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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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