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.And, as we have seen, borrowing in part from Smith’s free market idea, James Madison had argued in Federalist 10 that the collision of political factions in an extended republic would produce greater stability, making size an asset rather than a liability.One could also argue that the contrived compromises reached at the Constitutional Convention, especially on the extent of executive power and the blurry line separating state and federal jurisdiction, created an inherently argumentative context that made the emergence of political parties of some kind virtually inevitable.And that, of course, is precisely what happened.2So why were the founders, pretty much to a man, so resistant to the inevitable, especially when the creation of the first functioning two-party system in world history turned out to be perhaps their most lasting contribution to modern political thought? Why did they have to be dragged—kicking, screaming, and, perhaps most interestingly, denying what they were quite obviously doing?The full answer to those questions lies within the folds of the story told in the pages that follow.The two major players are James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, early on dubbed “the General” and “the Generalissimo” of the emerging Republican Party.A major supporting role goes to Alexander Hamilton, the most flamboyantly brilliant member of the cast, who nearly steals the show but whose chief purpose here is to serve as the fixed object against which Madison and Jefferson do their political version of isometric exercises.Minor roles belong to two men most accustomed to heading the bill, George Washington and John Adams, neither of whom could quite fathom the partisan bickering that shaped their respective presidencies as anything more than dissonant noise that drowned out the classical harmonies.Washington and Adams, in fact, were representative American statesmen who understood the terms “party” or “faction” as epithets that conveyed a disreputable commitment to a narrow and usually private agenda at the expense of the public interest.(The closest approximation in our modern political vocabulary is “lobbyist.”) Their role model was the Patriot King, first described by Henry St.John, Viscount Bolingbroke, a British opposition thinker much admired by America’s revolutionary generation for his endorsement of disinterested virtue as the hallmark of statesmanship, floating above factional squabbles and misguided popular surges to act in the long-term interest of the nation regardless of the political cost at the moment.It was psychologically impossible for either Adams or Washington to regard himself as the leader of a political party.Indeed, Washington was the ultimate Patriot King of all time.And Adams took considerable delight in committing political suicide by refusing to fight a popular war with France in 1799, a decision that led to his defeat in 1800 but that he forever regarded as the finest moment of his presidency.3Modern American journalists and politicians still pay rhetorical homage to this inveterate disdain for polls, popularity, and partisanship, which is one of the chief reasons the founders enjoy such iconic reputations as the gold standard for our diluted political currency.The truth is that Washington and Adams were the last of a classical breed, and Jefferson was the first president to point the way to modernity as the avowed—though he was extremely reluctant to admit it—leader of a political party.In a sense the problem was a matter of language.There was no neutral vocabulary available to talk about political parties, just as there was no way to discuss executive power without referring to kings and courts.Although the notion that economic interest groups or political factions could play a positive role in the marketplace or the political arena was generally understood, being regarded as a party leader remained a major stigma.It was one thing to recognize the clash of interests as a permanent feature of political life.It was quite another to embrace self-consciously and openly the role of party advocate and partisan, which on the face of it came across as a confession of corruption and moral deficiency that automatically disqualified such a person for national office.Even campaigning for office was considered a declaration of unworthiness [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]