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The Realignment
581 | Jeffrey Rosen: Hamilton vs. Jefferson and the Battle Over Government Power in 21st Century America
00:53:55
Jeffrey Rosen, President of the National Constitution Center and author of The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America, returns to The Realignment. Marshall and Jeffrey discuss how debates over Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson's ideas about the power of government has shaped America's political debates since the 18th century, whether our struggle to make government work effectively to accomplish its goals results from too much Jeffersonianism, why political philosophy isn't just an academic interest, and how Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump's project of attacking the administrative state and the government power will stand the test of time.
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- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment. Earlier this year, my Niskan and colleague Mark Dunkelman published why Nothing Works, who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back. Why Nothing Works is the perfect companion book to Abundance because it tells the story of why it feels like we can't build and government can't work through the lens of the idea that 20th century plus American liberalism is torn between two competing instincts, one Hamiltonian and one Jeffersonian. On the Hamiltonian side, we want to electrify the Texas Hill country and build the Tennessee Valley Authority during the New Deal. On the Jeffersonian side, we want to protect local communities from getting bulldozed by Robert Moses imposing his vision of New York without their input. In Mark's telling, we are now unable to do good and build big things like the TVA because we leaned too hard into Jeffersonian ideas in the 1970s after we looked at the wreckage left by the Hamiltonian 30s through 1960s. Solving today's problems requires finding a balance between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton's visions. So I was excited to see that. Jeffrey Rosen, previous guest president of the National Constitution center, has a new book out, the Pursuit of how Hamilton vs. Jefferson ignited the Lasting Battle over Power in America. Our conversation gave me the chance to dive deeper into how Hamilton vs. Jefferson and their dynamic has shaped American history and how we can influence today's policy debates by keeping this perspective over power in mind. Jeffrey Rosen, welcome back to the realignment.
- [01:36]
B
Thank you. So great to be back.
- [01:39]
A
Yeah, I'm very excited for you. So we're going to start in a fun way of reconciling my inner career turmoil. So I'm in this weird position where I work at a think tank and I work in academia. So my world is super inside baseball, fancy people talking to fancy people about things that the public might not be interested in. And that side of my career is awesome. But sometimes I also go into like really popular YouTube world. And in really popular YouTube world, I co hosted a show called Breaking Point. So millions of people are watching. So the opposite of the way think tank world works. And we were doing a show on the abundance agenda, just the idea we need to build more. And I was speaking with a critic and this critic was very critical. So I was sort of explaining that a lot of my thoughts on abundance are rooted in this debate over Hamilton and Jefferson of my colleague Mark Dunkelman's book why Nothing Works. And his central idea is that we have this Jeffersonian impulse which basically says the local matters democracy from the bottom up. Matters. And we really should have in terms of how it's operationalized itself in American politics, like local communities and the yeoman farmer, not the big people in the cities making these decisions. That's one side of it. And the other side of it is our Hamiltonian impulse. It's doing big things, big projects. Robert Moses is Hamiltonian. FDR's new deal is Hamilton. So I was explaining this debate in these contexts. And because I never go into YouTube world that much, I really read the comments because it's really cool to interact with actual people as the opposite of think tank world. And someone really objected to my use of the words Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian and were like, this is exactly what Democrats always do. You're making this wonky. You're using all these complicated ideas. Just talk like a normal person. And I really viscerally disagree with that idea. I think it's really important that we talk about philosophy and we talk about figures and these debates and speak in these terms. So as the head of the National Constitution center, and you could definitely do a better job of this than I did, can you explain to people why using words like Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, why it's not just wonky, why it's not just inside baseball? Like, why does this matter when we're talking about policy debates?
