Barrack Obama: Hamiltonian?
(posted by Kevin Carson)
Obama really knows how to harsh a guy’s buzz.
A while back, I expressed the hope that he was to some extent a departure from establishment liberalism. Establishment liberalism, I had previously argued, was the ideology of the professional and managerial New Middle Class, which managed the new large organizations that had sprung up in the corporate economy of the late nineteenth century, and wanted to manage society as a whole the same way they managed their corporations. It was exemplified by Herbert Croly who, in The Promise of American Life, called for the achievement of “Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means.”
With all history that’s passed through the narrow canyons of Lower Manhattan, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the role that the market has played in the development of the American story. The great task before our founders was putting into practice the ideal that government could simultaneously serve liberty and advance the common good. For Alexander Hamilton, the young secretary of the treasury, that task was bound to the vigor of the American economy. Hamilton had a strong belief in the power of the market, but he balanced that belief with a conviction that human enterprise, and I quote, “may be beneficially stimulated by prudent aids and encouragements on the part of the government.” Government, he believed, had an important role to play in advancing our common prosperity. So he nationalized the state Revolutionary War debts, weaving together the economies of the states and creating an American system of credit and capital markets. And he encouraged manufacturing and infrastructure, so products could be moved to market. Hamilton met fierce opposition from Thomas Jefferson, who worried that this brand of capitalism would favor the interests of the few over the many.
Jefferson was right on this score. America’s history didn’t start with Obama’s “founders” of 1787. It had already experienced decades of contentious history, most of it dominated by struggle between the “few” and the “many” that Obama spoke of. That struggle, especially, dominated the post-revolutionary politics of the 1780s (see, for example, neo-Beardian Merrill Jensen’s work: The Founding of a Nation , on the 1760s and ’70s, and The Articles of Confederation).
The American left wing, by far the dominant force in the Revolution, adhered to the Anglo-republican tradition of the Levellers and Commonwealthmen, Trenchard and Gordon, and John Wilkes.
The right wing, on the other hand, was a carbon copy of the British Court Party (the party of the Whig landed oligarchy and Walpolean finance). They had supported the role of Parliament as imperial coordinator and mercantile regulator, and only reluctantly embraced the revolutionary cause when Parliament went too far. Their goal in the 1780s was to create a new imperial center that would serve the same functions previously served by Parliament: to regulate and promote imperial commerce, protect the interests of speculators in Continental securities, and accommodate the great land speculators looking to engross the territories of the West.
Throughout the 1780s, the politics of the newly independent states was dominated by the conflict between these two parties. On the one hand, by far the majority of the public and the dominant force in the revolutionary coalition, was the party of subsistence farmers in the country and self-employed tradesmen in the towns. On the other hand was the party who thought the Revolution had gone too far, and wanted to create a new version of the old British commercial Empire with an American federal head in place of London. They were the party of Continental war bond speculators, long-distance merchants, and land grabbers.
When the Court Party regained power in Massachusetts, the majority of farmers and small tradesmen grew restive under the yoke of debt foreclosures and taxes to pay off the war bonds of the moneyed interests; that was the motive for Shays’ Rebellion.
The Federal Convention of 1787 was essentially a movement of the Court Party, panicked by the success of the farmers’ and tradesmen’s parties in the state legislatures, and especially by Shays’ militia companies shutting down half the courthouses in Massachusetts. The framing and ratification of the Constitution was, precisely, a counter-revolutionary coup by Obama’s “few” against the “many.”
A good example of the new government’s orientation was Hamilton’s policy on the war debt. Despite Obama’s goo-goo, “public interest,” and “general welfare” rhetoric about the deal, it was an eighteenth century version of the Bear Stearns bailout. With Hamilton leading him around by the nose, Washington adopted a policy of paying off the Revolutionary War debt at face value; this despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of bond owners had bought them second- or third-hand, at a tiny fraction of their face value. The new government also assumed the state war debts, despite the fact that some (like Pennsylvania) had already completely paid off their own debts and their working people would be taxed a second time to pay off the debts of other states.
Hamilton’s agenda was simply a warmed-over version of Walpole’s financial system in Britain: a government united around the stock-jobbers and moneyed interests, the biggest commercial capitalists, the people who lived off the returns of paper wealth, and the great land speculators. In short, it was a government of plutocratic piggies at the teats of the great tax-funded sow.
This was the agenda of the Whigs and the Gilded Age GOP. And after 1932, even the Democratic Party was hijacked by neo-Hamiltonians. All you have to do to verify this is look at the role of GE’s Gerard Swope and the Business Advisory Council in the New Deal, or the army of corporate lawyers and investment bankers who dominated FDR’s and every Democratic (and of course Republican) administration since. Since the triumph of the DLC, the Democrats might as well turn the Secretary of the Treasury’s position into a Goldman-Sachs endowed chair (who’s Hillary’s chief economic adviser? Why, Bob Rubin, previously of the aforementioned investment bank and now of Citibank).
