Let's Get This Party Started

Grace: 00:00:00

If you've been listening to the episodes of Frogmore Stew, you'll know that I like to talk to and focus on a variety of perspectives. I believe it's imperative to have an understanding of how someone comes into their thinking and how they use that perspective to navigate politics, policy, and the political sphere in general.

Grace: 00:00:20

We all identify ourselves in many different ways, by generation, by occupation, by race, by religion, by pronouns, the list goes on and on. And I spend a lot of time thinking about all of the things that we miss in each other, because we've staked out political assignments and associations or in alignment with one group or another.

Grace: 00:00:40

We are ourselves, our own very complex selves. There's a saying that says. If you aren't a Democrat, when you're young, you're heartless. And if you aren't a Republican, when you're old, you're brainless. So do we actually pick our team or do we come into it because of circumstance where we grow up, who we're surrounded by?

Grace: 00:01:02

And then as we grow, do we only seek out information that affirms the beliefs we started with or do we allow ourselves. I did a little deep dive and as expected, our parents and family guide us when we're young. And even if we rebel against our parents in youth, our political foundation is typically built by them.

Grace: 00:01:23

And then as we get older, where we live, who we marry, and our friends, they all have some influence. Our beliefs are a direct line to our values. That's what governs our everyday life. The decisions you make, how you treat others, and what you think about the world, nature, business, culture, religion, family, schools.

Grace: 00:01:44

But I thought it might be interesting for all of us to suspend our labels for the sake of the podcast and to go way back to the beginning of the two ideologies that still make up our political landscape in these United States. How they started, how they're still represented in our society, and what drove those fundamental beliefs.

Grace: 00:02:05

Before we arrived at this place of fighting over library books and pronouns and Bud Light, the two opposing political thoughts were a bit more clear. They centered around how much power the federal government versus a state government should possess, and how much responsibility the government owed to the people it represented. And, importantly, Who the government actually represented. those are the opposing views that would eventually become the foundation of our current day parties started before the constitution was even written.

Grace: 00:02:41

The two views were those of two really interesting characters, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, and these two men couldn't have come from more different backgrounds had more different outlooks on life and government.

Grace: 00:02:55

Thomas Jefferson was an optimist. He believed in the enlightened mind, expanding your knowledge and philosophical thinking. Jefferson lived in Virginia, supported by enslaved human labor, and surrounded by farms and mostly rural living people. He believed farming would continue to be the country's future, because at that time, That is what most of the country was made up of. He believed government should not be involved in business, especially not a federal government.

Grace: 00:03:23

He thought business would regulate itself and determine the direction of the country and that the government shouldn't be involved in regulating or setting any parameters for businesses. He believed that each state had its own individual needs, and he did not trust a federal government to make decisions for all of the new states to abide by.

Grace: 00:03:45

In his view, having individual state governments would provide more oversight by the people they were governing. Jefferson grew up wealthy, the best education, and a very gentry lifestyle. But with that class status came the obligation to abide by strict societal rules and customs.

Grace: 00:04:04

He was obsessed with French culture, the openness, and not driven by the strict societal rules he'd grown up with. He believed in liberty. Do as you please without society's judgments and rules.

Grace: 00:04:16

And he felt smothered by those rules. But even with all of his enlightened thinking, he owned humans and that business construct of enslaving humans supported his upper class lifestyle. He didn't want a federal government to have the power to change how his business was run by outlawing slavery because that would directly affect his profit.

Grace: 00:04:37

He believed in a laissez faire economy, meaning an economic system where transactions are free from basically any form of economic interventionism like regulations and subsidies. In French, it literally means let alone. So when it came to looking at the future of the country, he didn't want any change to the way things were going because his life was pretty awesome.

Grace: 00:05:00

But he wanted society's rules to go away. He wanted his liberty. The irony here is that Jefferson deemed himself a speaker for the common man and wrote the line in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. Which is a little bit ironic given that he owned humans and that he was anything but a common man.

Grace: 00:05:20

He disagreed with federal taxes and felt that taxing the common man on things like whiskey and everyday products was not what the federal government should be doing. But even if the working class had a little extra money in their pockets from their taxes on simple purchases, there were rarely chances to gain access to the wealth that Jefferson enjoyed, and he didn't really recognize that.

