If, however, the mythic figures sit atop their dueling perches, guarding the entry point to America’s political psyche, inside the sanctum lies the most sacred relic of all: the US Constitution. Yet that relic is not the guarantor of liberties that most Americans imagine. Rather, it’s the legal scaffolding of an elite-led counter-revolution — the same one that today lets tech billionaires drop power-guzzling data centers into communities that never asked for them.

In individualistic terms, America remains the most economically “free” country in the world, but also among the most atomized, alienated and unequal. Most Americans don’t realize, however, that it didn’t have to be this way. After all, how many have ever heard of Shays’s Rebellion — a massive class revolt led by ex-revolutionary soldiers, one that almost toppled the government and could have saved working people from 230-plus years of Constitutional tyranny?

To be clear, 1776 is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, the Revolution was arguably the greatest democratic uprising in world history. Much of that national mythos is worth preserving. Three cheers for the war against the Brits. Yet if the struggles from Lexington to Yorktown remain the quintessential Anglo-liberal uprising, a genuine David-and-Goliath triumph, selling that narrative has meant omitting what happened to the common foot soldiers of the Revolution itself.

The glorified writers of the Federalist Papers — John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison — explicitly didn’t want mass democracy. During the Constitutional Convention, launched in spring 1787 and convened meant to hammer out the document’s details, Hamilton pushed for a president serving “during good behaviour”. In other words: an elected king enthroned for life, much like the Supreme Court. Hamilton and his friends also pushed for a congressional veto on all state legislation, in effect allowing for total national and elite-led control of local government. That was shadowed by other elitist institutions, notably the Senate and the Electoral College. Voting, too, was to be the preserve of the propertied few: discounting women, slaves, and poor white men, the franchise in the early US encompassed just 6% of the population.

The true heroes of the early US, then, were the Anti-Federalists. An everyman group of farmers, ex-soldiers, and small property holders — none of them have ever received Broadway hagiographies or had their faces plastered on dollar bills. Yet they were the families who fought and died for the Revolution, risking their lives to overthrow the British and who now expected government both by and for the people.

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How did the wealthy merchants and bankers pushing for the Constitution respond? By economically destroying the little guy. Due to governmental dysfunction — and the fact the poor and propertyless were locked out of voting — a large percentage of veterans remained unpaid for years after the redcoats left. Even worse, many had mortgaged their homes and farms to finance the fight for independence, with the government promising repayment that never materialized. Little wonder these men rose up, under the former colonel Daniel Shays, to resist the injustices of debtors’ prisons and restore what they saw as the Revolution’s democratic spirit.

Not that Shays himself was some permanent rabble-rouser. Born not far from Boston, he fought at Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga, was wounded in action, and handed a ceremonial sword by none other than the Marquis de Lafayette. It’s a sword Shays was later forced to sell to cover his debts. By the autumn of 1786, the veterans and common folk of western Massachusetts had had enough. Armed bands of farmers — mostly veterans — marched on the county courthouses and shut them down by force, reasoning that a court that can’t convene also can’t foreclose on their neighbors and friends.

And so, for a few months, these insurgents effectively governed the western half of Massachusetts. The Commonwealth’s authority simply evaporated under popular pressure. Then, in January 1787, Shays led roughly 1,500 men against the federal arsenal at Springfield, aiming to seize its weapons and turn them against the state governments, which they believed had been captured by wealthy coastal merchants and big farmers. They never reached the gates. A militia — privately financed by a syndicate of Boston merchants, since the bankrupt state couldn’t afford one — met them with literal cannon fire. Four Shaysites fell dead in the snow. Upon seeing the ruthlessness with which these hired guns pursued them, some of the Shaysites are said to have died from fright. The rest scattered, before being hunted across the hills through a brutal winter.

What would Shays have done if he and his rebels had been able to take the arsenal at Springfield? In an interview with the Massachusetts Centinel, the colonel suggested that, once the rebels were armed to the teeth, they planned “to march directly to Boston, plunder it, and then destroy the nest of devils, who by their influence, make the Court enact what they please”. Given the scale of the betrayal of these revolutionary soldiers — and seeing how American business have dominated the country’s government since — it’s hard to argue against him.