March 29th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
If you can stomach a neocon-imperialist white nationalist (worst of both worlds, I know) you might be interested in this (and some of its linked articles) on Barack Obama and the “New Class” we’ve been discussing, but he’s pretty thickheaded and doesn’t give much thought to the economics and policies behind the rise of this class.
March 29th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Wonderful! You are on a roll, Kevin.
March 29th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
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March 29th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Thanks, Sheldon.
TGGP: The guy’s certainly on the mark about professionals’ disdainful cultural attitude toward working class whites, I’ll say that. Considering the racial stuff you have to wade through to get to it, though, I think I’ll pass.
March 30th, 2008 at 12:11 am
Thanks, Ian, I’m 2 for 2!
In all seriousness though, do you deny being a white nationalist?
March 30th, 2008 at 2:41 am
What the fuck does “pro-white” mean?
March 30th, 2008 at 5:38 am
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March 30th, 2008 at 6:11 am
Well, I give Obama credit that he at least has the philosophical chops to dig deep back to 1787 to make a Hamiltonian case for statism. The allure of Obama has never been his actual policy positions but his rhetorical departure from the brain-dead propaganda of the GOP and the spineless Clintonian triangulation of the Democrats.
If the choice is between a monomaniac perched all night awaiting the 3AM Call or the Dictator-in-Chief who promises more wars and centuries of occupation, or the Orator who invokes Hamilton, the choice is an easy one.
Of course, myself, being a LP member, will likely end up throwing my vote away on the LP nominee.
March 30th, 2008 at 6:31 am
Rbt. Lindsay, what you say makes no goddamn sense at all. What do you mean you’re proud to be white? Being white represents no accomplishment on your part. Or did you actually choose your genes? If you’re pro-white, you must be con something? What’s that? Really say something. Don’t just parrot stupid slogans.
March 30th, 2008 at 9:01 am
My take on Barack Obama is and always has been that he’s just another shyster politician. To the degree he stands for anything at all, it’s basically just a yuppie version of black nationalism that’s more personal than political.
My questions would be what is Barack going to do to shut down the US empire and end the slaughter perpetrated by the US around the world? What is he going to do to advance the class struggle against state-capitalism? Is he going to shut down the police state, drug war, etc.? So far as I can tell he is worthless on all these and other important points.
I don’t vote, but I tend to root for the guy I think will end up fucking up the system the worst. For instance, I rooted for Bush over Kerry. Losing two wars, alienating world opinion from the Empire, bankrupting the empire in the process, alientating domestic opinion including many conservatives and Republicans, suffering an international humiliation-that’s a fair amount of damage.
I rooting for McCain this time. A war with Iran resulting in Bill Lind’s prognosis of a Spain 1588 defeat for the Empire sounds about right.
March 30th, 2008 at 11:52 am
ka1igu1a:
“The allure of Obama has never been his actual policy positions but his rhetorical departure from the brain-dead propaganda of the GOP and the spineless Clintonian triangulation of the Democrats.”
OK, I’ll give you that one, for sure. I don’t despise him on a visceral level, the way I do Hillary (the most dangerous place in the world is between her and her script).
Keith:
The most I’ll say for Obama is that he’ll let the growth of Empire and police state slip backward just a bit–instead of continuing the upward ratcheting we had under Reno, Ashcroft, & Co. I’m afraid McCain will do something really godawful like appoint Giuliani AG. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see Hillary take Janet Reno out of mothballs. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the latter with her head mounted atop an FBI armored assault vehicle, like Captain Pike in his wheelchair.
I’m afraid McCain’s dramatic finish for the Empire, if that’s what results, will cause some extremely ugly times in the transition. If one or more carriers are sunk by Sunburns, Shia militias cut off American supply lines from the Gulf, and oil skyrockets to $300/barrel, the domestic political effects will probably lead to martial law.
I’d much, much prefer the collapse to be the kind of gradual process Warren Johnson predicted in the 1970s, with the highways and airports gradually falling into disrepair and becoming too expensive to use, industry decentralizing to local markets, and counter-institutions having time to supplant the state as it retreats.
March 30th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
“…like Captain Pike in his wheelchair.”
I like that. I’m always down with a good Star Trek.
I’ve considered the possibility you’re describing. I’ve thought if the US loses an army in Iran, conscription for the purpose of a retaliatory war may be imposed, with the boobsgeoisie going along because “those damn ragheads killed our boys! USA!USA!” and all that dumbass shit. If there’s resistance and/or domestic economic collapse or another 9-11, martial law may well be the result (we’re about there anyway).
The other side of it is that moderates might have the effect of stabilizing the system for the long haul, thereby maintaining a veneer of greater legitimacy and making it more invincible ultimately-the FDR effect.
