The Most Reluctant Federalist

It surprises most people (it surprised me) to find out that the founding fathers of the United States never intended for there to be two political parties. The expectation was that, as anyone might run for the nomination in the party primaries, this would provide for all the variety the country could possibly want. If you think about today's campaigns, you can see what they meant. Either of the parties today has more than half a dozen candidates in the field, providing a great variety of ideologies from which the American people can choose. If there were a single party perhaps the candidates would range from Huckabee, through McCain, Romney, Giuliani, Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Richardson, and Biden to Gravel and Kucinich. Providing an entire rainbow of the spectrum of possible political outlooks (I didn't know where to put Gravel in that rough spectrum; I think he might be insane). The official election in the electoral college was intended to be a mere formality, a ritual of unity.

The irony of the world, is that in politics the step in the opposite direction from the most logical one is often the one that results most directly in progress in the right direction. Why is this? Maybe it is because when a leader moves against the grain of the people, it is that much easier to gauge what direction the people are actually moving in.

George Washington was elected without party politics. Although his deputies and confidants would almost exclusively tend toward the so-called Federalists, in particular Alexander Hamilton, and he himself tended toward the central authority philosophy they advanced, he was nowhere near the autocrat Hamilton hoped to someday be. Hamilton genuinely and unashamedly wanted the new country emerging on the coast of North America to be a Kingdom. At first, he envisioned George Washington as it's king, but admitted that it would not be practical to institute it in the atmosphere of 1776 North America, so he advocated instead for Senators and Presidents to be elected for life. After Washington's retirement, a relinquishment of power that could only have confused and dismayed Hamilton, and seeing no other candidate as well suited in his eyes, he began to see himself as the true potential president-for-life.

But strangely, it was not the Federalists who broke from the original path. It was Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans who were seen at the time as splitting from the one party system. Though Jefferson represented by far the more accurate vision of government intended by the general consensus of North American rebels when they declared their independence and established a government soon to be declared "of the people, by the people and for the people," it was he who once again was obligated to declare a more qualified independence and effect his own 'second' revolution in order to keep the country on the path of self-determinism. Hamilton had begun organizing his faction while Secretary of the Treasury, consolidating his power by doling out the patronage of the Department of the Treasury to potential allies. Jefferson and his ideologues were in danger of being completely excluded from the political elite of the new government, so it was as a matter of political survival that Jefferson was forced to split from the Federalists.

Between Washington and Jefferson, a man held the office of the presidency who I had overlooked for my entire life until my mother recommended that I listen to the recent Pulitzer winning biography by David McCullough which she had taken out of the library in recorded edition. Ideologically somewhere between Washington and Jefferson, if he had not existed, Jefferson would almost certainly have been the second president. But because he did exist, Federalists backed him (and not Hamilton) which brought more moderates into the federalist camp.

I admire John Adams. He was a strong character, and if it weren't for him the U.S. would have allied itself directly with France and almost certainly reignited the war with Britain. I don't believe for a second Hamilton would have been the second president, which would almost certainly have resulted in Alliance with Britain and War with France, but the fact that he kept us out of that war entirely is the greatest precedent he could have set for our country. I'm not claiming that Jefferson was the democratic reincarnation of Jesus Christ. He was, in all honesty, too much of a believer in pure democracy. Pure Democracy doesn't work, as the war in Europe eventually proved, with the rise of Bonaparte to power and the subsequent Terrors. I consider it unfortunate that his existence assured the survival of the extremist Federalist ideology, which is the exact ideology which is giving us such grief today in Washington. It is sad that somewhere between the competing personalities of the two men, Adams and Jefferson, who had been friends and would become friends again later in life, that they could not have competed within the one party framework, marginalized Hamilton, and thereby have circumvented two hundred and ten years of divisiveness and alternations of regressions and progress.

But Adams, the Giuliani of the Federalist party, gave Hamilton relevance, and although Hamilton never became president, he set a precedent of Presidential over-reaching which has resulted in the swollen executive branch we have today. Adams did not want to be a Federalist, he did not want to be rivals to his onetime friend Thomas Jefferson, and he did not want to dilute the legislative branch's authority, which he wrote ought to be the ultimate sovereign authority. But in being president, despite being a truly admirable president and doing things no other president could have done in his place at that time, in being a FEDERALIST president, he is the precursor to George W. Bush.

I didn't know this until this week, but George W. Bush has appointed, whenever possible, members of a club called the Federalist Society, whose members include Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito, as well as Kenneth Starr, Orrin Hatch and Michael Chertoff. As you can see, Skull and Bones is hardly the dirty little secret of the Bush Administration. The Federalist Society is.

We have an opportunity to truly destroy the Republican party in this country today. This does not mean that we will destroy all fiscal responsibility, nor that we'll destroy religion, although I devoutly hope we will shake it from its place of honor at the table of governance, where it has NO FUCKING PLACE. There are plenty of Democrats who believe in the ideology of John Adams, that of peace through strength, of avoiding foreign entanglements (as George Washington told us to do) yet still believe in the rule of law. The Federalist Society believes in the rule of the lawgiver, which is a Monarchy or worse a Dictatorship. If you really want an America that is democratic and safe and not dependent on other countries for financial stability, find yourself a democratic candidate who will become a member of the 'Blue Dogs' when he's elected to Congress. These are 'conservative' Democrats, and they will expand the party into something the founding fathers could only dream about. "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists" Jefferson said in his first inaugural address, and in 2009, 208 years later, we have a chance to make that vision a reality, to make America safe for democracy, where all philosophies are welcome under the canvas of one party, where all views are heard by all Americans, and which supports and upholds the constitution instead of systematically undermining it.