
understand where he's coming from.

If the meaning of a term seems to contradict itself, then it can’t be valid. Fine for a historian, but it’s a rule that makes for terrible philosophy. Oddly enough, Anderson's big history book on the Western Marxist tradition more generally tends to give Gramsci more slack on this hegemony concept. Maybe because his focus is on how the concept changed over time and place.

Look again at all those definitions of hegemony that occur across the Prison Notebooks. What do they have in common? The projection of power as the ability to control and influence. There’s always a hub to that projection, a centre of power.

That power centre is sometimes very blunt, and its projection simple and direct. Think about the Russian Revolution of 1917. It could succeed relatively easily (once it got super-lucky) because there was only one vector of power – from the Czar to the masses through the aristocracy and military elite.

Power centres can also be dispersed. Think about a country and society like the contemporary United States. Institutions and networks of influence all over the country spread a morality of patriotism, love of country and the institutions of the state.

Americans don’t believe in this simply as a matter of following orders – schools, television networks, cultural industries of all sorts spread the moralities of American patriotism, America as an ideology. That ideology itself can come in contradictory forms – racists and pluralists can exist in the same country. They have for centuries.

They’re loyal to the same institutions – American democracy, just as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison described in the Federalist Papers. Even though they believe in radically different moral visions of what those institutions should do.

But it’s always a network of control and influence with a hub, the state institutions themselves. That’s the most philosophically tantalizing take I can find, figure out, or think of for Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. It’s the one that I’ll use in my own work.

Hegemony as the dominant projection of loyalty to a state.

When Federal Government Was Built to Protect the People, Research Time, 04/07/2017

Here's the thing that seriously bugs me when I read The Federalist Papers in the 21st century. Those who most loudly claim fealty to the founders of the United States are in fact the ones who betray most blatantly their vision for how the country’s government should work.

I’m talking about the founders’ philosophical vision for the country in the second constitution, the one they’re still running the US government on.

Happy July 4 to any readers in America. It'll always be a land of
possibility and hope.

Knowing what I’ve learned over the last few years about the libertarian right over the last few years, I think I can make a few general statements. At least I can make some general statements about the intensely anti-Obama, pro-Republican libertarian right.

One. They genuinely believe that the federal government has very few politically and ethically legitimate rights against them, that most laws, taxes, and domestic government departments are immoral because they impinge on individual people’s freedom.

Its most philosophically consistent form is the writing of Robert Nozick. Its most extreme political form is the anti-government militias of people like Amon Bundy, who carry out semi-competent occupations of federal nature reserve. Its most deranged extreme political form is the sovereign citizen movement.

Two. Most also fall in line with the ‘states’ rights’ message from right-wing organizations. This seems to be an incidental detail, but reading Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, you see how important it is.

Hamilton’s argument for having a strong federal government was to protect each individual American.* The main sources of tyranny was in the governments of individual states.

They all know the helicopters are looking at them. He's doing it to
flaunt his power. He knows that in today's America, he can do this,
be roasted in social media, and get away with it.

* Yes, he’s only talking about white people. Bracket this for now, just as we do with every other Western political theorist who was only ever talking about white people. Say citizen just as far as understanding the concept goes. Racial justice would bring Hamilton’s country in line with Hamilton’s ideas.

Governors would use their powers to seek corrupt privileges while denying their citizens even a functioning government. State legislatures would deny huge swaths of their citizens the ability to vote or even get basic services. Among other everyday injustices.

A strong federal government was required to defend the rights of citizens from these abuses, and maintain the political and social equality of all citizens across all the states.

Today, so many think of centralizing power in a large federal government as dangerous to individual liberty and freedom. And certainly quite a few federal powers can do a lot to take away people’s liberty and freedom.

But the most dangerous abusers of government power were the local governments, the petty tinpots.

A Disturbing Example of Eternal Recurrence, Research Time, 28/06/2017

I’m making a joke with this title, but it does genuinely allude to a curious feeling I kept getting as I read The Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton will describe a major national debate that was gripping the country in the 1780s.

And it will be pretty much the same ideas tearing at the country as Americans face today. I have a feeling this idea will appear somewhere in the Utopias manuscript – How can we believe in progress if we can’t even solve problems with literally centuries of effort?

Mike Pence is experiencing an odd recurrence of his own. I don't
know how meaningful this coincidence is, but I find it funny. Pence
once represented Indiana's 2nd Congressional district, the same as
Earl Landgrebe in the early 1970s, one of the most dedicated and
slavish Nixon loyalists.

