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HAMILTON HOWLS

Prior to being summarily dispatched by the prickly Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, among the Founders, was the champion of minority rights. Actually, it was THEIR “minority” rights he championed—the Founders and their ilk: the ruling landowners, slave-masters and planters. He was contemptuous of all the rest. Hamilton’s pet phrase for the unwashed masses was, “That great beast.”

Alexander Hamilton was born in bastardy on a Caribbean island. That was a non-starter in those days. However, his brilliance earned him an education grant of sorts in the mainland English colonies. He immediately embarked upon social purification through a lifelong campaign of upward mobility. Had it not been for his humble birth, he probably would have been a Tory.

After Herbert Hoover and the moneyed interests were done in by the excesses of the 1920s, FDR used the springboard of the Great Depression to consolidate political power through the ingenious use of government programs to stifle unrest and stave off starvation. When the world’s problems became ours in 1941, the spirit of the New Deal was firmly established among the working classes—and seemed likely to continue with the first and only “compassionate conservative,: Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike did not tinker with domestic tranquility, except where it forced his hand in events such as Little Rock. He connected the country through the interstate highway system and warned us about mixing politics with business and military adventurism.

Enter the modern-day Hamiltonians. After LBJ had pissed off the South with his Great Society affront, Nixon urged on by Hamiltonian theorists such as William Buckley, Jr., was coldly intent upon burying Roosevelt and firmly establishing the New Republican. Of course, that was stymied with his fatal collision with a Watergate. A benign Gerald Ford managed a lame duck stewardship until an equally benign Jimmy Carter was done in by an unraveling Middle East. The Republicans used that dénouement (and are still using it), to sneak Reagan in under the radar.

Yes, Reagan spent the Soviet Union into oblivion—they were headed there anyhow. In the meantime, with help from the oily Ollie North, he did dirty deals with our money and missiles in Central America and (where else?) Saddam Hussein’s Iraq!

Where is the Hamilton relevance? Hamilton, in order to advance his theory of elitism, had only to concern himself with landholding white men. Indentured servants, women, slaves and Indians were excluded from the voting process. In the case of modern Republicans, they did not have the voting numbers necessary to suppress the people, in order to oppress them à la Hamilton. Prior to 1948, when Truman began to tweak the white southerners’ racial perquisites, there had been an unholy alliance of southern whites and blacks, which accounted for the, “Solid South.” It was solid only on the surface, however. The truth is that, although blacks legally had the vote, it was brutally repressed by intimidation in the form of unequally applied poll taxes, literacy tests, burning crosses, white hoods and robes and the noose (the latter now making a symbolic comeback). As the light of day and the law began to neutralize the effect of these tactics, and blacks began to assert power through the Democratic Party, that party became less and less attractive to the implacable bigots. This was the phenomenon that gave birth to the Republicans’, “Southern Strategy.” It was the device that flipped the party of Lincoln and pulled those dyed-in-the-wool Confederates into unnatural consortium with the party of the Carpet Baggers. This, along with the politicization of the un-Christian Moral Majority, stuck together with a plethora of irrelevant, non sequitur wedge issues, forms the bedrock of the 21st century Republican Party.

Alexander Hamilton would have mixed feelings about our situation in 2007. Although he would be pleased by the Republican Party’s perspicacity in convincing the rabble to vote against their own, personal interests, he would be very displeased with our outlandish assault upon the public coffers, embarking upon endless, imperialistic adventurism and turning the reins of government over to uncaring, profit-driven corporations.

Hamilton was the first secretary of the treasury. He established the national financial system, which has remained viable throughout our comparatively short, constitutional life. I suggest that he might be exercised at how his misguided disdain for common folk and his enlightened passion for fiscal order have been twisted into the current, unrecognizable mess.

That noise you hear is Alexander Hamilton’s inconsolable howling over the way one of his two cherished legacies has been utilized to devastate the other.