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Traditional Liberalism shows some promise compared with piecemeal anti-war politics




Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different
Gordon S. Wood
New York: The Penguin Press, 2006
336 pp. hc.
Reviewed by Whirlingsnow, May 2007

Revolutionary Characters is mostly a collection of previously published material. Throughout, it makes several arguments controversial among historians. The chapters expressing the author's main argument most acutely are the introduction and the epilogue. The title of the book suggests an historical or biographical idealist approach. However, the book purports to explain why amerikans are so enamored with the u.$. founders, a potentially materialist question even if contemplative. Why do amerikans think the way they think about those leaders is a better question than asking why five different leaders were individually so pivotal in history. Even if the politics of the amerikan majority has already been adequately explained in terms of imperialist economic parasitism and settler economic and political dynamics, there may be a relevant strategic or theoretical question for communists to why amerikans hold the long-held beliefs they do about early u.$. history. The extent to which Revolutionary Characters successfully departs from historical and biographical idealism in explaining this is another issue. Right off the bat, this sentence in the beginning of the first chapter isn't a good sign: "Polls of presidential greatness are probably silly things, but if they are to be taken seriously, then Washington fully deserves the first place he used to hold" (p. 3). And: "Without Jefferson's letters, what would we know of his mind" (p. 246)? Marxism would be able to explain Euro-Amerikan independence and subsequent changes even if they didn't have this information. The greatest redeeming value of the book may be that, though Revolutionary Characters states that "egalitarian democracy" exists today, Revolutionary Characters happens to lay the groundwork for making the case that the current u.$. state is monarchical. Whether a monarchy-like state with a standing army, a huge spy apparatus and massive bureaucracy could be compatible with some kind of "democracy" is left open to question.

Readers of J. Sakai's Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat will not find Wood's mention of Thomas Jefferson's approach to abolition unsurprising. "Jefferson could never really imagine freed blacks living in a white man's America, and throughout his life he insisted that the emancipation of the slaves had to be accompanied by their expulsion from the country" (p. 96): a well-known thesis among historians. However, Wood raises the Freudian idea that Jefferson's views on abolition and slavery were shaped by a projection of repressed "libidinal desires" involving mulatto slave Sally Hemings. Wood notes that other southern planters had sex with slaves, but there is no discussion of white settlerism in general and the character of its influence on changes in the united $tates.

Aristocracy before egalitarian democracy

Wood sets out to make the argument that the founders are so special because the emergence of "egalitarian democracy" made the appearance of other such leaders more difficult. "For in the end what made subsequent duplication of the remarkable intellectual and political leadership of the revolutionaries impossible in America was the growth of what we have come to value most, our egalitarian culture and our democratic society" (p. 10). The independence leaders of the settler nation and builders of the new state "helped create the changes that led eventually to their own undoing, to the breakup of the kind of political and intellectual coherence they represented" (p. 11). According to Wood, the differences in education, literacy, access to literature/newspapers, behavior, style of communication and overall status (gentleman/commoner) that gave rise to the founders no longer exist. To Wood, wealth differences were a factor (e.g., "real gentlemen were not supposed to work for a living" (p. 232)) but weren't as crucial, resonating with bourgeois definitions of democracy in which the absence of monarchical status and classes is more important than the absence of wealth inequality.

In setting up his argument, Wood distinguishes himself from various other approaches, including 'one-sided' approaches ignoring the "achievements" of the early leaders. Against those who identify amerika's current features, such as racism, with the founders, such as Thomas Jefferson, as a means of remarking on contemporary issues, Wood argues that actually the leaders belonged to a different system than today's amerika. Against what Wood calls the "demonization" of the founders, Revolutionary Characters ends up rehabilitating the founders for Liberal use today, but the emphasis is on understanding the founders "in their own time" and "on the their own terms."

In this new book of Wood's, there are echoes of the idea that the founders are models to be emulated, even if there is no possibility of leaders like them existing today. However, Wood raises some interesting ideas, particularly about how the founders distinguished republicanism and democracy from monarchy. Liberal critics of George W. Bush's government will also find things of interest in this book, though a rational consideration of what Wood is pointing to in this book in the contemporary context will lead them away from Wood's conclusions. The bottom line, that Wood doesn't address, is that there is still a political elite in the united $tates to this day and has been for decades at least, not just since 2000. What's different is that the massive benefits the population gets from imperialism is making it apathetic. As long as they have their leaders, the smaller parasites as well as the bigger ones can afford to be apathetic or at least politically inactive.

"Although Washington had aristocratic predilections and never meant to popularize politics, he nonetheless was crucial in making this democracy feasible. He was an extraordinary man who made it possible for ordinary men to rule" (p. 63). Wood says the founders weren't "democrats . . . certainly not democrats in any modern manner" (p. 11). By this, Wood refers to the way the leaders saw themselves and behaved with respect to the non-elites and accepted elitism and social hierarchy. "[T]hey were the beneficiaries of a semiaristocratic political system, and their extraordinary leadership was due in large measure to processes that we today would consider undemocratic and detestable" (p. 11). The independence leaders and builders of the new state were a "self-made" aristocracy based more on merit, making it different from the English aristocracy. Nonetheless, Wood throughout his book draws several parallels.