I don't want to lean too much on the old idea that eternal recurrence is a straight-ahead ontological principle either. There’s too much about what we know of reality itself – I’m talking actual cosmological and physical knowledge – for me to say that cyclical time is the truth.

I don’t mean the idea that cyclical time is true, like a fact. I mean, the idea of cyclical time being the truth, a fundamental definitive aspect of a whole way of understanding the world. Let’s leave that stuff.

If Nietzsche is an inspiration for Utopias, it’s in how he tells us what real social progress amounts to. His story of the donkey, lion, and child is the model. A donkey accepts his lot and lumbers along though life. A lion throws off his shackles in rage. A child looks around those ruins and builds a new world.

We want to recognize that we can fix the injustice in our world, not just labour under it in hopelessness. You have the power to overthrow an unjust culture and society, but to lock down your victory, you need to build a new culture together.

American history can make you seriously pessimistic about this power. Despite centuries of activism, no one can even manage to throw off the shackles of racism. They only overthrow one version to see it replaced. America isn’t a slave society, but they went through nearly a century of Jim Crow and instituted mass incarceration.

Can we imagine for ourselves a force so
powerful in our souls that we can throw off
the burdens of the cosmos itself? Must we
always be donkeys before the cosmic
insignificance of humanity?

The return of injustice happens when people can’t or won’t build a culture of justice.

Specifically, what freaks me out in this instance of Hamilton’s wisdom? He describes the argument, as Americans were fighting over the country’s new constitution, against the federal government having strong taxation powers. It’s the same libertarian argument I hear so often today against government taxation powers.

Not the consistent, nuanced, and complex libertarian argument you’ll see coming from think tank philosophers. I’m talking about the mass media talking point – which drives so many ordinary folks to the voting booth and the public squares – that the federal government must be starved of taxes.

The argument: Federal government powers will inevitably be abused, used to oppress people instead of set them free. Even if the federal government avoids corruption by authoritarians or thieves, it will still oppress people by crushing local cultures and individual citizens under a single ideology and identity for all Americans.

In the 1780s, opponents of a strong federal government made an argument of cultural diversity. Not cultural diversity with our divisions today – differences of religion, ethnicity, sexuality, gender. Back then, it was the cultural diversity of the peoples who composed the Thirteen.

Rhode Island, Maryland, New Jersey, and all the others. These were each distinct societies, deserving of their independence from the homogenizing identity of “America.”

Today, we call it state’s rights. Am I onto something?

Should Michigan Matter More Than the Michganders? Research Time, 21/06/2017

There are moments when you read The Federalist Papers and you see a bizarre flash into the future.

It’s as if reading the text, for an instant, merges the moment of Alexander Hamilton at the constitutional conferences in New York and Philadelphia, with a moment of Donald Trump laughing, belching in the Oval Office tweeting more and more gloats about his victory.

When Trump won, one of the things that drove non-Trumpist Americans out of their minds was the structure of the electoral college. Understandably – it’s the institution that allowed the candidate who lost the popular vote to win the election. 2016 is the second time this has happened this century so far, and we’re not even one-fifth through it.

A key message of Donald Trump's campaign was encouraging
Americans to revel in open contempt for the poor and ethnic
minorities. Trump won a narrow victory in Michigan, and the
mechanisms of the electoral college resulted in that difference of a
few thousand votes giving the weight of the entire population to him.
Here, a Flint resident carries bottled water.

We’ve all seen plenty of explanations as to how this happens. The electoral college is a form of federal vote weighting that assigns a specific value to each state in the actual institutional votes for the Presidency.

The people of the United States don’t, technically speaking, have one single national election. They have fifty national elections, one in each state. And the state elections determine which candidate that state will throw its weight behind. The electoral votes are functions of a state’s population, and it doesn’t matter if a candidate smashes it or barely ekes out a win – all the electoral votes go to that candidate.

You might be thinking, “Why in the hell do they have this kind of system?” Well, it’s because the United States almost fell apart at the moment of its birth as a country. That’s what you learn reading The Federalist Papers. I don’t think a lot of Americans know this.

The original confederal constitution of the United States vested all the non-explicit powers of government in the individual states. So the confederal government couldn’t do a damn thing. So the second US constitution was written in this moment of intense tension between federalists and all-state indépendistes.

The electoral college’s structure and rules was one of the few concessions that the original indépendistes of the United States could squeeze out of the federalists.

