Part 5
The second big Hamiltonian idea—the critical role of the nation and national feeling—is likely to be at least as important in the coming era of American politics. Hamilton was a patriot. Perhaps because he was an immigrant without deep roots in a particular colony, he believed that the bonds that hold Americans together mattered more than the ethnic, regional, religious, and philosophical differences that divided them. For Hamilton, and for Hamiltonians such as Lincoln and Roosevelt, the preamble to the Constitution mattered. “We the people of the United States,” the founders wrote, not “We the peoples.”
Then, as now, Americans must embrace a duty of care toward one another. Nationalism—or patriotism, for those allergic to the more common term—is a moral necessity, not a moral failing. Americans are not just citizens of the world but also citizens of the American republic. And just as individual Americans have duties and ties to their family members that they do not have to the public at large, they have obligations to their fellow citizens that do not extend to all humankind. Hamilton risked his life fighting for a nation that was just being born. His successors have characteristically made patriotism the bedrock of their participation in political life. The sincerity of patriotism, which led so many into military service, has helped to legitimize the Hamiltonian vision for other Americans who were not instinctively drawn to the Hamiltonian ideal.
Hamiltonians have understood that patriotism lends American business a legitimacy without which its future is insecure. It is the patriotism of businesspeople as a class that ultimately safeguards their property and their lives. If a corporation considers itself a citizen of the world; is as at home in China, India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia as it is in the United States; and has leaders who feel no special obligations toward the American people, why would the American people support this business against unfair competition from foreigners? Or for that matter, why would they not simply tax its profits and confiscate its assets?
The shift from national Hamiltonianism to globalism across much of the post–Cold War American elite has massive, although often overlooked, implications for the immigration debate. If U.S. business leaders are not committed, first and foremost, to the American people, populists will be free to impugn corporate advocacy for higher levels of immigration as a sinister plot against the well-being of the average American family.
Hamilton stood for an impassioned but enlightened patriotism. He risked his life in battle for his country and dedicated himself to its service, at times to his considerable financial or personal cost. He understood that the security of property and liberty rests on the legitimacy of society’s leaders and that if the great and the powerful are seen to despise the common good and the common man, the social order will come crashing down. He was neither a jingoist nor a xenophobe, but he understood that a commercial society cannot flourish unless its social and business leaders are clearly, conspicuously, and consistently identified with the flag.
This sense of the necessary connection between solid patriotism and the political legitimacy of business and property was largely, although never entirely, lost in the post–Cold War years. Elite universities moved ever farther away from their old role of instilling patriotism in their students or expecting it from their faculties. Hamilton would have condemned this as a dangerous folly likely to end in attacks on the legitimacy of the state and the security of property. Hamiltonians have long understood that elite privilege can be justified only by a conspicuous adherence to a widely accepted vision of the common good—and that serious patriotism is an indispensable element of that adherence.
The third idea to recover from Hamilton’s legacy is the concept of realism in foreign policy. The originality of the Anglo-American foreign policy intellectual tradition is not sufficiently appreciated with respect to this idea. Hamilton and his followers neither stand with the naive liberal internationalists nor with the Machiavellian realpolitikers. Unlike the naifs, he did not believe that humanity was naturally good or naturally disposed to settle down in democratic and egalitarian societies, all harmoniously at peace with one another. Short of divine intervention, he did not expect the arrival of a perfectly just society, a perfectly honest government, or a perfectly fair international order. He did not even expect a reasonable approximation of these eminently desirable conditions to appear.
Hamilton believed that people were naturally flawed. They were selfish, greedy, jealous, petty, vindictive, and sometimes extraordinarily brutal and cruel. Elites were arrogant and grasping; mobs were ignorant and emotional. With such material you could not build a perfect village, much less a perfect nation or a perfect world order. Democratic peace theory, the idea that democracies would never go to war with each other, had not received its modern form, but Hamilton’s argument in “Federalist No. 6” (of
The Federalist Papers) is a sustained attack on what he saw as the delusional folly behind such utopian dreams. And the idea that global institutions such as the United Nations would ever have the wisdom, power, or legitimacy to replace national governments would have seemed dangerously credulous. He never accepted the idea that U.S. foreign policy should be about installing democracies in other countries or establishing a global system of government. He rejected Jefferson’s call for an ideological crusade at the side of revolutionary France. But that view did not drive him, or those who follow in his footsteps, to cynical depths of despair. Hamiltonians might not be able to transform earth into heaven, but that did not mean they had to go to hell. Following a tradition of Anglo-American thought grounded in books such as Adam Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments, Hamiltonians see human nature offering the hope for limited and perhaps only temporary but still real improvements in the human condition.
/Part 5