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In the end, though, the country’s greatest ever class rebellion ended in failure. Shays himself was eventually pardoned, though would later die in drunken poverty. But the fright it put into the propertied classes endured. Word of the uprising reached Mount Vernon, and a rattled George Washington was coaxed into running for the presidency. Meanwhile, the rebellion’s shock directly spurred the wealthy establishment’s drive for the new constitutional order, replacing the radically localist politics of the revolutionary era with a system designed to stabilize property relations and restrain popular democracy.

It worked. All the attention on slavery and race in American history overshadows the essential fact that, in most cases, the poor and propertyless were not allowed to vote until the Jacksonian era, some 40 years after the Constitution’s passage. Nor does the document’s malign influence, or the resonance of Shays’s Rebellion, end there. Far from being a quaint historical curiosity, the revolt’s failure was both the spur for today’s legal order and the decisive turning point in American political development: with the Constitution amounting to, essentially, an elite-led counter-revolution where the democratic energies of 1776 were deliberately caged to protect bankers, creditors, and commercial elites from popular pressure. The Presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court — all these elements were explicitly designed to curb democratic energies and ensure that property holders were protected from the “factionalism” of the “mob”.

The anti-majoritarian architecture built in 1789 continues to imprison American governance to this day. Beside the absurdity of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — which allows money to be treated as legally protected “speech” — nothing illustrates this better than the data-center boom. No one except tech billionaires wants these things: certainly not in their own communities. And yet they pop up everywhere, including the now-notorious “Stratos Project” in northern Utah, funded by investor Kevin O’Leary, and which would immediately require more power than the entire state uses in a year. Just like the spread of Walmart in earlier decades, often against the will of the communities the shopping centers invaded, the spread of data centers is enabled by precisely the tyranny of property holders the Constitution was built to make possible.

The shadow of the nation’s Constitutional counter-revolution extends to nearly all the great economic problems of American life. The same logic that crushed the Shaysites — creditor over debtor; centralized elite over localist self-rule; property rights over political rights — runs through American political economy to this day, from the Wall Street bailouts after 2008, to wars fought for corporate interests, to the relentless algorithmic extraction of the gig economy.

If the civics-touting Right remains in hock to the Constitution, the Left’s critique isn’t much better either. For all the supposed radicalism of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ undertaking was merely a continuation of the trend among elite storytellers and academicians who ignore class entirely, and instead seek to turn the Founding into a different kind of myth useful to their political project. For Hannah-Jones and rich readers of the New York Times, certainly, it’s useful to make race and gender — not class — the Founding’s dominant feature.

How, then, might we build a better tomorrow? In the first place, by recognizing that the Constitution wasn’t totally hopeless. The Bill of Rights, of course not pushed by Hamilton, Madison and the other Federalists, enshrined John Locke’s idea of limited government into law, and opened an eventual pathway for liberal democracy globally. In other words, then, the future rests not on the DSA socialism of Zohran Mamdani, nor on the Sanderistas, but on returning to the localist tradition Shays  tried to defend. It’s a tradition Anti-Federalists sought to preserve as much as possible: hence their insistence on an extensive list of governmental “thou shalt nots” throughout the Bill of Rights. Yet if this exists entirely in the realm of what political theorists call “negative rights” — in other words freedom from rather than freedom to — this is ultimately a mischaracterization of the Anti-Federalists and their politics. Without our Anti-Federalist strand, the fight to end property restrictions on the right to vote, which propelled Andrew Jackson into office, would never have been completed. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal probably wouldn’t have been possible either.

If, in other words, fighting the Constitution means encouraging “localism”, that’s less abstract than the term implies. For instance, it would mean turning antitrust law, mostly dormant for two generations, against the tech monopolies, just as trustbusters once stymied the railroad barons. It would also mean encouraging right-to-repair laws, letting people own the machines they buy outright, while keeping banks accountable to the towns they lend in — instead of hands-off regulation-haven states like Delaware.

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More generally, reviving the American Revolution means reducing the power of the national government over the states: both the intention of the 1776 revolution and the only way a true democracy can function. Recall, again, that the revolutionaries were committed to small-“r” republican governance, which meant as many people as possible participating actively and often in the political process. Pretending that the system we have now is a “democracy” in line with the intentions of our 1776 founding is in itself a betrayal.

