Beginning in the 1960s, progressives became ever more suspicious of big projects and their threats to individuals and local communities.
Exactly a century ago, the journalist Claude Bowers published “Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America.” In Bowers’s telling, Thomas Jefferson was at the root of everything democratic and honest in the nation, and Alexander Hamilton was the source of everything elitist and corrupt. A former and future politician named Franklin D. Roosevelt thought the book offered a road map for the Democratic Party. In the only book review he ever wrote, Roosevelt asked, “Is there a Jefferson on the horizon?”
In “Why Nothing Works,” Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, revives this now shopworn distinction between the two founders as the central conflict of American political history. He argues that the left has become too enamored of Jefferson’s popular democracy and too suspicious of Hamilton’s centralized power. The problem is that “progressivism’s cultural aversion to power” has turned the Democratic Party “into an institution drawn almost instinctively to cut government down.”
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
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