If the founders struggled with leaving private life and becoming professional politicians, as Wood argues, the situation today where professional politicians are common and readily accepted suggests even more the existence of an elite. "Disinterested" professional politics in the founders' time meant people leaving private economic life for politics and pursing the interests of the nation. If there appears to be more "disinterested" leadership today, with people leaving business for politics, it may be because of a growth of settler nation parasitism making politics possible as a career, and a complexification of the division of labor and decentralization of management and other unproductive activity.

Monarchical republicanism

Wood suggests the founders were different because of their virtues, sensibilities, and personalities. The "characters" in the title of Wood's book is apt. On the other hand, Wood mentions how they were at the mercy of settlers moving west and settlers resistant to ending slavery. The settler nation leaders also had to work with political forces and discourses beyond their control. Limiting democracy meant opening doors to monarchy. There was a trade-off between democracy and monarchy. According to Wood, the Federalists knew the Constitution reflected a curtailment of democracy in the states in favor of monarchy.

"All the Federalists, as the supporters of the new Constitution called themselves, knew that if democracy were to be curbed, then what was need in the new government was more power. And power in eighteenth-century Anglo-American political theory essentially meant monarchy. According to the conventional conception of an eighteenth-century balanced or mixed constitution, too much democracy required the counterbalancing of some more monarchy" (p. 48).

"But by 1789 the Federalists knew only too well that they could not speak openly about the need for more monarchy in the government. Nevertheless, many of them privately shared the opinion of Benjamin Rush that the new government was one "which unites with the vigor of monarchy and the stability of aristocracy all the freedom of a simple republic.""

In other words, some monarchy was compatible with republicanism to some of the founders. Importantly, in the founders' time, monarchy was associated with a "centralized fiscal-military state" and a standing army. A single-persyn executive was also associated with monarchy. "The executive or chief magistracy was after all the traditional source of tyranny and, as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, the source in America from which monarchy would naturally emerge" (p. 49).

Wood believes strongly that the development of a monarchy was a real possibility in the newly independent nation and argues that the founders often had to distinguish themselves from or position themselves in relation to monarchy. Revolutionary Characters gives the impression that the anti-monarchical principles or sentiments many of the founders had no longer exist.

"Indeed, we shall never understand events of the 1790s until we take seriously, as contemporaries did, the possibility of some sort of monarchy's developing in America. Republicanism was new and untried" (p. 50).

That people contemplated making Washington a king is well-known. That the u.$. system was actually similar to a constitutional monarchy is less acknowledged. Wood unfortunately compares the united $tates to Rome a couple times, which downplays economic differences. Such trains of thought emphasizing government organization can lead to saying countries are "democratic," "communist," "totalitarian," or imperial, regardless of their mode of production or actual class dictatorship. However, the notion of the united $tates as a monarchical bourgeois republic existing even in the 20th and 21st centuries, or at least that many of the founders would have viewed the current united $tates this way, isn't out of the question.

Whether a monarchical bourgeois republic exists is perhaps less clear than the high probability u.$. founders would have viewed the current u.$. system as such if they were alive today. Wood criticizes what-would-the-founders-think kind of thinking (apparently belonging in the same category as "what would Jesus do" and "what would Reagan do."), but the idea that there currently exists an egalitarian society without a gap between leaders and the public is far from indisputable.

In terms of public opinion, Wood defines aristocracy broadly as an approach to influencing the public via elite intermediaries. The founders communicated with a "genteel public." In fact, "they were aware of the term public opinion, which had first arisen in the English-speaking world in the early 1700s, but they conceived of the public as a very limited sphere" (p. 248; emphasis in original). Wood paints a picture of politicians in the united $tates today needing to pander to the demands and whims of a much larger public. Reactionary amerikans can exercise power without being intellectuals.

"The older hierarchical and homogeneous society of the eighteenth century -- a patronage world of personal influence and vertical connections, whose most meaningful horizontal cleavage was that between gentlemen and common people -- weaker in American and never as finely calibrated as in England, beset by forces released and accelerated by the Revolution, now finally fell apart . . . " (p. 252).

Wood sees a more even distribution of power and interest in politics today. To communists, this suggests two possibilities. Wood's "aristocracy" of course has nothing to do with the Marxist concept of the labor aristocracy, but maybe the political "aristocracy" is just larger today and millions of amerikans are part of a global political elite. The white mob on the Internet with their beloved blogs might like to think that. However, the concentration of detailed interest in politics, if not classical Liberalism, in a small minority today suggests the continuing existence of an elite, just one more responsive to the immediate sentiments of the white population because of competition reasons. The oppressor nation population desires this elite because this elite supports the functioning of a state the founders would have called monarchical, whether it is actually a monarchy being another issue. In the interests of the oppressed, it may be possible to divide Liberal exploiters over the idea that the united $tates is a monarchy, but that idea could reflect reality or not. Arguably, there has never been full liberal democracy, even in its openly bourgeois forms, as imagined by classical Liberalism.