The time for change, in short, is now. Tech monopolies and their ruthless gaming of the legal system are gutting whatever’s left of the Revolution’s democratic spirit. The trillionaire class that AI’s rise will produce is the final boss stage of the elite-led counter-revolution that began in 1787. As we speak, the elite are exploiting the supremacy of property law provided by the Constitution to ensure technology serves no one but their makers, keeping the few rich and the many surveilled. Technology itself, though, remains neutral. The material conditions of the present — remote work, decentralized production, drone-assisted agriculture — may, practically for the first time since the Revolution itself, revive the localist, democratic spirit the Constitution was designed to suppress.

Whether this happens depends on something the localists have been trying to tell us for 40 years. In his 1985 book Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah warned that a republic organized around private accumulation forgets the language of the common good — and loses the civic muscles self-government actually runs on. To paraphrase Michael Sandel, we have traded the citizen, who helps govern the forces that rule his life, for the consumer, who is merely ignored by them. That trade, in a sense, is the counter-revolution’s deepest victory: a whole people taught to mistake being unbothered for being “free”. The key question now is whether Americans can recognize their own revolutionary inheritance before the counter-revolution completes itself and all working-class children are illiterate, device-addicted serfs who own nothing and “like it”.

The Hamilton buzz came with distasteful notes of official propriety, the same dead respectability carried by such names as “Barack Obama” and “The New York Times” and “NPR”. Indeed, in my own California neighborhood, a continent away from Broadway, I was beginning to see grey-haired liberal ladies carrying Hamilton tote bags. That the play was supposedly a mashup of the American Founding and hip-hop threatened to spoil both the American Founding and hip-hop for me.

And then, one morning late in 2016, I woke to find songs from Hamilton coming from my own stereo — the official cast recording of Hamilton had become urgently popular among American 10-year-olds, and my oldest child was 10 at the time. The final barrier between me and musical theater had been breached. But I couldn’t disdain those songs as I may have wanted to, since my daughter loved them so much, and since she and her friends were singing and rapping along to them with such charming exuberance. And since, well, some of those songs, some of that Broadway hip-hop, I had to admit I kind of liked. They were like… songs, pretty good songs. There was, for example, the winning Beatles bounce of “Washington on Your Side”, and the ingenious, absurdly infectious rhythms of “Wait for It”.

What really broke my resistance, though, was Hamilton’s hip-hop side. Now, a musical about America’s first secretary of the treasury is obviously miles away, in sensibility and setting and street cred, from what is generally considered hip-hop, which was fine because so am I. What of hip-hop Hamilton does have — rapid-fire rhymes and expert word-play — it has in abundance. I can only imagine how much fun it would be to deliver such lines from a stage. What I do know is it’s consistently a kick to hear them.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2020, though, when Disney Plus released a filmed version of a 2016 stage production of Hamilton, that I saw the play as a single work of musical theater, start to finish. And my official critical assessment of Hamilton would be that, dramatically or narratively, it is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. Still, those parts are pretty great. And the individual scenes built from the dozens of fun songs, the countless witty lines and clever couplets, create their own cumulative pleasure that more than compensates for the narrative flimsiness. (This may be how musical theater works in general. I wouldn’t know.)

By then the play’s public reputation, which had been in flux for several years, was in something like a crisis. Initially, back in 2015 and 2016, it had been an object of fervent public adulation among people with real power, including Obama. Its standing was so exalted that the play’s cast felt entitled to direct a pointed, critical plea at the Vice President-elect of the United States, Mike Pence, when he and his wife attended a Hamilton performance shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory. Speaking for the entire cast after the show, one actor addressed Pence directly, expressing anxiety that “your new administration will not protect us” — the “diverse America” the mostly black cast took itself to represent — “or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights”. He went on to express “hope” that Pence would be “inspired” by Hamilton “to uphold our American values”. In its melding of patriotic boilerplate and the language of Obama liberalism, this was a very Hamilton sort of message. (In retrospect, Trump’s whining response — saying the cast had “harassed” Pence and violated the “safe place” of the theater — reads as a weirdly literal omen of how New Right Machiavels like Chris Rufo and Stephen Miller would take up the campus Left’s weepy pretexts for punishing wrong-think when the chance arose.)

