After going back and forth on Twitter a bit with Eric Levitz about his article with the headline “AOC Thinks Concentrated Wealth Is Incompatible With Democracy. So Did Our Founders,” I thought I’d clarify my point of view. Really, I thought I’d use my objections to the line of thought exemplified by Levitz’s piece as a way of developing my own thought — at some length, it turns out — on egalitarianism and the nation’s founders, especially with regard to Jeffersonianism as a supposedly progressive antidote to Hamiltonianism.
Levitz’s linkage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to founding American values rose out of the panting, 24/7 need of media platforms to gin comments made on other media platforms into further comments; and out of opinion writers’ ceaseless task of opining on whatever momentarily passes for breaking news, which often means somebody else’s ceaseless opining. Hence Levitz’s discussion of the American founding, in response to a predictably reactionary rant by Sean Hannity, calling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s policies un-American.
But clickbait headlines aren’t the responsibility of writers. Levitz’s real point is more intelligent, informed, and nuanced than the headline’s suggestion that — contra Hannity — Ocasio-Cortez’s desire to use government power to restrain wealth and promote economic equality is actually grounded in philosophies, goals, and policies that brought the nation into being. For of course it’s true that, as Levitz says, “there’s nothing foreign or communistic about the idea that concentrated wealth is incompatible with democracy.” And of course it’s true that Hamilton, for one, despised democracy and promoted concentration of wealth as a national good — so in a funny way you can say that even he would have agreed that the two aren’t compatible.
Yet Levitz uses a disproportionately involved schooling of Hannity to mount a defense of Ocasio-Cortez as an exemplar of founding American values. So I’m now using an even more disproportionately involved dissent from Levitz to present my thoughts on the futility, for any real public engagement with progressivism and democracy, of roping the founders into those values. Politicians of every persuasion will never stop invoking imaginary founding precedents for their views. But intellectuals could stop, and I think if they did, the public discourse would improve, and so would our politics. Levitz’s take is a classic of its kind, yet far better informed than most, and so just as Hannity’s knee jerks in response to AOC, and Levitz’s in response to Hannity, mine jerks like this:
Levitz begins his effort to root Ocasio-Cortez’s progressivism in founding American values by invoking Thomas Paine, not via argument, but by linking to a Bill Moyers interview with the Paine scholar Harvey Kaye. The idea is to position the author of “Common Sense” as representative of egalitarian views supposedly evinced by “many of our republic’s founders,” as Levitz puts it. Since Paine’s radically egalitarian views made him persona non grata with almost every one of our republic’s founders, the mainstream founding-history establishment doesn’t even consistently include Paine as a founder: it endorses his (possibly overrated) contribution to independence via the pamphlet; it sometimes ignores and sometimes explicitly tut-tuts the economic radicalism that made him unique among the famous founders, and which aroused the open disdain of Adams as early as 1776, and of Washington by the early 1790’s at the latest. Paine served as an inspiration for and a supporter of the popular American insurrectionary movements that Henry Knox, sounding almost exactly like Hannity, feared were out to confiscate all of the elites’ property and redistribute it equally by tyrannical fiat.
Elites called the Constitutional Convention to put a stop to that stuff, and it was not for nothing that the Washington administration left Thomas Paine to die under the guillotine in Paris, refusing even to claim him as an American citizen. Paine escaped that fate only by luck, and when he did at last die, alone, drunk, and poverty-stricken back in New York, the tiny group of funeral mourners included not one comrade from the glory days, Federalist or Republican. If Paine is a hero, he’s a tragic one, precisely for being in no way representative of “many our republic’s founders.” His ideas are representative of exactly what the other founders were out to crush when forming the nation. In the process, Paine was crushed too.
Leapfrogging from Paine, whose real story offers no help in constructing an ethos of economic equality shared by a multitude of founders, Levitz jumps along the path set out by many hopefuls before him, landing on Jefferson, long the go-to person for locating egalitarianism in founding American thought. Glaring problems now arise, and Levitz is keenly aware of them. Continue reading →