March 30th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
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March 30th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Robert Lindsay,
I doubt Sheldon Richman is proud of being Jewish any more than I am of being an Irish-Armenian hybrid. Your sense of pride can in no way be projected on to others. And anyway, lest we forget, Judaism is a religion, not a race.
I’ll grant you this: I may very well become more cognizant of being white when I’m the only white guy around (as you are, apparently), but I’m not sure that would translate into pride.
Perhaps if I were in prison, and my life depended on faking white pride because the only olive branch came from the Aryan “club”, would I go as far as to say I was proud of being (nominally?) white.
March 30th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
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March 30th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Ian,
Wouldn’t your own analysis of whites themselves being the cultivators of anti-white sentiment undermine your idea of whites as the sustainers of Western Culture?
And if what is known as “Western Culture” today involves a particular form of reflexive self-criticism and empty multiculturalism, then what is valuable about sustaining it? As many insightful people have pointed out, almost all of the awful ideas so popular in America today are the result of white people’s ideologies and ideas, and/or their enthusiastic support.
March 30th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
My take on Obama is that he is possibly, but perhaps only marginally, better than Hillary Clinton. At the least, he has not embraced the DLC, although they have already tried to embrace him. If you believe Counterpunch and Black Agenda, Obama is being silently backed by sectors of the financial elite because they want a new face for American Imperialism, one which is less alienating than Bush and Co., John McCain, or even Hillary Clinton–which may be true, but that the ruling class hedges its bets isn’t terribly surprising either–so I am not trying to be too hard on him.
On the ground, most of the Obama supporters I know are idealistic younger folks, who probably haven’t voted before; African Americans, who are justifiably excited about a “change,” even if it is a superficial one; and labor folks who simply can’t stand Hillary Clinton–which isn’t a bad bunch to work with.
My hope is that if Obama wins, that this will energize his base and pull him (possibly against his will) in directions that he may not actually be intending. The worst case scenario is Obama gets elected, people “wait” for the change (I sound like John Mayer), and the change comes, but it isn’t what they expected (Obama morphs into Hillary Clinton in blackface).
I will be voting for Obama on April 22, but my hopes are less with him than with grass roots groups which may have a better chance if he wins than with the alternatives.
March 30th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
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March 30th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
In what sense am I a fake?
I discussed the odd fit between classic nationalism and what is now called “white nationalism” here. As a bigwig in American Renaissance, you would most definitely be considered a white nationalism. Your statement about ensuring that the country be controlled by whites (rather than merely people you would consider competent and implementing good policies) is also typically white nationalist.
March 30th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
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March 31st, 2008 at 2:29 pm
“These White guys in this thread acting like White pride is automatically Aryan Nazi stuff and denying that they have any ethnocentric feelings about being White are a prime example of how we Whites have been brainwashed into self-hatred. White pride is perfectly consonant with liberalism, Leftism and anti-racism. It’s just normal to be somewhat ethnocentric; we all are, really, deep down.”
I do not think white pride is automatically Nazi. It’s just hysterical to claim so, so I won’t do it. I DO think white pride is kinda laughable, then again the most important person in my life right now is black. And I’ll cop to a double standard: Black pride does NOT seem quite so laughable to me. I’ll back this up if anybody insists.
I’ll grant that white pride is not necessarily anti left, though probably anti-liberal in the broader, historical sense. It’s even possible for it to be anti-racist if one understands that pride in ones racial “heritage” does not automatically equate into disdain for other races. Black pride does not necessarily mean hatred of whites, for instance, and psychological/public opinion research has suggested this. (I belileve it was John Ray investigating abuses and misues of the “F-Scale”.)
In light of the above, Robert, you’d be just as wrong to accuse whites of a kind of false consciousness for claiming to not value or consider their whiteness as “Authoritarian Personality” enthusiasts are for claiming to have found latent Fascism behind every mention of the value of meritorcracy or individualism (which they have!). It’s entirely presumptuous.
That is to say, I no more disbelieve you when you say you aren’t a Nazi than you should disbelieve other whites on this forum who claim to be indifferent about the value of their whiteness.
March 31st, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Apparently, the art which is possible here is to get Kevin to post on a regular basis. Much better than that other blog he was doing 8~)
And, in the spirit of Orwell, shouldn’t the answer to the above question be 5? Maybe if it was reworded:
To help us filter out spam, by way of noting that all computers and other beings non-responsive to irrationalist propaganda would compute a very mundane and wrong 4, please type the number which Big Brother wishes you to answer to this question …
March 31st, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Eric,
Well, I ain’t getting paid jack at my other blog. Since my focus over there has shifted almost entirely to the org theory book I’m writing, about all I do is post chapter drafts and the occasional related article.
I try to delete as much of the comment spam as I catch.
On the whole white pride thing, I’d appreciate if the whole topic just faded away. I just finished a post on the general issue and how I intend to handle it in the future.