Reading Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton on the back of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy I’m struck by the necessary yet unintended consequences of Federalism’s eventual dominance over Jeffersonian ideals. Even at our country’s inception a gulf formed between rural Southerners and urban Northerners over personal freedom vs. central control for the collective good. Money won, as it will, and the collective good of capitalism – “all boats lifted on a rising tide” - became the foundational logic supporting successive legislative bricks. The result is a comfortable, if crowded, residence reflective of a nuclear family, with personal freedom proponents akin to restive teenagers, secure but forgetful of where that security came from and sullen about the rules. Feeling their oats those teens openly rebelled in 1860 under the banner of restricted rights and, like a wiser parent will curtail coltish revolt, Lincoln forcefully brought them to heel. But the chafe of romantic idealism under commerce’s unforgiving logic wasn’t extinguished, just temporarily quenched; the warped honor code, victim mentality, and immature decisions elucidated in Hillbilly Elegy – along with the recent election of a bullying buffoon to the presidency by this same constituency - are the sulfurous vapor of its dormant rumblings. The feud between Hamilton and Jefferson smolders on, requiring only a breath of oxygen, a crack in the surface, to erupt as it nearly did in 1800.
The conflict of hard logic vs. romantic idealism extends farther abroad than the founding fathers, of course. In Richard Holmes’ Age of Wonder the same vein is tapped by Wordsworth in his 1798 poem “The Tables Turned” where he goads the studious to leave off studying –“Books! Tis a dull and endless strife” for a stroll in the woods and laments that “Our meddling intellect mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: — We murder to dissect” while Keats castigates Newton in for erasing the poetry from a rainbow by “reducing it to a prism”. Jeffersonian enthusiasts would surely relate to these sentiments, clutching to the agrarian dream of a United States populated by gentlemen farmers and a benevolent aristocracy musing over soaring poems between rounds of mint juleps. A rising tide requires more of Hamilton’s energetic ingenuity, more of Ben Franklin’s industry and frugality, than Jefferson’s dewy daydreams.
The general sulkiness of idealists subverted by science has morphed into real consequences for the nation. Like it or not, Hamilton had the prescience to predict the driver of our national engine with his Federalist Papers – economic industry and trade. When a full third of our GDP is spent on healthcare and a third of that is spent on futile care in the last three weeks of life, romantic idealism at the cost of hard, scientific logic is an ebb tide. Government sponsored medical treatments are clustered around the holy trinity of –largely controllable – diseases: hypertension, obesity, & diabetes. The largest user demographic of federally-funded care for this triad of trouble is – you guessed it – Southerners, descendants of the same stubborn, romantic Scots-Irish that swept Jefferson into the presidency, figuratively killing the Federalist party forever (and ironically placing Aaron Burr into the vice presidency, the man who killed Federalism’s founder literally).
It’s as if the rebellious teens settled into apathy after losing the battle and said, with arms crossed, “Fine, if I have to live in your house and follow your rules I will slouch my way to the fridge, humidor, & liquor cabinet, load my arms with the bounty you’ve stocked, plop into the comfy sofa you’ve provided, and solace my fruitless rage with a constant release of dopamine, pleasuring my health into ruin. Oh, you’ll counsel me about my reckless behavior based on statistics and science and I won’t listen, but – out of your sense of guilt - rather than enforce consequences you’ll ply me with ever-more-costly palliatives until your finances are in shambles, the house is sold, and we move into a run-down trailer park with a Chinese landlord.”
I love reading history books; they make so much more sense of the present.
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