- [03:53]
B
Absolutely. So the thesis of my new book, the Pursuit of Liberty, how Hamilton vs. Jefferson ignited the Lasting Battle over Power in America, is that the debate between Hamilton and Jefferson over national power versus states rights and liberal versus strict construction of the Constitution and democracy versus rule by elites has defined all of American history. It's so striking to see that political historians from John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren all the way up to Ron Chernow have agreed that this is the essential debate in American political history. I was so excited to go back and do word searches of Hamilton and Jefferson in all the primary texts of American history and find that they are invoked by name at all the crucial turning points. So let's now do a tour of American history through the lens of the Hamilton Jefferson debate. It's striking that it all goes back to the dinner party that defined America. Hamilton is at Jefferson's house. Washington is away. At some point in the evening, Hamilton looks around the room and says to Jefferson, who are those three guys on the wall? And Jefferson says, those are my three visions of the greatest men in history. John Locke, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. And Hamilton pauses for a long time. And then he says, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar. And Jefferson goes on to found the Democratic Republican Party in opposition to the supposed Caesaristic ambitions of Hamilton and the Federalists. In fact, both Hamilton and Jefferson fear a Caesar who will subvert the republic. They believe they found one in Aaron Burr. And they unite to oppose Burr's efforts to consolidate power, subvert the republic, and undermine the Constitution. But for the rest of American history, we've been debating exactly that question. Who is the new embryo Caesar? And Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson and FDR are all attacked by their opponents, as would be Caesars. FDR actually dresses up like Julius Caesar for his birthday to kind of make fun of the charges. And then today, of course, we're having a debate about whether President Trump is Julius Caesar or Andrew Jack Accent. Is he the fulfillment of Hamilton and Jefferson's fears, or a populist who is mobilizing executive power to attack elites? And it's the eternal debate. I've just described one of the major cleavages between Hamilton and Jefferson, which is over executive power. But then there's the debate over congressional power. And think of all the crucial turning points in American history. Is the bank constitutional? Is the Missouri Compromise constitutional leading up to the Civil War? Are the Reconstruction Acts constitutional? Is the Progressive Era independent agencies constitutional? Is the New Deal constitutional? And finally, is the New Deal, should it be scaled back, which is the central question on the Supreme Court today? All of those are a debate between Hamiltonian liberal construction of the Constitution and Jeffersonian strict construction of the Constitution. And it's incredible, again, how the Supreme Court justices are invoking them by name. Then finally, the last big cleavage is between democracy and rule by elites. Jefferson champions the expansion of the suffrage to white men, of course, in his case, but his vision is invoked by women and minorities in the future. And Hamilton, who fears democracy in the mob and wants to restrict the suffrage and check the impulses of populism. And that valence has gone back and forth as well. So anyone who loves American history, and I know everyone listening to this podcast does, can view Hamilton and Jefferson as golden and silver threads woven throughout the tapestry of American history. Sometimes they clash, sometimes they cross, sometimes they almost snap apart. But it's the productive tension between Hamilton and Jefferson's ideas that have sustained the republic since the beginning of the and.
- [08:04]
A
I think what's helpful, if listeners have read Mark Dunkelman's book, is Mark's claim is not that Hamilton is always right or Jefferson is always right. It's that these are competing instincts that apply in different contexts. And what I'd be curious to ask you then is the obvious follow up would be who's right? Who do you agree with? So I think it's a balancing act. But what's your answer to that question in these debates?
- [08:25]
B
Well, as I say at the beginning of the book, I don't take sides on the Hamilton Jefferson debate. Other chroniclers like Henry Cabot Lodge and Claude Bowers and all of these bestselling historians throughout history have just put their thumb on the scales and have kind of introduced caricatures of Hamilton or Jefferson and denigrated their opponent. I'm a first. I run the National Constitution center, which is nonpartisan and insists on convening different points of view. But in this book I'm also an intellectual historian and I'm just describing the ways that Hamilton and Jefferson have been invoked. And what's so striking is that they're invoked by both sides at all times, and each side is constantly switching and crossing and dating back to Jefferson himself, who starts as the great strict constructionist and then when he becomes president, buys Louisiana, doubles the size of the United States and abandons the broad construction of the territories clause that he'd previously abandoned. And similarly, Herbert Crowley calls on Theodore Roosevelt to deploy Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends. The Hamiltonian means of strong federal power for the Jeffersonian ends of curbing the corporations and expanding democracy. Really, I think it's impossible if you're studying American history to say one is right or the other is wrong because they have different ideals that clash with each other. FDR inherits the Jefferson of limited government, and he has the chutzpah to reinvent Jefferson as the prophet of democracy and make him champion of the New Deal administrative state, even as FDR expands federal power in a way that would make even Hamilton perhaps balk. But these are the essential guideposts, the yin and the yang of our constitutional debate. They've been invoked on all sides of every major question. And it's far more illuminating to study the complexities of history and note how essential, inescapable each of them are than to try to pick sides. It's on the rare occasions that extremists have rejected the Hamilton and Jefferson framework entirely that the shooting begins. That was John Calhoun who said that the Declaration was a self evident lie and that slavery was a positive good. He was rejecting the Declaration and Jefferson, or similarly with extremists on the right and the left today who want to tear down the founders and question the liberal ideal. Jefferson and Hamilton maintain that the productive tension maintains the center. And it's really the debate between them rather than the victory of one or the other that has sustained the American idea.
- [11:14]
A
I think what's interesting is to your point, there's no need to inherently choose sides in this context, I think where you can argue about one being more correct than the other was in their visions for where the country was going to go. They're both very long term thinkers and critically, Jefferson has this vision of America as being about the farmer and the yeoman, the small. And Hamilton's vision is very big. It's the cities, it's industry, it's manufacturing. Obviously the country moved in a how is history going to progress sense towards Hamilton's vision rather than Jefferson's vision. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether that's a correct take and the degree to which Jefferson's vision is limited by the fact that the country moved in a Hamiltonian direction, even if they still have this tensions with Jeffersonian thought.
