America’s Future Past
Of Republics, Frontiers, Empire, and Covenant
The War of American Independence began upon the standards of Whiggery, the defense of the Commons and the Gentry against the encroachments of Courtly centralization. Such ideas had mobilized men like John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in the Augustan age, where Whiggish lords dominated parliamentary proceedings, unleashing a golden age of commerce and corruption. Philippics and Jeremiads flowed freely against the long greasy reign of Robin, First Lord of the Treasury, who had pioneered the ministerial game of patronage and parliamentary procedure. In many ways, contrary to common sense, the Americans found themselves opposed not to the Old World, not to the tyranny of an Ancien Regime, but against the most modern polity that had graced the world, Britannia who had emerged from the azure main to rule and rule effectively, with a burden light and a wealth everflowing.
Americans were often the country bumpkin, still soaked in the lore of the Good Old Cause and King Billy, and found this new world incomprehensible. The paltry banking, mercantile company, and insurance firms of a Boston or Barbados quailed before the royally patented trading companies that circled the globe, inundating London with the riches of the world. The government sat pleasantly on a sated people, relying on the coiling Bank of England and all the commercial privileges of the City to fund these expeditions. Wars erupted once a decade, but the taxpayer was secure. Yankees may kneel before Jehovah when the French fort of Louisbourg was delivered into their hands. But the gods of Threadneedle and Lombard were neither rustic nor provincial in their caffeinated dealings. The fort was returned, only to have the whole of Canada absorbed into the Empire, even as their Caribbean sugar island of Saint Domingue was returned. The world was a business, and a very complex one, managed by the Senate of Westminster. Paper money, joint-stock, a seemingly infinite supply of bonds, these interlocking systems overwhelmed the average yeoman. But that was Great Britain, mistress of the seas and arbiter of Europe.
For many Americans, this system was invisible, it was benign, hovering over them as an inscrutable guardian angel. But soon this Imperial Parliament, hymned as a mortal god in the legal commentary of Blackstone, had come under the pall of new managers. The youthful George III had brought in young men, hungry for the power and the glory, illumined with oriental light of Plassey. These were not the sleazy shopkeeps of John Bull, but the disciples of Bolingbroke who yearned for a coming Patriot King. A new empire was being born from the basis of the old, a militancy that demanded the whole world, twirling and sparkling about the crown jewel of Hindoostan. Like Alexander fulfilling prophecy in untying the Gordian knot, England was garlanded with a destiny to rule in Asia. Belts must be tightened and purse strings loosed.
The befuddled Americans could do little but despise the imperious demands of Bute, Grenville, and Townshend. Hanging and burning these petit tyrants in effigy, American became Wilkesite in the blink of an eye, unleashing the Sons of Liberty to demand a return to the old empire (an empire they never fully understood). Dr. Franklin was one of the few who knew, and thus had attempted placation through integration, with the colonies sending representatives to sit in Parliament. The plan was little more than a dream, and so, with a sign, the American Prometheus put his hand towards the growing agitation to separate. And that is what America did, cast naked upon the formless waters of a new age.
After victory, the new republic (forged with the imaginarium of Greece, Rome, Venice, Florence, Amsterdam, and the Rump) was adrift. Americans never truly understood who they were or the nature of England they had just left. The cry of the Country, with its virtue and vigor, was never quite so independent from the life of the Court as they claimed. The Cicero of yesterday denouncing a ministerial Cataline was soon, after taking his post in a ministry, denounced in the same language. Gentlemen relied on the nobility for patronage, and this oil of mutual benefit eased the way towards management. What had exasperated Lord-Protector Cromwell (who was nearly alone as a true believer in a free parliament) was overcome through a cursus honorum of graft and promotion. The great Whiggish empire of England was founded upon an aristocracy who knew how to war and how to politic, who could unsheath a sword and conduct double entry bookkeeping. But there was no aristocracy in America, not really. So how could the Country govern without a Court?
The republic tradition supplied an answer: natural aristocracy. Rather than an inherited title, Nature herself would chrismate those Few who would hold the reins of imperium. The Many would doff their caps to these senators by instinct, the respect of virtuous citizenry to the virtue of their leading men. Heredity was redundant artifice. The Democratic element had a nose for the Aristocratic element, and thus the best would rise to take their seats in the hallowed halls of government. But who are these men? As the 1780s rolled on, it was unclear who exactly fit this image. Republic citizenry understood ranks and place within the Common Thing, as patricians and plebeians offered mutual coinherence to defend the Senate and People of Rome. But that did not exist in America, and rapidly there was simply The People, the rumblings of King Mob in classical theory, with no differentiation between Better and Best sorts.