Hamilton argues it well. Democracy must rest a government’s institutional power ultimately in the hands of the people. A government that rests its own power in the people will be the one that inspires patriotic devotion, the sense of community that comes from a common government.

In the first US constitution, the governments that connected their powers with the people were the individual states. The federal government could only act domestically through the mediation of the states. Hamilton warned that this would result in huge inequalities of power from state to state, and erode the sense of common community that the revolution had instilled in white Americans from Maine to the Carolinas.

The electoral college was one last part of the American federal government that mediated the actions and votes of the people through the individual states as entities.

In this century so far, it’s helped exacerbate violent and resentment tensions between different states and regions of the US, as its mathematical quirks have enabled two disastrous presidents to ascend to state power.

I can easily imagine Alexander Hamilton telling the people of the United States, “I told you so.”

Grinding the Great Plains in the Teeth of Tank Treads, Research Time, 16/06/2017

The American conquest of North America was more than just a war. The United States is the oldest democracy still functioning. Many times, it’s merely creaked along.

Civil wars, assassinations, uprisings of political violence. Don’t forget the festering wounds of the country’s birth defects – the genocide of indigenous peoples, slavery, then Klan terrorism, Jim Crow, then the War on Drugs.

As the United States government spread out from the original Thirteen Colonies to conquer French, Spanish, and Indigenous territory all the way to the Pacific Coast, the armies and militias carried the name of the USA. But the government came after the conquest.

A mass grave from the killing of hundreds of Lakota warriors and
civilians at Wounded Knee in what is now South Dakota.

Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist #8, describes how the conquest of the rest of the American continent would require war machines. It would not be accomplished through the authoritative violence of the state.

They could conquer the American west only through the high-speed brute force of the war machines – nomadic forces spreading at their own will across the continent’s territory. Only the British and Iroquois were able to hold them off. Other than that, these militias and armies flashed across the continent in wave after wave.

The violence that settled the American West was a force that needed no sanction but its own acts. Nothing enfolds or controls this violence – it’s a pure desire that goes where it will, destroying all that it encounters.

This is the violence of Judge Holden. But where Cormac McCarthy read the conquest as a religious experience – the reign of satan in a world that’s become a continent-wide forest fire – an attentive ontologist sees only the fire itself.

There was no real agency directing the expansion. Yes, there were laws and declarations from Washington, territorial and city governments appeared. But the genocidal violence was autonomous. Violence was the agent, and people were the expression of violence.

We’re accustomed to thinking of forces and processes the other way around. But the war machine of American conquest is a force that becomes the space itself. Its violence moves as space emptying itself of all existing structures of humanity.

Tribes, existing empires, peoples, and people all pushed farther and farther until the sheer weight of intensifying violence grinds all these subjects into particles indistinguishable from the plains.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called the war machine the creation of a nomad space. It’s an effective name, but it does an injustice to nomadic peoples themselves, who’ve too often been crushed by such machines. Just ask a Bedouin.

American people too often depict their old west with too much virtue.

No, what I’m riffing on here is the “smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in all directions . . . they themselves make them grow . . . make the desert no less than they are made by it . . . The variability, the polyvocality of directions, is an essential feature of smooth spaces of the rhizome type, and it alters their cartography.” These are words from A Thousand Plateaus.

The war machine is space and territory itself become violence. A militia reconstitutes land itself as a bloodbath, soaking the soil until the beaches and cliffs of the Pacific coast. The only limit to expansion was the end of land itself. The hungry consumption of violence grows the territory that it razes and fragments into particles.

This was the American expansion west from the Thirteen Colonies, the story of how the United States got its continent-sized shape.
• • •
Alexander Hamilton wrote about the danger that the coming conquest of the American west posed the people of the United States. If, in 1789, the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies decided to split the union into multiple states and confederacies, Hamilton said it would tear the American people apart.

Yeah, like I said, there’d be the internecine wars over territory as the different North American countries expanded west. But it wouldn’t be the same as the conflicts among the different South American states. They mostly had border wars, wars over small territorial possessions, wars of independence, or civil wars.

No, the United States’ expansion from 1810 to the start of its civil war was not the imposition of order. It was the wholesale cleansing of a continent’s territory through the annihilation of all societies, organizations, and cultures but that which extended from the Thirteen Colonies.

The state came later, with its sheen of law. The myth was that the USA’s expansion brought the law to a lawless land. The land was only lawless because they cleared away all the old laws first.