- [12:06]
B
It's true that our economics and structure of government has tended to move in a Hamiltonian direction in the sense that, as you say, Jefferson's ideal of yeoman, white farmers idyllically tilling their fields has been overtaken by a multi racial globalized economy which is far from the Saxon shires that Jefferson idealized. Also, the government has tended to grow and the powers of centralization have created first the nascent administrative state and then the progressive independent agencies and then the post New Deal administrative state. And even presidents who tend to exalt limited government in theory have tended to expand the government in practice. So in all that sense you could say that Hamilton is one. On the other hand, the persistence of Jeffersonian ideals and rhetoric has ensured that in the battle of ideas and invocations, Jefferson is generally in the ascendant. Let's think about the arc of this remarkable debate. So Hamilton dies in the duel, the Federalist Party is dead, and everyone's a Jeffersonian in the era of good feelings. And everyone from Henry Clay, the founder of the Whig party, to Lincoln invoked Jefferson, not Hamilton, as their patron saint. And even as they champion expanded government, Lincoln stands in front of Independence hall and says he's never had a thought politically that doesn't stem from Jefferson and he'd rather be assassinated on this spot than abandon the principles of the Declaration. Then the Civil War comes and the war came as Lincoln said. And after the war, Jefferson's stock crashes because he's the prophet of secession and nullification. And President Grant banishes the statue of Jefferson from the White House where Polk had brought it to. And James Garfield invokes Hamilton as the patron saint of Reconstruction. And Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Harding all make Hamilton the hero of the Gilded Age and reconstruction. But then 1929, Hamilton's stock crashes again and FDR runs for president in 1932 after reading a biography, Hamilton vs. The Battle for Democracy in America. And FDR reinvents Jefferson as the prophet of democracy rather than limited government. Ronald Reagan says that he left the Democratic Party in 1960 because it had abandoned the principles of Jefferson and limited government and resurrects the balanced budget. Jefferson as the new ideal of the Republican Party. And that's the most striking thing, that from the Reagan era to the Trump era, Republicans have tended in theory to embrace Jefferson even as they've in practice committed themselves to a really robust vision of the unitary executive. That's hardly consistent with Jefferson's fears of centralized power. And then to make things even more interesting, there's the musical Hamilton. We just gave the Liberty Medal at the National Constitution center to Ron Chernow and the Hamilton musical last week. And Ron Chernow told us that he decided to write the book Hamilton in 1998 because Hamilton's stock was so low that he had no juice at all that he was considered an aristocrat and a elitist and no one was a Hamiltonian. But then the book published in 2004 exploded and then the musical just utterly went nuclear and transformed Hamilton into the multicultural rapping icon of the American dream. So in theory, today, of course, everyone's a cultural Hamiltonian and Jefferson's stock is low as the enslaver and the white defender of white supremacy. Still, Donald Trump ran in 19 in, in 2020 saying he was going to prevent the Democrats from tearing down statues of Jefferson. And Joe Biden said he decided to run in 2020 in Charlottesville when President Trump said there were good people on both sides of the of the white supremacy debate. So in a sense there's cultural Hamiltonianism as. Ascendant. But Jefferson is inescapable. This all suggests that who's up and who's down has as much to do with culture as politics. It's a couple of best selling books throughout history that's really transformed each of these men. It was a book by Clot by Gertrude Atherton called Hamilton the Conqueror, a fictionalized biography of Hamilton that kind of took off in the Progressive Era, the Theodore Roosevelt one, and made him a hero of the Progressive era. And of course there's the musical today. But it just confirms once again that Hamilton and Jefferson are central to America not because of objective correspondence with their actual views, but because of the position they occupy in the American imagination.
- [17:14]
A
You know, it's really interesting because to your point about Lin Manuel Miranda's interpretation of Hamilton, Hamilton's kind of had two revival moments over the past two decades. So in the 2010s that play music was obviously written in the context of an Obama presidency where America seems to be advancing towards this multiracial progressive future. It's the story of this immigrant with at least in his interpretation, like ambiguous this racial identity and cultural identities. And there's a lot of that version of that telling. But I work in the foreign policy and econ space and now there's a lot of Hamiltonian interest just in the sense of his economic vision. So this question of the state accomplishing big things, reviving industry re industrialization. You have all these conversations around Hamilton today that have nothing to do with the 2010s version. So it just seems like this is the first time you've had back to back back sort of Hamiltonian ascendancies that have on paper nothing to do with one another. So that's just I think worth noting.
- [18:13]
B
It's so true that they often do have nothing to do with one another. There was a similar Hamiltonian mini bubble in the 90s and 2000s when you had Michael Lynn at the New America, New America writing a book saying that Hamilton should be the patron saint of New Deal Democrats who wanted to expand the administrative state, but also champion capture a degree of populism in opposition to elites. I forgot how he pulled off that hat trick, but he new Democratic thinkers to kind of try to lead a Hamiltonian revival. And then Bill Kristol and David Brooks talked about Hamiltonianism in foreign policy and said that Republicans should unapologetically embrace that kind of international aspect. It just confirms once again there are constructs and broad framework for our principles that don't actually correspond to what Hamilton and Jefferson actually believed.