It was this situation that Alexander Hamilton recognized keenly. The ancient polities would not do, but medieval ones; not the Oceana of Harrington, but the Leviathan of Hobbes. The authority of the representative is in his energetic capabilities, the infinite balancing act of commerce and corruption that had marked the British state, justified by the consent of the governed. In light of the new federal Constitution that created a more robust central government with the power to tax, Hamilton believed, or was believed to believe, that the old ways were, indeed, best. America needed a modern state, one with an elective monarchy who regulated a ministry of the talented Few, thrust into a fierce competition of states. No believer in free-trade, but imperial zones of control and influence, Hamilton proposed his infamous plan for a Bank of the United States, which immediately drew cries of corruption. Here was the reincarnation of the Whig Court and Lord Robin, if not (as some accused him) Caesar. But who held the shares of this national bank? Would they not form an informal hereditary aristocracy, based on government credit if not blue blood? Here were the Few whom Nature had failed to unveil. As Hamilton darkly lamented, “Cato was the Tory, Caesar the Whig of his day” and while “the former perished with the republic, the latter destroyed it.” What did this mean? While not an endorsement of Caesar, it was hardly a repudiation. Did survival necessitate abandonment of principle?
To even countenance this arrangement was, for Thomas Jefferson, a betrayal, apostasy, the reception of the mark of the beast. Britain was old but also the wrong kind of new, and the only way out was movement. Against the idea that limitless expansion would create degeneracy (the hick phenomenon), as the movement from civilization bred savagery, Jefferson saw rejuvenation through conquest. Hamilton was an American antichrist because he looked East, while Jefferson believed the only way out for a republic sans virtue, a Many sans Few, was Elsewhere. Despite James Madison’s flailing about Separation of Powers, Jefferson turned in a very different way. Virtue can only exist through tampering corruption. Contrary to the Madisonian balance of interest or the neo-whiggery of the Hamiltonians, there was no compromise with corruption, for a republic sans virtue was unthinkable. Thus, the energetic frontiersman, the settler, the planter, he alone could preserve the justice of the republic, as he was constantly baptized into the West. It was no surprise that Andrew Jackson and the Democracy would seize upon the mantle of Jefferson, the first Western president, the Tribune who would police a Senate that, by definition, was corrupt.
But is this process of rolling rejuvenation sustainable? As Jefferson believed in the frontier, he knew it would come to an end. The shores of the Pacific would signify both victory and defeat. And while Jefferson wildly underestimated how long this victory would take, it would also signal the death knell for America the Republic. It is no surprise that vocal Hamiltonians reappeared at the very close of the frontier. Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt attempted to jerk America’s neck backwards. Asia is on the horizon, and so too the Caribbean and lands of Latin America, there were even the African plains and jungles, but these were all in service of joining the Olympian councils of Europe. Despite the incitements to war and to empire that Roosevelt foisted upon the American people, a daring Sulla who infused blood into the decrepit Four Hundred, he also could not steer Columbia. Like Hamilton, his efforts dashed against the rocks of the American Many, who were now not quite like anything else before.
The solution came from the West, so far West that it had become the true East. The Asia trade, the Open Door, was not only life blood for the American economy, it also fulfilled its destiny. In a stirring passage, written amidst the tumult of the 1970s, the late J.G.A Pocock, a historian of republican thought from Renaissance to Revolution, gave a peculiar analysis, maybe even a prophecy:
“It is also intelligible that there is now an interpretation of American history, since that era [turn-of-the-century], which proposes that after 1890 the choice lay between internal reformation on the one hand and oceanic empire on the other, leading to the liberation of Asia by trade through an Open Door; and that the apparent rejection of America by Asia in the third quarter of the twentieth century is seen as leading to a profound crisis in self-perfeception, in which the hope of renewed innocence and recovered virtue is felt (once again) to have gone forever and the national jeremiad is sounded in peculiarly anguished terms.” (The Machiavellian Moment, 544)
While Pocock was blinkered by the significance of the Vietnam War (as were many left and left-adjacent academics), he was no less correct that Asia, as America’s true West, had become intertwined with the fate of America. The Jeffersonian idea, perhaps neo-Jeffersonian, meant renovating the whole world. Such an idea not only infused Woodrow Wilson’s hope for a League of Nations (though certainly not offering the Asians themselves a seat at the conference), but mobilized much of the Republican Party (named in honor of Jefferson). Heuristically, the GOP may be seen as the successor of the Whigs, and by extension the Federalists, but this simplistic schema obscures the variety of visions. Not a few Republicans lamented the silk-stockings back East, turning West. Internal improvements meant further movement West, industrialization meant further expansion West. Clay was Harry of the West for a reason, and this spirit travelled far and wide, leading to Secretary of State William Seward purchasing Alaska, the demand to acquire Hawaii, and the firm relationship with the Republic of China. Herbert Hoover’s secret language with his wife was Mandarin after all.
