It's what conservatives do

Daveed Diggs as Thomas Jefferson and author Lin-Manuel Miranda as the eponymous protagonist of Hamilton.

Famed drama critic David Brooks comes out with his review of the hip-hop musical Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, at the Public Theater. I haven't seen the show and have no justification for complaining about his judgment—glad he had a good time—but I have to quibble with the way he just has to insert a little bit of conservative propaganda, portraying the contest between Federalists and anti-Federalists in Alexander Hamilton's time in a kind of Jonah Goldberg funhouse mirror as plucky lower-class Republicans vs. liberal elitist Democrats:

Hamilton’s greatest foe, Thomas Jefferson, is portrayed brilliantly by the actor Daveed Diggs as a supremely gifted aristocrat who knows exactly how gifted he is. Hamilton assaulted Jefferson because he did not believe a country dominated by oligarchs could be a country in which poor boys and girls like him would have space to rise and grow.

Hamilton on the threat of oligarchy, 1784, defending citizenship rights for the pro-British loyalists or Tories who had lost the war:

If the legislature can disfranchise any number of citizens at pleasure by general descriptions, it may soon confide all the votes to a small number of partizens, and establish an aristocracy or an oligarchy...

He certainly knew what an oligarchy was, unlike Brooks, but this slippery-slope argument wasn't on behalf of poor boys and girls. It was dedicated to the extremely wealthy Tory clients of his law practice (and I imagine of the financial enterprise the 20-something genius had founded the same year, the Bank of New York), moneylenders who were being punished by the victorious Patriots for having been on the wrong side of the war and were having trouble collecting from their debtors (typically veterans from the Patriot side). As far as establishing an aristocracy was concerned, his original plan for the Constitution in 1786 was to have life terms for the presidency and the Senate, a proposal that can be called many things, but anti-oligarchical or pro–poor boys and girls is not one of them.

I think it's crucial to emphasize that that first generation of politicians in the new United States was not in any way divided between "liberals" and "conservatives"; everybody was a progressive Revolutionary, looking to move forward from the colonial order. What eventually divided them into Federalists and anti-Federalists was different views on how to attain utopia, with the Jefferson faction cultivating its vision of a republic of noble and independent farmers, and the Hamilton faction pushing for industrial development and more wealth. Both sides tried to reconcile egalitarian and libertarian elements instead of feeling forced to choose between them as we often do now, and figures like Washington and Adams tried hard (though not, I guess, successfully) to rise above the debate over particular means.

At the time of the debate over the Constitution, at any rate, they were on the same page and working together, literally, as Hamilton and Mr. Jefferson's friend Madison issued their New York op-eds along with John Jay under the single pseudonym of Publius. It was Hamilton who took on the job of demonstrating that the new Constitution would not lead to oligarchy, in Federalist 60 where he argued that the rules, in particular leaving voter qualifications up to the states, would prevent either the landed interest or the commercial interest from taking over, or "the wealthy and the well-born". Though of course in point of fact under state control only white men of property had the right to vote; it wasn't until the 1820s that taxpayer status began to replace landowner status as a qualification, and not until the 1850s that something like universal white male suffrage began to evolve—it was a bit of an oligarchy to start with, and the Founders wanted it that way, with the exception of genuine radicals like Benjamin Franklin:

Today a man owns a jackass worth 50 dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the mean time has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers—but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?

It may well be that in the show Brooks saw Hamilton, the illegitimate kid from St. Kitts who clawed his way to the top, "assaults" Jefferson, the born aristocrat, for snobbery, but the idea that Jefferson's presumptive "oligarchism" had anything to do with it can't be right; the facts are kind of the other way around. The differences between the two arose in two areas, that of foreign policy, where all the Federalists supported oligarchical Britain over Revolutionary and egalitarian France, and the disposal of the new national debt, in the 1789 clash specifically between Treasury Secretary Hamilton and Virginia congressman Madison, where it was Hamilton who was accused, rightly or wrongly, of oligarchism.