- [19:19]
A
When you were answering my question of why this isn't just academic and wonky, you just really, if you listen to the biographies of the politicians you referenced. So Van Buren Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge. I've got a Henry Cabot Lodge bio behind me somewhere here. The professor and the President. And it's about how Henry Cabot Lodge, he's obviously a senator and Theodore Roosevelt's best buddy in the Senate, but before Henry Cabot Lodge was a senator, he was a professor at Harvard. That's how he comes across Theodore Roosevelt. Before going into Massachusetts politics himself. And then of course Theodore Roosevelt is also writing history. I'm wondering if part of what makes the sort of popular audience or public feel alienated from using language around Hamiltonianism or Jeffersonianism and is that our politicians today if you. I talk to a lot of politicians. I'm sure you two I interview a lot on this show. I don't get the sense and would more than be willing to make a serious bet that they themselves do not conceive of themselves or are rooted in being political historians in a way that for some reason there was a 19th century, 18th century boomlet. So I'd love to hear from sort of a national constitution center sense why so many politicians were attracted to the field of history. And when you write this type of history, you're obviously going to be drawn to using that Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian language. And obviously Franco del Reno Roosevelt is not a. He's not a historian, he's not an academic, but he's still reading a Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian biography and then really articulating his senses in those terms when today when I talk to politicians they're much wonkier. So they would say look, we're really busy. So I read a book about how do you solve health care in America? Or what is the future of American foreign policy. But those books I've got a bunch of the behind me are not talking about principles or ideals or philosophy. They're very this, this, this or that. And this transition from politicians from this sort of historian politician era to a more action oriented like what are the things we're going to do Politician that's before tv. It's before the obvious. We're doing CNN hits where you only have five minutes. So you're not going to talk about philosophy in those terms. Something deeper is going on there. I'd love to hear your sort of thinking theory of how this sort of is going on or how that's happened.
- [21:35]
B
It is striking as you say, what deep historians many of our 19th century politicians were starting with Lodge like you, I'm really struck by the depth of his achievements as a historian as well as a politician as well as the fact that when he proposes the Federal Force act in the Gilded Age, the one act that might actually have enforce civil rights in the south at a time when the Republicans were withdrawing from the South. He invokes Webster and Hamilton. He's written a biography of Daniel Webster as well as of Hamilton. He says only a Hamiltonian approach to federal power, namely sending in military troops, could have enforced civil rights. So he's so guided by his studies. And then his friend and co author Theodore Roosevelt writes a biography of Gouverneur Morris of all people for Lodge's American President series and also exalts Hamilton as his hero based on his own research in the primary sources. So that would be one difference between the 19th century Historian politicians and today, that they delved into the primary sources with confidence. And think about the election of 1912 when Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft are all historians who've written biographies of or adjacent to the Founders. And Hamilton. Wilson, the only PhD in American history, writes deeply about the founding and actually questions the liberal idea, but based on his own studies of what he says is the difference between the Newtonian and I forgot what his other. It's a Hegelian point of view basically. But it's basically Hamilton Jefferson that he comes up with fancy names for and he writes a whole book about it. And William Howard Taft is just appalled by this manipulation of the founder's vision and defends the liberal idea from the perspective of his heroes Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall. So all that would be a way for lamenting the fact that we've lost that tradition of the scholar politician. But on the other hand, have we lost it? I end the book by saying how struck I am by how many of our presidents throughout history, including in the 20th and 21st century, are deep readers of history who've written or read about Hamilton and Jefferson themselves. And just to take the 20th century, because that's where we're up to now, after Theodore Roosevelt and fdr, we have Harry Truman, a self taught lover of Jefferson who can quote his letters by from memory. Jfk, who of course writes about profiles and courage and is deeply familiar with the founding. Richard Nixon.
- [24:22]
A
I have to ask a follow up here. Do you think JFK wrote Profiles and Courage?
- [24:29]
B
Well, the actual evidence suggests he didn't write all of it. And we have theater, Ted Sorensen's drafts. But JFK was a reader and he was able. And JFK of course came up with the single best line about Thomas Jefferson anyone has ever come up with. The famous, this is the most distinguished gathering of people in the White House. Except when Thomas Jefferson died alone, he said to the Nobel Prize laureate. So he was a, he was a well read student of American history. And then there aren't too many more. But Nixon, I may not be educated, but I do read books as he memorably. And then Jimmy Carter, of course, an author and student of history. And then we have the trio of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all of whom are deep readers. William Jefferson Clinton can discuss the Hamilton Jefferson debate and its relevance to the Internet. George W. Bush recommends Chernow's biography and is a really vigorous reader of history. And Barack Obama, just to bring this answer home, quotes Hamilton in his Cooper Union address and makes him the patron saint of the of healthcare reform. So Obama is absolutely as deeply rooted in the tradition of president historians as Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt. So all that suggests to me, you know, maybe we're not so forgetful of that tradition after all. Certainly there are plenty of great enthusiasts of history in Congress today. Our ailments in our political system which is is has to do well first generally with the fact that people of all backgrounds are not reading books as much as deeply as they used to because of social media and are browsing and filter bubbling and amusing ourselves to, to death. We are not returning to the primary sources. On a, on a mass level, there's plenty of deep reading and deep engagement all over the America, including among our politicians. But in a world of, you know, Instagram posts or whatever it is, you can't, you don't have the time to make the complicated arguments that history requires. So all this suggests that are the problems that avail that assail our discourse have mostly to do with social media attention economy that rewards negative polarization where we're more interested in destroying the other side than in making complicated arguments about our ideals. Yet at the same time, despite all that, there's a lot of deep reading and discussion and deliberation going on. And if anything is going to bring us back to where we need to be, it will be the ideals of Hamilton and Jefferson themselves.