“Before Man Was, War Waited For Him,” Jamming, 09/06/2017

Here's an odd convergence as I thought about a passage in The Federalist Papers. I didn’t realize its implications in the moment I first read it, but thinking on it in my notebook today, it’s there. A glimpse of terror.

The Federalist Papers make a remarkably optimistic document. It would have to be. These essays were designed to sway popular opinion, so had to be appealing. And they had to sway popular opinion regarding one of the heaviest concerns ever facing the people of the United States – they had to choose what their country would be.

So you don’t throw in a stark manifestation of horror intentionally. This scream appeared by accident. At the time, they probably wouldn’t even have seen it as a scream. It would have been a call to adventure.

The quote from the title is from Cormac McCarthy's
Blood Meridian. It was written as a dark and bloody
myth of America's creation in the late stages of its
western conquest. A story of the best time for an
otherworldly evil to manifest on Earth was during
the American genocide of its indigenous people.
When the scalp was a form of currency.

Americans don’t like to think of themselves as an empire. I feel pretty safe saying this. Even with their military bases flung all over the world supporting countless international alliances,* American corporations and business leaders still some of the most powerful in the world, and having written the very rules of global financial institutions, no American would say their country is an empire.

* So many that even the President can’t even keep track of who’s a friend or an enemy.

By some technical definitions, they’re right. Americans didn’t conquer every country where they stuck a military base. But I’m not thinking about the empire around the world.

See, in Federalist #7, Alexander Hamilton talks about another reason why the United States will be better off unified under a federal government. Now, he talks about the fascinating philosophical ideas in other essays.

His conception of patriotism as the fundamental virtue for a peaceful society is fascinating. It puts Hamilton squarely in the tradition of Machiavellian republicans – the materialist democrats. But there are also a lot of frank practical discussions about the coming challenges Americans faced at that moment in history.**

** No, of course it wouldn’t be slavery. Hamilton may have been enlightened in many ways, but he still had no problem with slavery.

This challenge was looking west. It was the challenge of building an American empire. Hamilton also foresaw several separate American nations and confederacies sparking into constant war on each other. John Jay spoke in broad historical strokes about how all peoples slip into war with each other eventually.

Hamilton had a very specific war in mind. If the USA split into four or five different countries and peoples, they’d face a massive war of competition over each other’s imperialist expansion. Not war directly on each other, but war for control of the territory of the American west and north.

Canada has its malformed romantic memory of the War of 1812, but for Americans at the time, it was just one part of a massive, decades-long program of empire building. From 1783 to the 1840s, the United States government led a massive push of military forces and armed settlers west of the 1763 Proclamation Line all the way to the Pacific.

America, land of those brave enough to force thousands of people on
brutal death marches across 400 miles.

The United States failed to conquer England’s northern colony of Upper Canada, but they did a much better job with the chunks of New France that still existed south of the Great Lakes, and with New Spain.

Of course, the worst would happen to the Indigenous peoples. US policy during its westward expansion was the open genocide of Indigenous peoples – constant raids and massacres, disease inflicted on them to decimate their population, forced starvation on reserve land.

Probably the most intense single event of America’s Indigenous Holocaust was the Trail of Tears. It’s a lilting, poetic name for a brutal death march of hundreds of thousands of people from the Carolinas halfway across the fucking continent to what’s now Oklahoma.

Hamilton urged unity for the 13 American states because otherwise, violence might break out during this continental conquest. The only violence that was a problem for him was the violence among countries and peoples who could have come together as the United States.

What about the rest – British, French, Spanish, black slaves, indigenous sub-humans? Violence against them would bring triumph, the triumph of American empire.

Alexander Hamilton knew a few things about how to topple empires. He knew what kept an empire strong, and what made it vulnerable. Most importantly, he new that the only empire that could ever last was a monopoly.

Dank Enough for the Dreamers, Research Time, 08/06/2017

You read John Jay and you feel all the brutality of Henry Kissinger. In a few pages, he describes a world of war. Not constant war, not a world without any peace at all.

Jay’s world is of inevitable war – the knowledge that whatever peace and community exists between peoples at some time, corruption will erode that brotherhood like a swift river along clay banks. Best to make yourself one people, to avoid that old killing hatred.

Since I’ve already painted Alexander Hamilton as the pragmatic idealist of the group, you might think that he gives the uplifting account of national unity. It’s true – Hamilton’s vision of patriotism is inspiring.