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But by the time I finally watched Hamilton on Disney Plus, not quite four years later, America was two months into the “racial reckoning” incited by the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. An unprecedented moral pageantry of protest and public kneeling and rote apologies had just been underwritten by the strange but effective teamwork of multinational corporations and urban rioters. The play’s affirming take on the American Founding, with its multicultural casting and its fond portrayal of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, had been a perfect sendoff for the Obama years, but it didn’t fit so well with this puritanical moment. Openly conjuring the Founding Fathers so as to adulate the nation they wrought was the sort of thing that could get you cancelled — and indeed, the hashtag #cancelhamilton was briefly a thing on Twitter. Miranda was accordingly scolded by Harvard students and lectured by Columbia lecturers. The 2020 backlash was not huge, but it was big enough that Miranda embarked on a minor apology tour that summer, in which he absorbed without complaint every bit of criticism that came his way and, of course, promised to do better.

In fact, a small number of people had been finding Hamilton problematic more or less from the beginning, and for reasons of simple historical fact that are pretty sound. For example, shortly after the show began its massive run at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway, in August 2015, the black novelist Ishmael Reed wrote a long and (characteristically) angry essay pointing out the historical errors and evasions that enable both Miranda and Ron Chernow, author of the bestselling Alexander Hamilton biography on which the play is based, to portray Hamilton as an early abolitionist. Hamilton does indeed seem to have disliked slavery and looked forward to its dissolution, and he was close friends with abolitionist dreamer John Laurens, and he was a founding member of the New York Manumission Society, which advocated the voluntary freeing of slaves by slaveowners. But, as Reed and others have pointed out, he married into a slave-owning family, seems to have owned slaves himself, brokered the sale of other slaves, and represented slave-owners in his capacity as a lawyer. Hamilton disliked slavery, but not enough to take a stand against it in his personal and professional life.

In his biography, Chernow deals with these inconvenient facts by laboring to discover a sort of heroic ambivalence in Hamilton’s heart for which, in the documentary record, evidence is scarce. Miranda deals with them by briefly, glancingly, playing up Hamilton’s anti-slavery side and otherwise rushing past the whole topic. In a cabinet debate over government debt, Hamilton mocks the Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson: “A civics lesson from a slaver. Hey neighbor/Your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor.” And earlier, in the rousing anthem “My Shot”, Hamilton identifies himself and his fellow rebellious New Yorkers, and Laurens, as “A bunch of revolutionary manumission abolitionists”. The couplet’s second line — which clinches a killer bit of wordplay — is heading elsewhere in a hurry: “Give me a position, show me where the ammunition is.”

For Hamilton’s harshest critics, though, invoking the play’s historical evasions and exaggerations is merely a way of prosecuting a deeper case against it. Miranda’s undergrad critic from Harvard accuses him of “blindly ask[ing] BIPOC performers to act in a piece detailing historical events benefiting their oppressors”. (That “blindly” is a very undergrad touch. The notion that contemporary actors are being oppressed by men from the 18th century nicely illustrates the collapsed version of historical time that operates in the minds of certain progressive commentators on race in America.) For Ishmael Reed, Hamilton’s historical characters are so fundamentally defined by their involvement in slavery that it should blot out all other ways of talking about these men.

In other words, it’s the implicit optimism of the play that is unacceptable to these critics. Historical details about Hamilton merely confirm this prior conviction. In the event that someone like Miranda stirs up a hopeful mood about America, a battalion of academic historians stands on call to provide these details, with angry writers ready to send them through their megaphones. Cornily, Miranda grants American Founder Alexander Hamilton the liberal honor of being an “immigrant”, because he came from a different part of the British Empire, and he lets the word “abolitionist” hang in the air like a sort of Kantian cologne for Hamilton and his revolutionary friends to pass through and bear the smell of for the rest of the play. And then the historians and professional pessimists step in to say: Wrong! Racism! Slavery!

But many of Hamilton’s admirers already knew it was wrong, or at least a happy distortion of a darker history. The play’s most famous and powerful admirer, Obama, was surely not duped into beliefs contrary to the historical record after seeing it, formed as he was by the more radical traditions of black thought and black struggle. But I imagine that, as president of the country whose founding was being portrayed in that delightful and hugely successful musical, Obama welcomed the opportunity to indulge the happy distortion for as long as the inertial forces of public discourse would allow. I imagine him thinking, “It’s healthy and useful to think about it this way for a while. No doubt we’ll have to go back to thinking about it the other way at some point.”