Monarchical possibilities today

As claimed by Wood himself, some of the founders, such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, thought the population would become disinterested through becoming educated. What exists today is an intense mixure of economically self-interested individualism and nationalism and virtual deference to an elite in charge of managing the imperialist state. Competition for popular appeal exists where professional politicians need to differentiate themselves. In classical Liberalism, the Democratic and Republican parties today would both contain monarchical elements, neither opposing the standing army, the spy bureaucracy, militarism, or geopolitics, regardless of any rhetorical disagreements about taxes or the extent of powers of the single-persyn executive. The contemporary state also limits the freedom of the press and has a group-by-group approach to freedom of speech, where elites and the majority of whites can get away with saying things that hundreds of thousands of prisoners can't, for example.

Alexander Hamilton's Federalists used the Sedition Act of 1798 to suppress their critics. Wood suggests that this reflected the aristocratic view that distrust of the government among commoners was dangerous. The emergence of the new concept of public opinion, broadening the public to include everyone, supposedly did away with this.

Whether or not the aristocracy- and monarchy-like elements that exist today are an unbroken continuation from the monarchy that existed in the early united $tates, Wood suggests strongly that monarchical holdovers did exist, before and after 1776. John Adams acknowledged frankly the existence of and need for aristocracy and monarchy in balance with democracy, even if there wasn't and couldn't be hereditary monarchy. If Adams raises the idea of monarchy coexisting with democracy domestically, Alexander Hamilton brings to the fore the connection between militarism and monarchy in classical Liberal ideology.

James Madison and other classical liberals saw the republic as a means of avoiding war, which they saw as a profound evil -- a means to an end -- the reason Madison isn't as renowned today, according to Wood. "Eliminate aggrandizing monarchies and all their accoutrements, and war itself would be eliminated" (p. 167). "Since the dynastic ambitions, the bloated bureaucracies, and the standing armies of monarchies were related to the waging of war, the elimination of monarchy promised the elimination of war" (p. 211).

By contrast, "Hamilton envisioned the United States' becoming a great powerful nation like Great Britain and the other states of modern Europe, a state with a centralized bureaucracy, a professional standing army, and the capacity to wage war on equal terms with other nations" (p. 136). Wood writes that Thomas Jefferson's Republicans (not the same thing as the Republican Party) tried to stop Hamilton "and his fellow Federalists from foistering a warmongering monarchy on America" (p. 137). While Hamilton claimed he wasn't a monarchist, Wood repeatedly distinguishes Hamilton's policies, associated by his contemporaries with monarchy, from democratic republicanism. For example:

"Hamilton would be right at home in the present-day United States and present-day world. He would love our government's vast feeral bureaucracy, its sprawling Pentagon, its enormous CIA, its huge public debt, its taxes beyond any he could have hoped for, and especially its largest professional military force with well over a million men and women under arms spread across two oceans and dozens of countries" (pp. 139-140). [Although Wood got the central question, MIM would question whether or not he read Hamilton accurately. While Hamilton was more pro-centralization than other founders and much public opinion, we question whether Hamilton would have condoned the degree of centralization even of the late 1800s, never mind the 1900s. We find it unlikely that Hamilton would have favored the use of the growing economic surplus to create parasitic state activities to the unparalleled degree we have now--ed.]

Marxism doesn't have the same concepts and categories as Liberalism. The united $tates may or may not have monarchy-like features. What Gordon Wood's Revolutionary Characters evidences is the potential for division among the exploiters over the idea that the united $tates is and has long been divergent from liberal democracy. Any such division useful for disrupting militarism and repression should and can be expanded without Liberals calling themselves "Marxist."

Provocatively, Wood says:

"Madison remained remarkably sanguine during the disastrous events of the war [the War of 1812]. Better to allow the country to be invaded and the capital to be burned than to build up state power in a European monarchical manner."

Wood draws a fine distinction between war and economic sanctions (in the context of Jefferson and Madison), but Liberals should go with the above thinking. If the Liberals in amerika's political elite don't get rid of "monarchy," the international proletariat will through invasion, revolution, and re-civilization of the oppressors. Some of the u.$. founders claimed they were willing to abstain from monarchy even if they were surrounded by monarchies. Such selflessness should be emulated by Liberals. Liberals may have a better chance of contributing to ending "monarchy" now than they would have stopping Hamiltonian pseudo-monarchy in an early united $tates surrounded by rival monarchies. Working to eliminate monarchy-like institutions would be better than opposing imperialist wars piecemeal, or rejecting power struggle entirely or criticizing all power in post-modernist fashion. The traditional Liberalism expressed in Wood's book has some merits compared with spineless selective anti-war politics and post-modern liberalism.

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