I saw some prideful, self-aggrandizing, embarrassing patriotism during
the Harper years here in Canada. I'm thinking particularly of his
tasteless celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812.
The government arranged a spectacle of imperialist military history,
basking in the glory of Canada as the faithful northern diamond
of the British Empire. Gag me.

It’s also rooted in a vision of humanity that will tear each other apart for the sake of ego and fleeting glory, musket bullets turning to metal teeth devouring the flesh of our brothers.*

* I listened to Bob Dylan’s strangely haunting, fragmentary vernacular poem of a Nobel acceptance lecture the other day. I feel like throwing down a few naturalistic metaphors. It’s the Herman Melville in me.

Yes, says Hamilton, commercial trade and the multicultural fermentation that goes with it builds an impressive brotherhood among peoples. But those long relationships ultimately can’t stop war and hatred arising. It’s always possible for long-loving brothers to throw punches and draw blood.

A collection of neighbours becomes a people when they develop a shared concept of patriotic solidarity, and devote themselves, at least a little, to its force. That solidarity among a community is the productive kind of patriotism.

Patriotism is the virtue that grows out of that feeling of solidarity in each individual. That virtue in turn makes community solidarity possible, and encourages its growth. But such virtuous patriotism can become corrupt when solidarity turns to pride.

A prideful soul aggrandizes itself. A prideful man seeks the honour and glory of demonstrating his superiority over others. A prideful people, says Hamilton, seeks the same. The corruption of patriotism is a raging desire throughout a people to aggrandize themselves – to demonstrate their greatness by subjugating and humiliating others.

The patriotism of solidarity consolidates communities and individuals into a people. One of the essential beliefs such a virtue of patriotism generates is the notion that all of our countryfolk rise and fall together.

The patriotism of pride corrupts that solidarity through the belief that our rise requires others’ fall.

The Power(less), Research Time, 01/06/2017

Yesterday, I wrote about how the larger work of forging a unified American identity across all 13 states was a key purpose of the country’s federalist project, the United States’ second constitution.* But Alexander Hamilton had both lofty and brutally pragmatic reasons for wanting American federalism to succeed.

* Another reason why I find modern originalist jurists’ slavish devotion to a virtually Salafist originalism of the 1789 American constitution. That constitution was itself the second go-around of the American government’s structure. The Founding Fathers wrote it with the knowledge that they were fallible.

Grover Norquist is a well-spoken man who I respect as the most honest
and straightforward of the contemporary right wing. I mean, I reject
and am appalled by almost everything he stands for. But he doesn't
pussyfoot around the bush, and I respect that. It's a breath of fresh air.
It's the air of an ambition to build a one-party state. Still counts.

Actually, let’s compare and contrast some contemporary Americans with the originals. One of the biggest arguments to justify a lot of the Republican Party’s reactionary program has been “state’s rights.”

Giving more power to the states, and away from the federal government, is a major goal of the modern American right. They understand the presence of the federal government in local affairs as a massive intrusion on your life.

Now, it’s not as though a lot of people aren’t under threat by the federal government of the United States. I’d say we’re a generation particularly suited to understanding, in systematic and fairly rigorous terms, all those hideous powers of the government.

That’s what the mass incarceration system does – millions of people imprisoned for years on laughably minor marijuana offences, their careers after release ruined by laws and popular fears of hiring convicts. The growth of the private prison sector is just one dangerous (and sometimes confusing) addition to this long-festering social cancer.

The surveillance state does it too. This is more indirect, because its presence in people’s everyday lives is more of a hovering aura than the direct violence of gunshots and prison walls.

But the Republican right wing rarely focusses on this. Having to pay taxes, I think. Environmental protection laws. Workplace safety laws.

Yet what does the hippest Founding Father write? He says that an expanded federal government that can act on many local levels is a massive decentralization of power. It seems totally counter to the problems of today.

Now look at his examples of serious problems facing the country in 1789. It all comes down to a very Machiavellian answer – corruption.

Alexander Hamilton may finally have lost.

Hamilton describes local mega-rich (for the time) industry leaders. Plantation owners and factory chiefs. Men who, practically speaking, own their entire towns – or else, they hold everyone in their grasp through wealth and influence.

That's one original danger to American democracy – local oligarchs. A strong federal government would counter-balance their power.

The other danger Hamilton discusses are local state officials – mayors, appointees, legislators, and governors – who use their positions to exploit their people. Maybe they’re kleptocrats, for sale to the highest-bidding local businessman. Maybe they’re tinpot autocrats building a personal fiefdom for their ego.