That is, the warm reception given to Hamilton by influential and historically savvy people like Obama, and indeed the writing of the play by the Puerto Rican phenom Miranda, are examples of what Benedict Anderson calls “memory and forgetting” in Imagined Communities, his great book on the origins and moral logic of nationalism. Since nation states were typically put together and solidified through enormous violence, often fueled by ethnic or racial hostility, they bear these injuries and outrages as undeniable facts of their national histories. But — unlike the multinational agglomerations known as empires — the nation state carries a civic and communal promise, in its very form, to all those contained within its borders, including those who were gathered in and politically domesticated through conquest and violence: “You are members of this national community, brothers in nationhood.” Because this promise and this history are radically at odds with each other, those who generate the legitimating stories of these nations are forced into an almost comically impossible task. They can’t simply engage in perpetual remembering of the formative outrages, since this contradicts the unifying conceit of nationhood and threatens to undo this work of unifying and legitimating. But they can’t simply forget these outrages since they’re too well-remembered, especially by the groups whose ancestors bore this formative violence, and they remain communally important for those groups. And so the nation’s legitimating stories, and everyone who imbibes them in moments of national affirmation, do both. They forget and remember at the same time, or they forget and then later they remember, or vice versa.

Anderson’s great example comes from his own people, the English, whose founding hero arrived from a different country and indeed bears this alienness in his name: William the Conqueror. But the name is rendered blurry in national myth, so that one can imagine William, touched with some primordial Englishness back in France, conquering not England but someone else on England’s behalf. As Anderson writes, the sobriquet “‘the Conqueror’ operates as [a] kind of ellipses… to remind one of something which it is immediately obligatory to forget”.

“The American national myth,” I wrote in that earlier article, “reflects an even more vigorous effort of memory and forgetting, in which… the enslavement of Africans serves as mere prelude to their emancipation into civic brotherhood.” Yes, the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of black people was a founding fact of American history, but so was their eventual, inevitable emancipation into membership in this great nation, thanks to the elevated sentiment and noble political philosophy of founding Americans like Hamilton. Yes, our greatest Founding Father George Washington owned slaves at Mount Vernon, but, in an almost perfect working-out of this mythic logic of founding and emancipation, he also freed those slaves when he died. It feels almost Christ-like in the national telling, as if Washington died in order to free his slaves. This is how it works.

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Critics accused Miranda of ignoring or downplaying slavery in Hamilton, of forgetting it if you will. This was true, sort of. He definitely didn’t dwell on it — except that, in the small matter of casting his play almost entirely with descendants of its victims, and having them perform in a musical style invented by other such descendants, he was very much remembering American slavery. The play wasn’t about slavery in its text, but in the subtext or metatext of its casting and music, it was about slavery quite powerfully, and quite obviously. In this way, Hamilton is one of America’s most pointed and elegant and self-aware achievements in memory and forgetting.

Of course, this is what its critics dislike about it. The funny practice of memory and forgetting, even if it contains ample portions of regret and self-critique, generally sustains the national myth and thus serves the national project. Otherwise, it would just be memory, bitter remembering as perpetual critique, cynical rebuke to the claim of belonging. (You might say that America’s racial pessimists are “all memory”, in which case Trump, who recently complained that America’s national museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was”, would accurately be described as “all forgetting”.)

And, of course, this balance of symbolic influences, along with those songs and that quasi-hip-hop wordplay, was another reason why I liked that corny musical when my daughter started playing it on my stereo. It felt like a healthy antidote to the dominant way of thinking about race in America at the time — the post-Ferguson years when activists had turned their flamboyant pessimism into an ongoing business, latching onto ambiguous individual tragedies as iron confirmation of a sort of paranoid metaphysics of racist oppression. It’s a convenient and profitable circularity, in which murky events, interpreted according to those invidious assumptions, are pointed to as proving those assumptions. In casting the American Founders in his hip-hop musical with black actors, Hamilton conveyed that adopting such blanket convictions about America’s “structural” and “systematic” — and thus permanent, unchanging, and inexpugnable — racial guilt was a political choice, and that other choices were available. There were other ways for black Americans to look at and inhabit their country.

