Alexander Hamilton was a Tea-Bagger

[babylonsister]

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/5/29/135828/253

Alexander Hamilton was a Tea-Bagger

by BooMan
Tue May 29th, 2012 at 01:58:28 PM EST


David Brooks offers us another steaming pile of Stupid. This time, he's concerned that some folks on the left are complaining about income inequality and ultra low taxes on the wealthy, so he attempts to invoke Alexander Hamilton as the kind of guy who would have no truck with class warfare. Yes, it's odd to summon the ghost of the foremost advocate of a strong central government to argue for the virtues of limited government, but this is David Brooks we're talking about here, and nonsense is the name of his game.

He creates something new, which he calls the Hamiltonian Tradition even though the thing he describes has nothing to do with Hamilton. But that's all just jive-talk. The real meat of the piece is his assertion that the progressives, the New Dealers, and the folks of the New Frontier and Great Society were all well-intentioned people who simply went too far. They wound up creating a system that has unsustainable debt, invests in the wrong things, and morally corrupts the American people. Now, mind you, he's saying all this in the context of a complaint about criticisms the left has aimed at the very rich.

About a year ago, the Center for American Progress issued a report on what our debt would look like if there had never been any Bush tax cuts. They started out with a reminder:

President Bush inherited perhaps the strongest federal balance sheet in postwar history. There were record-high surpluses, debt was at around 30 percent of GDP and falling, and the Congressional Budget Office projected that the federal government would be debt free by 2009. The country was in great fiscal shape to deal with any crises or emergencies coming down the road, and it was even ready to deal with the coming retirement of the baby boom generation.

Now, a sane or honest person might ask how we could have been in such great shape if the progressives, the New Dealers, and the Great Society folks had screwed up the system and corrupted all our morals. I mean, debt-free in 2009 sounds pretty good. But it didn't happen. And rather than learn from that mistake, the Republicans refuse to raise any taxes on the wealthy at all, instead insisting that all the budget balancing come out of government services, research, and investments. They created a debt crisis with their policies and now they want to dismantle a century of progressive government to pay for their folly. They gave the ultra-rich twelve years of absurdly low taxes that directly ruined our balance sheets, and now they refuse to allow any of those people to pay into the system. No wonder people are getting angry with the rich. You're going to make me work two more years before I can collect Social Security just so a billionaire can keep a few more million bucks?

David Brooks continues to concoct new ways to excuse this behavior, and he's probably going to burn in hell for it.

[Arkana]

1. Holy shit, is he KIDDING?

Alexander Hamilton was the original Federalist and advocated a strong central government PRECISELY because he didn't trust the masses.

If anything, talk about Jefferson or Madison, but fucking HAMILTON? Brooks has lost his mind.

[JHB]

2. Yes, but until then he creates a nice brimstone smokescreen...

...so that the People Worth Speaking Of don't have to contemplate the hell they're making for the rest of us.

It takes a certain calibre of man to construct a strawman, use it repeatedly for a blow-up doll, and enjoy the experience so much he just makes more.

Time and again, Brooks has shown he is such a man.

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. Jefferson on Hamilton

I invited them to dine with me, and after dinner, sitting at our wine, having settled our question, other conversation came on, in which a collision of opinion arose between Mr. Adams and Colonel Hamilton, on the merits of the British Constitution, Mr. Adams giving it as his opinion, that, if some of its defects and abuses were corrected, it would be the most perfect constitution of government ever devised by man. Hamilton, on the contrary, asserted, that with its existing vices, it was the most perfect model of government that could be formed; and that the correction of its vices would render it an impracticable government. And this you May be assured was the real line of difference between the political principles of these two gentlemen. Another incident took place on the same occasion, which will further delineate Mr. Hamilton's political principles. The room being hung around with a collection of the portraits of remarkable men, among them were those of Bacon, Newton and Locke. Hamilton asked me who they were. I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them. He paused for some time: “The greatest man,” said he, “that ever lived, was Julius Caesar.” Mr. Adams was honest as a politician as well as a man; Hamilton honest as a man, but, as a politician, believing in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men.
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush (1811)[1]

[white_wolf]

4. Ehh, I really don't have much respect for Hamilton.

However, to call him a Teabagger is stupid. While he was one of the more conservative of the Founders, he was also and advocate for a strong central government.