- [27:20]
A
Yeah, and it's interesting I got a follow up here too where and to note why I asked about the JFK thing when you just referenced jfk. Writing profiles encouraged. I just know there's like five listeners who just strenuously objected. There's been whole books written about this controversy. So you've got an audience advocate. So I agree if your point there I just was like I have to speak for those five specific people who would object to me not saying hey, do you think this actually happened? So something I'm curious about. I'm glad you brought up Woodrow Wilson because I didn't include him on my list of sort of scholar, academic, presidents, political figures because I think in many ways if we sort of think of our popular understanding of Woodrow Wilson and his various failures that if you he's one of the few people that. You know a theme of the show is that sometimes you have figures and ideas that left, right and center could find things they like and very, very strenuously dislike. I think Woodrow Wilson has the highest ratio of every single side of the aisle. Finds something truly abhorrent about that presidency. I remember back in high school, Glenn Beck, when he had his CNN show, would do hour long episodes talking about how awful Woodrow Wilson was. And this was sort of a little before aggressive left revisionism on Woodrow Wilson. And I was sort of like, wow, that seems like a little extreme. But then obviously a few years later, you have a lot of reconsidering of his language and frankly his truly awful views on race and resegregating the federal government. Government. But the broad critique was always just that. This is a person who is one of the first modern political scientists. He's obviously head of Princeton, he's writing these serious academic books, but in many ways he's a true failure at his broad objectives. So I'd be curious to hear from your perspective if I'm doing an episode trying to suggest to current and aspiring politicians they should engage more with thought they may think is a little academic. What do you think are the limits of the academic as the politician? Maybe if Woodrow Wilson is sort of a center point of. Because I think for a lot of reasons people cite, if you just read popular works about Woodrow Wilson, this just serves as like the worst case scenario of the sort of distant scholar put into these spaces and leading in many ways to both disaster and failure.
- [29:32]
B
You're so right that Wilson is disliked by the left and the right today, with good reason, appropriately so. But the main objection to him, I think, is not that he was a scholar, but that he was a virulent white supremacist. And his appalling racism and resegregation of the federal government, despite his supposed embrace of the ideals of the Constitution, was a form of hypocrisy, not, you know, being too much of an egghead. On the other hand, it's true that he did call for us to reject the core of the Declaration of Independence as a guide to the American idea. He said, don't read the preamble, read the list of grievances, and it's up for every generation to remake the structure of government anew. And he questioned the separation of powers, which is so rooted in Enlightenment fear of centralized power, and advocated a form of British parliamentarianism as well as transforming the office of Presidency into a kind of demagogic populous office by insisting that the President was a steward of the people who could directly channel popular will. Now, on that second point about the presidency, Theodore Roosevelt did the same thing. Even though he was less of a egghead scholar. He was indeed a scholar, but less philosophical and less tendentious in his rejection of the liberal idea. But all this is to say that I think Wilson's unique distastefulness, or you could use the phrase illiberalism really would be a better phrase, has to do with the content of his ideas more than, more than the fact that he was a scholar. He, based on his studies of Hegel in grad school, just came to really favor centralized power and strong executive authority. And then once he became president, he naturally wanted to exercise that executive authority to the limit. He was encouraged to do that by being the war president in World War I, who's literally greeted with Europeans strewing flowers at his feet. When he arrives after the war, he's hailed as a conquering God, which understandably went to his head. He completely threw. His arrogance and refusal to compromise destroyed his lifelong dream of creating a League of Nations. He could have done that if he were a better practical politician. And if he negotiated with Henry Cabot Lodge and he ends. Oh, and, and he, as if that isn't enough, he presides over the most illiberal persecution of domestic dissent since the Alien and Sedition Acts. And his behavior around the 1917 Espionage act is, is just appalling. So, so he's really distasteful because he's a centralizing pro executive crypto caesar white supremacist. If that's not, you know, bad enough, I don't think it was primarily because he was a professor. I think it's because he held a liberal view of executive power.
