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.)
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