America's Dueling Enlightenments (Rebroadcast)

**Andrew Heaton** (0:03)
Happy 250th Birthday, America. This week, to celebrate Independence Day and America's quarter of a millennium milestone, I will be rebroadcasting some of my favorite history episodes about the United States on this program. Then on Thursday, we will have a new bonus monologue episode available for patrons, and on Friday, get psyched for a historical deep dive on America's anti-founding father and why we never descended into a military dictatorship. That will be on Friday. Until then, enjoy this rebroadcast of a fun American history episode.
Hello, and welcome to The Political Orphanage, a home for deep thinkers and political mutants of all stripes. I'm your host and fellow mutant, Andrew Heaton.
And there are two very tempting traps to fall into in modern politics. Actually, there's more than that. There's like 8,000 tempting traps you can fall into, just a billion sarlocks out there. But I'm gonna bring up two for our purposes today.
The first is to think that our current era is unique in how toxic and partisan and hypocritical everything is. Now, don't get me wrong. Our era is lousy with tribalism and hypocrisy. But it's not that America was just hunky dory country club until 2008 and then it went off the deep end. For example, quite early on, one time, our vice president shot the secretary of the Treasury in New Jersey. Also, I am to understand that we had a war one time against ourselves. So the mudslinging and the shameless adjut prop go way back. It's not exactly constant throughout American history, but it's not new either, at all. Here's a clip from some of my friends over at Reason, compiling actual campaign literature from the 1800 presidential election between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in the style of a modern political ad.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:22)
John Adams is a blind, bald, crippled, toothless man who wants to start a war with France. While he's not busy importing mistresses from Europe, he's trying to marry one of his sons to a daughter of King George. Haven't we had enough monarchy in America?

**SPEAKER_3** (2:40)
I'm Thomas Jefferson and I approve this message because John Adams is a hideous, hermaphroditical character with neither the force and firmness of a man nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:52)
If Thomas Jefferson wins, murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced. The air will be rent with the cries of the distressed. The soil will be soaked with blood and the nation black with crimes.
Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames, female chastity violated, children writhing on a pike?

**SPEAKER_4** (3:15)
I'm John Adams and I prove this message because Jefferson is the son of a half-breed Indian squaw raised on hoe cakes and Hamilton is a creole bastard brat of a scotch peddler.

**Andrew Heaton** (3:28)
The other trap that's easy to fall into is to assume that some radically different interpretations of the Constitution and the nature of the Republic are brand new. And again, some of them are new, but it turns out that a lot of the fights that we have about the nature of our country go back to the very beginning of our country. Is America a compact between sovereign states which lend their power to the federal government? Or is the federal government a compact between the American people as a whole?
Is the Constitution a severely limiting document which denotes what the government can do and nothing more? Or does it say what the government cannot do but leave a free hand for all else? These ideas, at least these ideas, whether you agree with them or not, they do go back to the beginning. And my guest today will make the case that the two dueling political philosophies, which harken all the way back to the origin of the Republic, are embodied in two specific thinkers, rival patron saints of dueling civic religions, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. America's two angry dads.
We'll explore that momentarily. Today's episode is part history, part constitutional analysis. One quick note before we do, which I think will make the episode more fun for you. Rather than trying to figure out who you line up with, whether you're a Jefferson guy or a Hamilton guy, who you support and who you would smite, who has the more odious political interpretation, I think you will find it more fun today to look at America's two angry dads as creating multiple strains of thought that weave in and out of American history and ideology. You can make it an either-or proposition, as who is the good guy, who is the bad guy. But I think that you will enjoy the episode more if you look into your own philosophy and see which parts of what I think are Jeffersonian and which parts are Hamiltonian. You'll probably lean one way, but I would be very surprised if anybody was a 100 percent in either camp. All right. Noting that, let's meet our dads.