- [32:44]
A
And you know what's funny? So this, this show has been a show for over six years now. And you know, my first episode was with J.D. vance. He was famous by that point, but he was obviously not a senator or a vice president. And as I think about the evolution of this show, I never would have had you on for back to back appearances where we're talking about political philosophy and the founding. And I think a lot of it comes down the structure of the 2010s DC that I came into as a young person. So I came into DC in 2015 and I like a lot of young people who probably listen to the show, especially the Hill staffers. I came to D.C. because I want to fix health care and what's foreign policy going to be and how do we compete with China? What's the future of higher education? The sort of wonk coded things. And the more time that I've actually spoken about politicians and actual just listeners and actual people, I've found more and more that this stuff think of this book is titled the Pursuit of Liberty. Your previous book was the Pursuit of Happiness. Those are not wonk coded policy oriented topics you're not going to read either of your books and come up with. Okay, so here are the five things we need to do next week to put before the Senate. But the more and more I look at how unsettled the countries and the more and more I talk to people, the more I think actually there are a bunch of different answers to what liberty is. There are actually a bunch of different answers to the question of what does the pursuit of happiness actually mean in 2020s America as we're going through this weird cataclysmic change. And the more I get myself in wonk mode, the less I'm able to offer, I think useful perspectives or even just talk to regular people. But instead. So for example, I do a lot of abundance agenda work. So it's like we need to talk about the zoning code and we need to find ways to build more housing. Kamala Harris tried doing this during the election. I have a plan to create 3 million new houses. But what's so funny, and this is the rebuttal to the person who says the Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonian doesn't matter when I'm actually talking to neighbors and friends. The more I transition from the wonky version and instead focus on the pursuit of liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Why are we building all these houses? Well, it's because people have a certain vision of the American dream. And the American dream is about agency and pursuit, pursuing what you want. The Jeffersonian idea of you have your property, you have your thing, you're pursuing your vision of what you want to actually have, the more it actually resonates and becomes just useful. That's just like a reaction. I just wanted to note that because when I went to D.C. i was in conservative world and conservative world, especially if young people were sort of on the rise, they make you go through these boot camps where you're reading about the Greeks and the classics and the founders, and this is very much not what you do in center left world. It's much more politic, policy and wonky. And at the time I did not enjoy all of my various boot camps with the classics and the founders, and now I'm having to do catch up right now I'm reading this book, obviously for our show, but I actually need to read this book because this is an education that wasn't prioritized both either in college or high school or was just my early sort of D.C. career. I think this stuff is just so important. So I'd love for you to kind of speak to that, because I think just like this wonkery, it's not that wonkery doesn't matter, but I think it leaves this huge vulnerability when it comes to your ability to really speak to people and understand what's actually going on.
- [36:02]
B
Absolutely. Well, my mission at the National Constitution center, which I'm honored to work at, comes from the Constitution Center's mission statement to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people on a nonpartisan basis. And the way we do that is by bringing together people of different points of view, liberals and conservatives, to talk not about political questions, but constitutional and historical questions. And that lens, which is kind of particular, has allowed us to transcend partisanship and convene meaningful debates about the issues at the center of American life. People are not going to agree about politics and an age of extreme polarization. Hosting policy debates doesn't seem all that productive, or at least if there's a role for it. It's not something the National Constitution center is going to do, but we can absolutely debate constitutional and historical questions because always there are good arguments on all sides of nearly all of our current questions because they're complicated, history is complicated, and constitutional law is complicated, and the Constitution is made for people of fundamentally differing points of view. So that's what led us at the NCC to focus on conversations about constitutional and historical, not policy topics. And for whatever reason, and the reasons are clear enough, that's a useful thing to do both, because you can actually learn something by thinking about the arguments on both sides of constitutional questions. I feel like I can't have an informed opinion about anything the Supreme Court is doing until we've hosted a We the People podcast episode about it. And I've heard from the best arguments on both sides. But in addition to that, it's an act of civic faith, of civic engagement, of citizenship, to take the time to disagree without being disagreeable, to learn from other perspectives, and most important of all, to really dig in deep on American history. It's urgently important to learn about the big ideas of American history and the American idea. Liberty, equality, government by consent, separation of powers, federalism, the Bill of Rights, all of these basic principles are essentially debated throughout history. It's not like there's a clear answer to them, but it's the details of the debates themselves that are necessary to understand the American idea. So that's a long way of saying that I share your lack of interest in pure policy debates these days, and my eagerness, my hunger, my enthusiasm for deep conversations about history and the Constitution.
- [38:55]
A
And I want to bring up the reference you made to. I think it was Wilson you cited who was citing up the need to. He didn't use the refounding of the country language, but really revisit and think about these things. So obviously I've always loved how the French just have their very straightforward conception of first, second, third and fourth republics. It just leads to a fifth. It just leads to a understandable conception that this vision of France is a very specific vision that is built upon and improved upon and corrected the issues with other versions. And obviously in the Arthur Schlesinger sense, we have our own idea of an academic world, but we've had different republics, but it's just not as quite formalized as it is with the French. But Assida Naenio of the New Republic, he just had a new book out, he's from my age cohort about refounding the country and those different ideas. I would love to speak to you then about from the perspective from the National Constitution center. How should we think about this idea of refounding the country? Is it a valid conception in the American context? Is it a. A useful thing? Because I think I really enjoyed talking with Vasita, but my sort of problem with his book is that he takes the new founding direction once again in that policy direction. So here are these five or six policies we need to really do. And I think that the second, just from the pure of my political animal side perspective, you're not going to get a generational refounding of the country, which is something I really endorse if it just turns into a policy debate. Because obviously there are policy debates at the Constitutional Convention, huge ones, everything from the three fifths compromise to the structure of government itself. But behind those, and coming before a lot of those specific debates that implicated policy and politics, you had the foundational thing. So I think I would love someone in my cohort, this is sort of a book suggestion for someone to sort of write, like to bring this new founding concept in, sort of within the framework of like, the actual ideals and the idea of like debating at a. So I would love for someone to write a book saying, I'm a millennial. Here's how what I think the pursuit of happiness is. So I'd love to hear your perspective on all this.