These are groups who corrupt the practices of government and business for selfish reasons. People who’ve lost their sight of the public good, or who never cared for it in the first place.

The greatest danger America faced in 1789 – when the gun barrels of the War of Independence had barely cooled – was corrupt powerful people who’d abuse their power and public trust for their own gain.

So you'd need a powerful federal government to overcome the local schemes of on-the-ground businessmen and corrupt local officials.

Hamilton’s words are insightful and powerful. Maybe there was something to originalist legal theory after all. But I’m left with a question.

What happens when the corrupt men take over all the levels of government?

American Ghosts, Research Time, 31/05/2017

So I was reading through The Federalist Papers a while ago. It was the first time I’d read any of that volume since an undergraduate course on political theory I took back in my undergraduate years.

Now that I’ve looked back through these essays, I find it remarkable that we didn’t study Alexander Hamilton and James Madison as full-fledged political philosophers on the same level as John Locke, Adam Smith, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Do they focus on The Federalist Papers in the political theory and history courses of universities in the United States? I feel like they must. American friends and friends who teach in America – let me know about this. I’m interested to know.

I actually haven't seen the full show of Hamilton yet, but I have a distinct
feeling that Lin-Manuel Miranda doesn't spend a lot of time meditating
on the necessity of a legitimate government to levy domestic taxes.
There are beats to funkify.

If any text can be a foundation of US-American utopias, this is it. It lays out the structure of American politics itself. What’s more, it does so from a conceptual and an institutional perspective at the same time. Hamilton and Madison thought intimately and intricately about how each element of American institutions would safeguard the people’s freedom.

At a time like ours, when influential figures on the right wing of US politics seem to be openly advocating the creation of a one-party state under the Republicans. No matter the feelings of patriotism in the modern, paranoid Republican party, they’re out to destroy the institutions that real American patriots like Hamilton and Madison built.

The Federalist Papers were written as a (successful) attempt to lobby a popular audience into voting for a referendum result. Given the magnitude of what they were voting for, I’m kind of impressed that Hamilton and Madison’s (and John Jay too) arguments achieved what they did.

I’m sure they weren’t the only pro-federalist outreach that side of the referendum had going for it. But they were the most famous throughout the time since. Hamilton and Madison stand as the first philosophers of the North American continent to contribute to the Western tradition.*

* Reading the essays, James Madison deals most explicitly and for the longest time on distinctly philosophical concerns. You have to look for Alexander Hamilton’s thinking lying underneath his institutional language. Not far, though.

While Madison is the premier philosopher of the Federalist trio, Hamilton sometimes walks the knife edges of the toughest paradoxes. Here’s an example – his argument that a powerful federal government actually decentralizes power.

This is exactly the opposite of the so-called patriotic argument among the right that the individual states of the union should hold all real government and bureaucratic power. Hamilton writes in an era where the USA’s only federal institution of elected officials was the Continental Congress, the federal legislative assembly.

You could accurately and metaphorically call Governor Paul LePage
a Mainiac, alright. But state-level leaders like him were an example
of why Hamilton wanted a strong federal government. Where
American state-level politics seemed dominated by fraudsters,
local oligarchs, and enraged demagogues. The federal government
was intended as (if I can steal one of my own lines), a sober
second thought against the hot-headed independence of states.
Well, eventually, everything tends to fall apart.

But the Congress had very little power domestically. Each state – Virginia, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and each of the rest – was basically its own independent country, joined in a confederation. The only institutional purpose of the Continental Congress was to represent the states. It couldn’t even levy domestic taxes – that too was just for the states.

It was completely unworkable. A federal system of mixed domestic powers was necessary for a government that could be at all useful to its people. Hamilton leaves aside the question of what such a disunified government would face internationally, and in the early papers talks mostly about the relationship of people to their government.

If your federal government just represents the provinces or states as institutions, then you aren’t really a citizen of the United States. You’re a Knickerbocker, a Sandlapper, a Nutmegger, or a Mainiac. There’s no American.

Because when you’re trying to forge a new identity from 13 (or more) separate ones, you need the unifying institution – the federal government – to be present in people’s lives. There has to be a link between the daily life of an individual with their federal government.

The line to your federal representative, the appearance of federal government workers and rules in your life, has to be alive for the national identity to set in. Being American – institutionally – has to matter to everyone across all the member states if people are going to be American in their identities.

Hamilton offers another argument for why domestic American populations needed a strong federal government. But that more Machiavellian answer will come tomorrow.