And these ways are better. It’s not that the stance of pessimism and stubborn aggrievement has nothing behind it. This attitude must be especially hard to shake for a satirical writer like Reed. The satirist’s state of inflamed skepticism has an easy foil in America, with its vanity and vaulting ideals, on one hand, and its much less ideal history and sometimes ridiculous present, on the other. The satirical novelist looks upon such a nation and sees nothing redeemable, only a rich cast of targets — everyone appearing a clownish agent of racist evil or patriotic delusion or both. This harsh outlook serves the satirist, as it serves the activist with her hands out for the philanthropy of racial guilt, but it’s hard to imagine that it serves the material interests of everyday black people.

I’ll give an example of what I mean. At a middle school I’ve visited for my children’s football matches, a school in the poor and violent “Deep East” of my town Oakland, an exterior wall is adorned with a quotation. The quotation — an official message or motto of the school itself, though it’s spray-painted in a graffiti-style script — is from Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers, who said: “Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lies advertised around them.” This is the perverse endpoint of racial cynicism, a middle school’s leadership sending a hopeless message about school itself to their impressionable students — many of them restless boys who, like me at that age, are already looking for reasons to shed the burdens of school and to avoid caring about anything but themselves.

The pedagogical and political wisdom of Hamilton lay in rejecting this dispiriting attitude while allowing the history behind it to function as musical suggestion and visible specter. It took the material Reed turns into bitter satire and made something much less bitter of it. In doing so it revealed that, despite the cynicism dominant in commentary about America by high-status black figures, most black Americans would prefer to inhabit their country uncynically, at least some of the time. They loved Hamilton as much as everyone else. The black Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed was one of the scholars who felt compelled to remind everyone that Hamilton was less of an abolitionist than Miranda implied, and yet she also loved Hamilton. “Evidently,” she wrote in 2016, “many of us enjoy feeling good about America.” “It makes perfect sense,” she went on, that people would want “to celebrate” as well as “to complicate” their national story. It makes perfect sense that black Americans — like everyone else who seeks a citizen’s spiritual home in a flawed nation — would find it worthwhile to forget sometimes, even as they remember.

Yet here I am — still a loyal Democrat. Why is that?

I don’t love modern progressivism. I reject its yearning to reform not just institutions, but people’s souls. Indeed, Marc Dunkelman’s recent book Why Nothing Works has all but convinced me that modern progressivism has turned into a cannibalistic movement chewing to death any attempts at meaningful reform. And with every breath that brings me closer to age 40, I become more and more skeptical of the notion that public policy can right the crooked timber of humankind or alter the fundamentals of human nature.

Given all that, could it be that my loyalty to Democrats has to do with mere tribal identity? I hail from deep-blue New York, which codes entirely Democratic on cultural issues. To a great extent, my Democratic sensibilities can’t help but be shaped by the fact that everybody I knew growing up was Democrat. But tribal identity and teenage gut feelings aren’t solid guides to thoughtful, grownup political participation.

Luckily, there is a better answer, and it has to do with the historical role of the Democrats in America’s modern party system: the fact that in the 20th century, the party has stood for mature governance, warts and all, while the other, the GOP, has been and remains a party too often averse to government as such. When we support political parties, we choose people to govern us. It’s one thing to reject the progressive dream. It’s another to insist upon good governance. 

The Democratic Party was founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren as a vehicle for disaffected farmers and workers. If these groups’ interests didn’t always align, they shared a hostility to the Northeastern establishment, embodied in the Second Bank of the United States, against which Jackson waged war as fiercely as he carried out Indian Removal. As the young republic developed, and sectional tensions over slavery intensified, Democrats found themselves divided in a way that simply wasn’t true of the Republicans, a party explicitly founded in favor of “free labor” and in opposition to the South’s Peculiar Institution. 

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It wasn’t until the 1890s, then, that the modern party system in America really took shape. At that point, the US basically was a single-party state. Having supported secession, pro-slavery Democrats had discredited themselves, and the party as a whole, gifting Republicans with a 30-year run of near-total electoral dominance. The reconstituted Democrats emerged first out of a kind of a yearning for a splinter movement. Attempting to be cutting, a Republican surrogate in 1884 accused the Dems of being the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” but there were enough Catholics and rum drinkers around that the label stuck and became a rallying cry. The Democrats became once more, as in their Jacksonian roots, the party of the underdog and particularly of the urban disenfranchised. 