The coalescence of three hundred years of history still swirls around us, as Americans still, as ever, are not sure who or what they are. Is it any surprise that Chinahawking is nearly alone as the bipartisan consensus? Hamiltonian statesmen, such as Dean Acheson, have times in the limelight, but we are all the misbegotten children of Monticello. Concern with Russia is, increasingly, tethered to concern with China. It was Russia’s interference in the Caucuses that irked American policy makers, not in Europe. Russian oil is a threat to West Asian oil sales. And, as a continuation of the Great Game between Britain and Russia, Central Asia is up for grabs. For America, it is not a question of empire or Mackinder’s World Island. If America has an empire, it is the empire of Venice, an embarrassment more than a source of pride, an open secret of rotating bases and consulates. If anything, Franklin Roosevelt’s turn to Europe and subsequent policies of decolonization were to shut up the Continent for good, reduced to a Disneyfied theme park. That has been the status quo for half a century, perhaps it will soon crack.
So what is America? It had revolted from a truly modern power to become something unique and, to an extent, unreal. The cycles of growth, decadence, and collapse appear to have been short-circuited. The “good times make bad men” has been ongoing for over a century with little abatement, and yet the hard times seem relatively distant, even as wage stagnation, capital flight, offshore industry, limitless immigration, and various other sores begin to form. Still, the US sends billions to Ukraine, Israel, and various other proxy wars, along with the infinite sink of graft and waste that has only grown with the world prestige of America. Old school libertarians predict the Fed’s days are numbered, and yet the Fiat bubble has been floating for fifty years. It is almost, as outsiders ranging from William Blake to Wyndham Lewis have predicted, that America simply escaped History and subsists as a truly post-historical entity. The odd Hegelian Alexandre Kojeve, who coined the End of History concept, believed that was, by necessity, the outcome of the Cold War. Whether it was the US or the USSR, the post-historical man would come about. America has simply accomplished its pseudo-messianic goal.
But, per Jefferson’s pessimism, these shores of the Pacific, these traces of the end, spell a not so imminent doom. If, as Pocock posed, America’s fate is tied up with Asia, then this post-historical existence depends upon the defeat of, or conflation with, the People’s Republic of China (among various other minor players). The Middle Kingdom cannot exist as such, it must be the West, the final final frontier (unless space colonization happens) of America.
What is next?
In one strand, this neo-Jeffersonian ethos remains. America only remains America in this vein. The presidency of Donald Trump is, spiritually, a repudiation of this vision. If this turn is not so much a neo-Hamiltonian polity, which would embrace authoritarian imperial statecraft, it is a negation. And that is why Trump is the danger that he is. It is not offering a thin or fanciful alternative to the postliberal status quo, but simply No, a vague enough platform to attract ruralites, grass roots Evangelicals, rustbelters, a few disgruntled tech investors, and the rest of those Americans who drown under the shadow of the Frontier. Taiwan is more valuable than Ohio in terms of this schema. Trump talking as if America was not messianic is what is so offensive and insufferable. It was Obama, not Trump, who offered populist drivel to justify a rebirth of the Jeffersonian ideal. America is, if not anything else, self-critical about its perceived failures as an Empire of Liberty.
Is that all there is? A sturdy No? There is the possibility of a real neo-Hamiltonian polity, with an imperial monarchy of President-in-Congress, though one that strips America finally of the veneer of its virtue and embraces, in whatever form, the arcanum imperii and the selfishness of an energetic ruling class. The People’s Republic of China studies Hamiltonian theory quite lustily, for China has no vision for the World, only itself, a big beast in the jungle of nations, more medieval than ancient, with the Party as a Court. In this sense, China is more American than America, and yet an apostate America. I will not entertain fairy tales of royalism or secessionism, which draw from bad history and a worse sense of the times. Is that all there is? The Jeffersonian drift or the Hamiltonian apostasy?