[Egalitarian Thug]

5. Know your audience. He knows his knows nothing, so he is free

to just pull any old turd out of his ass and sell it as The Way The World Ought To Be.
K&R

[lookingfortruth]

6. These people need to know a little about their history before they start using historic

figures to their advantage.


Not only that most teabaggers I know are also Birthers. I don't know if that is very common but it is rare that I'm talking to bagger that it isn't a birther. When I'm talking to someone who is both I joking call them Birthbags.

Hamilton was born in Nevis which is part of the Leeward Chain of Islands - which one Birther didn't believe me.

Second of all we need GOOD Historians who don't have "Political ties" to go on say PBS or some station and re-educate the general public about who the founding fathers were and what they stood for and believe.


Remember an article a few days back said that Congressman as a whole are speaking and understanding things on like a 10th grade level.

I believe someone from here pointed out that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are like College level -17 level and 15 respectively.

[NYC Liberal]

8. Oh most of them know full well; they're deliberately lying to the uneducated

right-wing. They have to lie to get the poor and middle-class Republicans to vote against their own interests.

[ieoeja]

7. Ronald Reagan called himself a "new Federalist".

And by new federalist he meant anti-federalist. But people bought it.

I was going to say the "uneducated" bought it. However, I learned about federalists vs anti-federalist in elementary school. You didn't exactly need some "liberal, elitist" education to know that Reagan was newspeaking out his ass.

To any lurker who happens to see this, read that again. It was taught in elementary schools! Jeesh.

Sorry. Where was I? Ah, yes, the GOP has been reversing the meaning of federalist ever since. Divide up Iraq into loosely knitted states? "Federalist," they called it. Poor, Mr Hamilton has been completely rewritten.

Of course, he was a fucking thief. So I guess it couldn't have happened to a nicer man. Lord Baltimore's ownership to Maryland was vacated as a result of the American Revolution. Since technically people were not buying land, but rather buying the rights to use land that was owned by Lord Baltimore - not that many land buyers knew this - Hamilton and his cronies reasoned that the American Revolution vacated all claims to land ownership in Maryland and began filing claims on the land themselves. Hamilton himself stole my family's property in that manner.

Fucking Normans.

[David__77]

9. No, Jefferson was - if anyone.

Hamilton advocated progressive capitalist development.

[philly_bob]

10. About Brook's discussion of Michael Lind

Here's what Brooks' article says about the book I'm currently reading:

In his illuminating new book, “Land of Promise,” the political historian Michael Lind celebrates the Hamiltonian tradition, but, in his telling, Hamiltonianism segues into something that looks like modern liberalism. But the Hamiltonian tradition differs from liberalism in fundamental ways.

I'm weak on American history, so my only source is Lind. I actually was surprised by the degree to which Lind lined Hamilton up with the progressive left. From page 15:

What is good about the American economy is largely the result of the Hamiltonian developmental tradition, and what is bad about it is largely the result of the Jeffersonian producerist school.
To the developmental tradition of Hamilton, Washington and Roosevelt, Lincoln and Clay, we owe the Internet and the national rail and highway and aviation systems, the single continental market that allows increasing returns to scale to be exploited by globally competitive corporations, the unmatched military that defeated the Axis powers and the Soviet empire and has generated one technological spin-off after another, and, not least, the federally enforced civil rights laws and minimum wage laws that have eradicated the slavery and serfdom that once existed in the South and elsewhere.
To the Jeffersonian tradition, even if it is exempted from blame for slavery and segregation, the US owes the balkanization of the economy by states' rights and localism, underinvestment in infrastructure, irrational antitrust laws and anti-chain store laws designed to privilege small producers, exemption from regulations and subsidies for small businesses (defined for many purposes as those with fewer than 500 employees), the neglect of manufacturing in favor of overinvestment in single-family housing, and a panic prone system of tiny, government-protected small banks and savings and loan

The two italicized terms: developmental means supporting government investment in large-scale industrial development, producerist means supporting small government and leaving development up to small farmers and tradesmen on their own. (My paraphrase of Lind.)