But that left the Democrats as merely a party of sentiment, not of ideas. The tossing-and-turning of the Grover Cleveland administration — a rare Democratic break in the GOP dominance of the Gilded Age — showed the need for a coherent political philosophy. Cleveland, a man of impeccable integrity, conceived of himself as a mountain of obstruction in the executive branch, scrupulously following the Constitution and vetoing everything that seemed out of bounds. And yet Cleveland was compelled, over the course of his presidency (especially in his second term), to abandon his entire political philosophy.

He sent the feds into Chicago to break a strike — with a number of strikers killed in the chaos. He laid groundwork for the annexation of Hawaii as much as he disliked territorial expansion. And he found himself turning the government into a kind of cash-for-gold program, stocking up gold reserves as much as possible and eventually turning to JP Morgan to bail out the Treasury. As Cleveland said of his reliance on the plutocrats, in a stinging rebuke of the populist wing of his party: “It never occurred to any of us to consult in this emergency farmers, doctors, lawyers, shoemakers, or even statesmen.… The prospect of what we needed might be somewhat improved by making application to those whose business and surroundings qualified them to intelligently respond.”

Every one of Cleveland’s decisions was almost certainly correct under the circumstances, but he left office as a pariah to his own party, at that time undergoing its Populist renovation. His GOP successor, William McKinley, planned to govern with traditional Republican values — above all, a protective tariff — but he, like Cleveland, found himself playing cards from a completely different part of the deck. He committed himself to massive territorial expansion, annexing Hawaii and eventually Puerto Rico, turning Cuba into a protectorate, and extending the US imperium as far as the Philippines. A president who had arrived in office anticipating enclosed continental borders was, by 1898, telling his staff, “it is evident that I must learn a great deal of geography in this [Spanish-American] war.” And protective tariffs — the cornerstone of McKinley’s governing vision — were all but forgotten as expansionism spurred free trade.

If the 1890s showed the incoherence of the governing philosophies of both parties, the 1900s helped to smooth them out. The United States came to terms with its expansionary role in the world — abandoning George Washington’s counsel against “entangling alliances” in his Farewell Address — recognizing it as a necessary adaptation to the era of high-seas navies, in which overseas territory not picked up by America would tend to fall to a rival. The new power of the executive branch was accepted in an era of heightened international exposure — and charismatically embodied in the almost universally popular Theodore Roosevelt. And the government could conceive of a new domestic role for itself: enforcing nascent antitrust legislation and curbing the monopolistic control of the trusts.

Having entertained William Jennings Bryan’s idiotic silver-standard movement, the Democrats straightened themselves through the Progressive Era, so that, as Dunkelman writes, the 1912 election would come down to “which version of Progressivism … would define the movement going forward.” Government was understood as what John Kenneth Galbraith would call a “countervailing power” checking big business, and an income tax was instituted to overcome the deeply unreliable revenue system of relying on tariffs (which, as often as not, had meant turning to Wall Street whenever there was a crisis).

This, then, is the heart of what the Democratic Party means to me: a robust conception of government, in which government, without ever sacrificing popular legitimacy, carries out executive functions, above all in exercising countervailing power to curb monopolistic practices and in running a coherent, far-sighted foreign policy.

Neither one of these is exactly enshrined in the Constitution, but what everybody in power in the early 20th century discovered was that the Constitution couldn’t solve all problems — that it was necessary to develop a more robust government to deal with new crises: global power politics, predatory business practices, and then the Jim Crow regime that protected itself in appeals to local government and separation of powers.

Republicans would gradually forget all this. In the Twenties, the Republican Party rebranded itself —  very far away from the party of Theodore Roosevelt — as isolationist, strictly laissez-faire in business, but with stultifyingly high tariffs and immigration barriers. That turned out to be exactly the wrong approach to an era of interconnected global crises, whether economic or political, and the result was not only a well-deserved 20-year loss of power for the Republicans starting in 1932, but the dominance of New Deal Democrats through the Sixties. 

The making of the midcentury Democrats involved a transformation arguably more dramatic than Trump’s remaking of the Reagan GOP. Going back to its Jacksonian roots, the Democrats were beholden to a Jeffersonian vision of independent yeomen which saw the Hamiltonian state as, at best, an evil to be minimized and tolerated — barely. There was virtue to this vision, but it failed to answer the problems of the industrial age, when American craftsmen and yeomen became wage-earning employees, who owned neither their own tools nor land, and who were lorded over by enormous oligopolies controlling their respective markets. Prices were no longer a pristine index of supply and demand or marginal productivity, as in the pre-industrial world — but an expression of sheer market power.