Perhaps, but I offer some commentary to the contrary. The early Antifederalists were Country ultraists, raising the banner against Aristocracy, against Court, and ultimately against the Constitution. While they were an assorted bag of defunct elites, kooks, and parochial zealots, there is an ethos worth excavating. In a united way, whether in the name of New England or Virginia or otherwise, they refused to look East or West. Out of touch with the desire to expand across the Appalachia or trade across the Atlantic, they turned inwards (which gave them quite a shock). In Pocock’s sense, this reckoning would have perhaps provoked the same political crises that saw the red flag of Socialism hoisted above Paris or Berlin. But that presupposes that Socialism is the force of History that America has suspended, and continues to keep suspended. It is the exhausted radical Conservative ethos as the jurist Carl Schmitt, who only believed in the Emperor (or President) as the katechon, the divinely given Restrainer, who alone could withhold the savage hordes of Bolshevism. But such a framing tacitly admits that Socialism is, in fact, the future, if History were allowed to bring itself to a close.
But is History really a curse of decay and corruption? Is it the pessimism of Machiavelli detailing the rise and fall of republics, always creeping towards empire and corruption, with victorious Caesars and Catos buried in the rubble? Can time be redeemed, not simply escaped but overcome? Can these bones live?
Those puritans who came to America’s shores did not seek to escape, but to build a future that was undeniable against the crumbling of time. Winthrop’s lay sermon, extolling the construction of a City on a Hill, was a total vision beyond republican samsara. It was not that winnowing did not happen, or failure, or catastrophe, but these belonged not to the vicissitudes of time, but the will of the Lord, lifting up the humble and humbling the proud. The millenarian idea of the Covenant is not identical to the secular virtue of the Republic, even as the two have intermingled over the centuries. If the force of Independence mobilized Americans towards Federalism or Jefferson’s Republicans, and thus in support of their visions, it is not that they were sold on the platform. Patrick Henry, antifederalist extraordinaire, was an ardent ally of Washington’s administration in response to the Jacobinism in France.
The Covenant depends upon the Bible as the ur-text to describe the shape of time and course of history. It is God, not Fate, that determines the nations. It is sanctity, not virtue or energy, that will be proved in the fires of testing. The turn inwards does not necessitate pessimism or collapse, it also does not require a radical political realignment. The puritans who settled Massachusetts Bay were still under England as they pioneered a semi-autonomous corporate state with their covenantal charter. Perhaps like modern Orania, the faith of the saints did not necessitate statecraft, whether in the modern commercial state of Hamiltonians or the anti-state state of Jeffersonian expansion. The commitment to stand before the Lord grounds the then mundane tasks of self-sufficiency and outward interaction. These outposts, these uncovered lamps, shine that History is not merely a Wheel, but wheels twirling this way and that way as a luminous Throne descends from the skies.
However, there is a caveat for such a sanguine view. Just as the Jeffersonian vision had rightwing and leftwing variations, so too has the Covenant been ab-used. The Social Gospel converted the Gospel into materialism, with chastened critics, whether the Niebuhrs or Martin Luther King, advocating for the Covenant, though one devoid of a living God, a resurrected Christ, and a final judgment. These shrines of Beth El and Dan have their own priesthood and mock temples to boot. The form is not enough, but substance, and thus rhetoric of Righteousness and Repentance is no guarantee that it is anything more than being sandbagged for Establishment purposes (in this case, winning the Cold War).
But what does this mean in practice? In one sense America is dead, in another America is alive. It does not mean making a grab at the throne, in building a Court or unleashing an infinite Country. One must make a Covenant with the Lord and manifest the City on the Hill, whether it is through voluntary organizations or a corporate charter. This arrangement does not mean abandoning national politics or involvement, only that one is self-aware and on solid ground. Finding means to self-organize and buffer, on the concrete basis of self-sustenance (which means not only good teaching, but also access to food, clean water, energy, and shelter, with a means of self-protection). It is not separatism, but promoting national policies that allow vacuums to be filled with those at the local level that interconnect across space. It is, first and foremost, building a culture of Covenant that can offer a tangible and effective means of prosperity to those saintly members it serves, to be envied as a model by local authorities, states, even the federal government. These are not churches, at least not as church is a concept for many today, but corporate bodies that operate as HOAs and businesses, where saints are share-holders as much as resident-citizens.
Ultimately, the ur-problem in the American Revolution was that Americans had become too English to realize that they were, in fact, Americans. It is time to seek a better country.
This essay took initial inspiration from J.G.A Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975), 506-552.
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