- [41:07]
B
So people disagree about whether we need a new founding or a second founding or a third founding. That's a essentially a political disagreement. There is some acceptance on the right as well as the left of the idea that Reconstruction was a second founding. Some on the right question the idea that there could be anything more than a single founding. But using a phrase that Eric Foner popularized, there's a general recognition that the Reconstruction amendments fulfilled the promise of the Declaration of Independence in a way that transformed the Founders Constitution. Therefore, calling it a second founding may make sense. Beyond that, there's no consensus. Do we need. Have we had? Should we have a third or fourth or fifth founding? That's up to politics. However, in the pursuit of liberty, I do accept the argument of Keith Whittington, the political historian who says by broad consensus, there have been five constitutionally transformative presidents in American history. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, FDR and Ronald Reagan. And I think Whittington's group of five presidents well defines the eras in American history which by general consensus were eras of constitutional change. Whether you want to call it the transformation so dramatic that it deserves, you know, it's a second or third or fifth founding or whatever is up to you. But I do think that that's a helpful list of presidents who have ushered in great constitutional transformation. Of course, we're debating now whether President Trump should be added to the list and whether that's a sixth era of fundamental constitutional change. I think it's too soon to tell whether or not President Trump is Julius Caesar or Andrew Jackson redux, as I, as I said in the book, and we'll need a little more time to make that kind of judgment. But all this is to say the National Constitution center loves to host debates about whether or not we should have another Constitutional convention and if so, what content it should include. We had a great project that I think you and I may have discussed last time about. We summoned a liberal, conservative and libertarian teams to draft constitutions from scratch, and we're so struck that they came up with five proposed amendments to the Constitution showing a level of consensus about the possibility of structural change. And they were geeky amendments like term limits for justices and making impeachment a little harder in the House and amendment a little easier and abandoning the birthright citizenship requirement for president and eliminating the legislative, or rather resurrecting the legislative veto. Those geeky changes got agreement among three teams of strong liberals, conservatives and libertarians, suggesting to me first, that there may be more consensus than we think when we get past negative polarization. But also none of those changes would constitute a second or third or fourth founding. They're really structural tweaks that all the teams thought were necessary to preserve the founder structure rather than to transform it. So all that's a good way of saying that if you stick to constitutional rather than political debates and view things historically and descriptively rather than as an activist. We've had at least one and maybe two foundings. And the other transformative periods in American history have had more to do with changes in the balance of our constitutional understandings between executive and congressional power and national power and states rights. But all those are within the initial Hamilton Jefferson debate.
- [45:02]
A
I will so two things before we get to the final question. So I am a partisan in favor of the idea that the New Deal constituted another founding, another republic for the country. Just I think the transformation. So to your point about like structural tweaks versus like fundamental changes, I think the New Deal is so reconstructed, conceptualized, the sort of citizens relationship to the federal government and the state's relationship to the federal government that it just approaches that scale. So I will. You don't have to take a stand on that. I just want to give my partisan my constitutionally, you know, history nerd sort of partisan belief on that one I.
- [45:38]
B
Can'T resist with the response to that great suggestion. My law school teacher Bruce Ackerman long argued that there were three republics. He had three moments in the Constitution has to do the founding, reconstruction. He agreed with you that the New Deal was a third constitutional moment, even though it didn't have formal amendments to codify it. That was the controversial part of his argument, but I always argued with him back in the 90s. Well then wouldn't Reagan be a fourth? Because Reagan proposed to scale back the administrative state and also appointed transformative justices, as FDR did, and basically met all of Ackerman's standards for a constitutional moment. He would hem and haw. But eventually he said if President Trump gets a Supreme Court majority, then yes, you'd have to say that the Reagan revolution was codified in a fourth moment. And that's something that Professor Whittington's five periods confirms that. I think there's no question at this point in our history that both the New Deal and the Reagan revolution were moments of profound constitutional transformation. Now, whether they rise to the level of the founding and Reconstruction themselves because they didn't have formal amendments. That's the whole point is one that we can disagree on. And I guess since I'm down this path, I would side with those who say that, you know, the founding and Reconstruction were the two moments where the transformed understanding culminated amendments. And that sets them apart from the Jackson and Progressive and. And FDR and Reagan eras, which didn't culminate in amendments. Sorry, the Progressive era did. And that's not on the list. So I think that would be my take, but that this is a great topic for debate and the NCC would be delighted to host a town hall about precisely this question.