Against this backdrop, the Democratic Party managed to refound itself. It adopted a Hamiltonian vision that accepted the rational need for larger institutions. As Dunkelman writes, “these [Hamiltonian progressives] came to believe that the [Jeffersonian] vilification of ‘bigness’ was fundamentally off base. In their view, the salve wouldn’t be in eroding concentrations of power, but in establishing new nodes of public power to hold vast concentrations in check.” In other words, to protect the ideal of republican independence and dignity, it was necessary to wield the apparatus of the federal government: “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends,” in the famous formula of the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

And it was that basic conception that drove the recovery from the Depression, the successful execution of World War II, and the phenomenal achievements of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years. 

The tragedy of the 20th century is that at some point, the Democrats gave up on that political conception. In the Sixties, a progressivism emerged that was essentially nihilist, that believed in tearing-down all concentrated power, that mistrusted the very soul of America. I’m speaking, of course, of the decline of New Deal Democrats and the rise of the McGovernites and their ilk: the cohort that LBJ, the last New Deal Democrat, derided as “Harvard kids.” 

In a way, the acme of this shift was the progressive historian Robert Caro’s ferocious attacks against the legacy of New York’s legendary urban planner, Robert Moses. In his 1974 book, The Power Broker, Caro painted Moses as a liberal autocrat who tore through Gotham’s organic fabric in pursuit of large, rationalized infrastructure. The urbanist Jane Jacobs, representing a similar tendency as Caro, mounted a parallel attack. The enduring result was to delegitimize the Hamiltonian impulse in Democratic government. As Dunkelman puts it, the party’s “previous inclination to build power up had been replaced by an almost insatiable impulse to tear things down.”

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By Justin H. Vassallo

The result was paralysis and red tape everywhere. The Republican Party, having made its own peace with good government under Eisenhower and Nixon, had turned cannibalistic and libertarian by the end of the Seventies, demolishing everything in the American state that wasn’t the military. For their part, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party produced nothing but snarl. Anybody critical of Robert Moses’s excesses might pause to consider the 40 years it took, after Moses’s death, to build a meager extension to the Second Avenue Subway or the city’s utter inability to reconstruct Penn Station. Moses, by contrast, built up several enormous projects in far less time.

Which brings us to today’s Democratic Party. The party today still suffers from the damage wrought by its turn in the Sixties and Seventies. For example, the party’s 2020 assault on policing, now blessedly abandoned, was an echo of the same destructive tendencies that saw Democrats abandon New Deal models and New Deal patriotism in favor of McGovernite suspicion and Leftist excess.

Still, the Democratic Party retains enough muscle memory to be able — maybe, just maybe — to become once more the party of sound government. The movement for so-called abundance, spearheaded by the likes of Ezra Klein, promises to coordinate government and business in order to clear supply bottlenecks, lower prices, and promote the mass, middle-class prosperity that used to be the Democrats’ calling card. Some of this work is deregulatory and involves cutting the kinds of boutique environmental red tape that hinders development in the United States. Some of it, however, would involve — yes — proactive government where the market has failed: industrial policy, workforce training, and the like. 

Compare this to the chaos wrought by DOGE Republicans, as they slash through not just things that need to be slashed — but also funding for the sorts of basic research in the health sciences that form the foundations of US prosperity. This policy can’t but have long-lasting, and destructive, ramifications: researchers and academics leaving the United States in the kind of “brain drain” associated with Third World countries; economic uncertainty prompting other nations to look for new trading partners. 

Allies are caught in the lurch, not sure if they can rely on the United States to maintain its security commitments or even conduct a cogent foreign policy. The United States, whether it likes it or not, is an empire and a hegemon, and the nation owes it to the world to fulfill the imperial obligations it has accrued. That’s what both parties, actually, discovered in the crucial period when the modern party system developed, but the Republicans managed to forget all that and the Democrats almost have. But not quite as badly as the GOP.

So, yes, as much as Democrats drive me to distraction, I remain a Democrat. The party is flawed — deeply flawed — but the job of government, fundamentally, is to govern, and the Democrats are the only party of the two that still takes that task seriously.