Grace: 00:05:42

So over the long term, a laissez faire type government can do the opposite of what the common man would actually benefit from by leading to vast inequality of wealth and income. Wealth and opportunity tend to get inherited, and those with limited opportunities struggle to compete against already established interests.

Grace: 00:06:03

In Jefferson's thinking, though, He connected to the common man because their life felt unencumbered from society's rules. They in turn were drawn to him and supported him because they could see this direct line to getting rid of something immediate like a whiskey tax. Jefferson believed the government only had the power to do the things directly listed in the constitution, which is considered individualism or originalism.

Grace: 00:06:30

On the other end of the spectrum was Alexander Hamilton, and he had a different outlook on the structure of government. If you've seen the play or the movie, you know what an interesting character he was. Hamilton was a pessimist, but he was very forward thinking. He believed people are pushed by self interest, that there's a dark side to human nature.

Grace: 00:06:52

But if you could harness that self interest and outline through a federal government, the rules surrounding it, the country could build, create, and grow. He didn't want the country to be stuck in a farming society. He saw the potential to create and build things, essentially industry.

Grace: 00:07:08

Hamilton was the son of an unmarried mother, which was very controversial at the time. He was an immigrant and he was poor and society treated him that way. He saw an underground world of struggling people, but he didn't grow up under the constraints of society culture. And because of that, he loved British gentry.

Grace: 00:07:29

He loved the proper mannered society of England. He also understood that many people like he did needed an assistant life, a lifeline to change the circumstances they were born into. But because of what he'd experienced, he also recognized that left to your own devices without regulation or oversight.

Grace: 00:07:48

You will almost always choose what is best for you over what's best for the good of everyone. He could see how people justify things to get what they needed when in dire straits and also how self interest drove decisions in the wealthy class and in business. His views on government were to enable everyone to have an equal shot at success regardless of the class they were born into. Just with a little bit of oversight.

Grace: 00:08:15

Hamilton lived in New York city. He believed industry was the future of the country, and he believed the government had a role in both assisting and setting standards across the country for business. He believed the constitution had implied powers, meaning the doctrine doesn't always have to say something to mean something.

Grace: 00:08:34

There were two different lives being lived in the country, just as there are now. He also believed it was necessary to adapt the government to societal changes. Hamilton believed that people are motivated by their self interest. They are not going to deny their own interests for the good of the whole.

Grace: 00:08:51

And he believed that government should work to manage those interests on behalf of the good of the whole. He believed in more spending to spread the money around and invest in new and inventive companies and infrastructure giving opportunity to those that didn't inherit wealth.

Grace: 00:09:07

He also wanted a national bank. He wanted a man raised in a poor family to be able to receive government investment to start a business, and he wanted to cultivate ideas from everyone in the country and not limit men ideas and success to their status at birth. The flaw on his plan, though, is that by giving government too much power, that can lead to corruption.

Grace: 00:09:30

Government officials can manipulate markets and categories of business. So isn't it ironic that Jefferson, a wealthy man, became the leader of the working class, and a poor man, Alexander Hamilton, became the leader of the elite? Which of the two styles of Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian thinking was best for the country?

Grace: 00:09:50

George Washington, as the new president, knew different types of thinking would be imperative to a Democratic Republic. Washington is quoted as saying, differences in political opinion are as unavoidable as they may perhaps be necessary. He knew that compromise was the ultimate goal, so he chose Alexander Hamilton to be his Secretary of the Treasury and Thomas Jefferson to be a Secretary of State, allowing two opposite types of thinking to govern, not necessarily always in harmony.

Grace: 00:10:21

Hamilton and Jefferson's rivalry reflected a divide in the country. The United States of America was not entirely united, and basically has never been completely aligned since the founding of this country.

Grace: 00:10:33

George Washington was right. It is imperative to have two points of view and to use those as the starting point to find compromise while recognizing that every person in this country deserves agency. That all individuals deserve to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential, but it is up to each individual to make that happen.