- [47:29]
A
Well, yeah, and this is I'm working on being more disagreeable in a friendly way on the podcast. And I think the thing I disagree with you on is I would Reagan. If you read Reagan's speeches, I think it qualifies. If you look at the actual act, and I study the conservative movement, and this is a huge controversy, obviously. So you read the speeches that Reagan gives. You read his career up until his presidency. You read the sort of inaugural address he gives that would qualify as transformative. And obviously, Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign had his famous statement that was misinterpreted, saying, I want to be a transformational president in the way that Reagan was, in a way that obviously the Clinton presidency wasn't. People thought he was saying, therefore, I'm Ronald Reagan. The point is that we were a different country after Ronald Reagan's presidency than we were before. But from the peer perspective, and this is where conservative purists have beef with Reagan today and had beef with him during his actual presidency, is he didn't actually reduce the size of government size, government got bigger. He shores up Social Security. And then where this gets really interesting and I think would be fascinating at a town hall, this would be really interesting because you could genuinely get. Because as you know, Trumpy people are sort of reluctant to engage in these sort of spaces for complicated partisan reasons. But I think what's interesting here is if Trump's presidency is transformative, and the key thing about transformative is it has to last. So, you know, FDR does the New Deal, and critically, Eisenhower accepts it. So that's what makes it really stand. So Trump could do all these different things, and if a president comes in in 2028, Democrat or Republican, and repeals those things, that would not be transformative in the sense that we're speaking. But critically, Trump is the president that is abolishing the Department of Education. Trump is the president. He's obviously still spending lots and lots and lots of money, but he is reconciled. He's reconsidering, conceptualizing the federal government's relationship with both like the states and policy and politics in a way that if he is transformative, I think I would just supersede Reagan and just say Trump is the person. I would just delete Reagan for good.
- [49:38]
B
Or for ill from.
- [49:39]
A
That's. I'd be really curious what you think about that.
- [49:41]
B
Well, that's a very interesting suggestion. The case that Reagan was transformative comes not from his own positions as president, but from the judicial movement that he led and nearly consummated. It was his effort to appoint originalist justices, who ultimately their most significant contribution was to be strict constructionist on congressional power. That allowed him to come within a whisker of scaling back the administrative state, which was the main goal of the Federalist Society. Had Robert Bork been appointed in 1987, he would have succeeded in that goal. Anthony Kennedy went way down that road when it came to administrative power. But it took the happenstance of Justice Scalia's death to give President Trump a pro strict constructionist on congressional power majority nearly, what is it, 20, 30 years later. So when you view constitutional transformation as representing a coalescence of the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court, then you could say that it was Reagan and the originalist revolution that precipitated the movement. On the other hand, the fact that President Trump is using executive power that just descriptively, you could say would have made even Hamilton, blanche and, you know, running roughshod over notions of federalism in militarizing the National Guard against state governors objections, all in the name of a unitary executive theory that the Court seems to be buying into, makes him impossible to see, to see as a traditional Jeffersonian. And if he is constitutionally transformative, surely it will more be for his success in vastly expanding and consolidating executive power and critics would say subverting the separation of powers than it is in shrinking the federal government and to Jeffersonian Italy. So that makes it a little complicated. I say, in the pursuit of liberty, that the current Supreme Court is Hamiltonian on executive power and Jeffersonian on congressional power will see this term, whether or not they're willing to check the president. But I think it's hard to see President Trump as the fulfillment of Reaganism to the degree that he's presiding over a vast expansion of the federal government in ways that Reagan would have resisted.
- [52:10]
A
So the last word, which I get as the host is, this is the point of friendly disagreement. You've actually got me to moderate because I'm just speaking out loud here. I'm just thinking of this for the first time. So you've actually, and I think when I was telling the story of why you could be a aggressive conservative and unhappy with Reagan and happy with Trump, I excluded to your point, the focus on the administrative state as the unifying thing across that project. So Steve Bannon, when he's at CPAC in the 2010s, he's asked, Define what MAGA is, define what the New Right is. What is your project? Steve Bannon? He says the destruction of the administrative state in a way that clearly is built upon, to your point, the court appointments and the legacy of Reagan in that sense. So my modified closing statement is I am no longer, if I had the power to make these technical declarations, I am no longer deleting Reagan from this sort of revolution. I would say it's a Reagan Trump revolution that should be understood as a 30 or 40 year project that required both the appointments, that, if this is transformative, required the appointments of Reagan in a way that really responded to the Warren and Berger courts, but also critically required Trump's willingness to, to expand the conception of what could be done in a way that Reagan wasn't willing to. So that is my closing. Jeffrey, this has been really great. I think you're running out of phrases from the declaration that you could use for book titles. So I'm curious where you go with your future work. So this is, I would love to have you on again whenever that comes about.
- [53:45]
B
That would be great. The third book in the trilogy is the Pursuit of a Union. So look forward to discussing that with you when it's out.
- [53:51]
A
There we go. Thank you for joining me on the realignment.
- [53:53]
B
Thank you. Really enjoyed it. Thank you.