This issue grew from the fact that much of the debt the federal government was assuming from the states consisted of scrip that had been issued during the war to the soldiers in lieu of pay, and which they had sold for pennies on the dollar to speculators (five or even two shillings in the pound, more precisely, or a discount of 75% to 90%), many of them certainly the same Tory money men Hamilton had been working for in 1784: Hamilton's plan was to pay full value to the men who owned the paper, whereat Madison got really angry, to Hamilton's surprise, and rose in the House to denounce the plan for failing to do anything for the original creditors, the patriots who had risked their lives and given their all for their brand-new country and been cheated of their honest recompense.

It should be noted that Hamilton had very good economic arguments on his side. The speculators had acquired their paper by perfectly legal means, and in the financial climate Hamilton wanted to establish in the republic, it would be essential for the money people to have absolute confidence in the rule of law and the reliability of the government in meeting its obligations. And between his idea of establishing those speculators as a capitalist class to fund the country's industrial development and the Jeffersonian fantasy that the repaid soldiers would be able to constitute themselves as a prosperous but plain-living, virtuous yeomanry, not in need of credit, it's pretty clear which one was the more realistic. You could argue that it just happened that those who would profit from the Hamilton plan would include Hamilton's friends and banking clients. But you cannot argue that Hamilton was working in any way against oligarchy: he was working to increase the distance between the ruling class and the ruled.

And then the difference became personal, at the memorable moment in April 1791 when President Washington was off touring the country and had asked Secretary of State Jefferson to deal with any urgent government matters and Jefferson invited Vice-President Adams and Treasury Secretary Hamilton to dinner to talk over whatever the problem was, as Jefferson described it in his Anas, the collection of papers from the Washington presidency:

After the cloth was removed, and our question agreed & dismissed, conversation began on other matters and, by some circumstance, was led to the British constitution, on which Mr. Adams observed "purge that constitution of it's corruption, and give to it's popular branch [i.e., the House of Commons] equality of representation, and it would be the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man." Hamilton paused and said, "purge it of it's corruption, and give to it's popular branch equality of representation, & it would become an impracticable government: as it stands at present, with all it's supposed defects, it is the most perfect government which ever existed." And this was assuredly the exact line which separated the political creeds of these two gentlemen. The one was for two hereditary branches and an honest elective one: the other for a hereditary king with a house of lords & commons, corrupted to his will, and standing between him and the people. Hamilton was indeed a singular character. Of acute understanding, disinterested, honest, and honorable in all private transactions, amiable in society, and duly valuing virtue in private life, yet so bewitched & perverted by the British example, as to be under thorough' conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation. (text via; my bolding)

I really wonder if Jefferson heard or remembered the discussion right; Adams, for one, certainly objected to the idea of a hereditary monarch and aristocracy: as he protested to Jefferson after their reconciliation in 1813,

I will forfeit my Life, if you can find one Sentence in my Defence of the Constitutions, or the Discourses on Davila, which by a fair construction, can favour the introduction of hereditary Monarchy or Aristocracy into America. They were all written to Support and Strengthen the Constitutions of the United States.

In any event, it's clear that it was Jefferson who saw Hamilton as an oligarchist here, too, openly preferring the tight concentration of power and purchase of influence in Georgian England to the intended virtue of the new republic. Not that Brooks has any ideas about this, in spite of all the books on the subject he may have read the first chapter of. He simply knows Jefferson's reputation as of the "left" and Hamilton's as of the "right" and therefore seizes the opportunity to make the one look bad and the other look cool.

Hamilton's elitism was real, as a matter of fact, in spite of his louche background (as the illegitimate grandson of the Laird of Grainge in Ayrshire) and unashamed:

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and well born; the other, the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second; and as they cannot receive any advantage by change, they will therefore maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly who annually [through annual elections] revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?  Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy. Their turbulent and changing disposition requires checks. (1787)

That "first class" and its "distinct, permanent share in the government" is exactly what an oligarchy is. And he acted on it, of course, throughout his career, as especially in that case of the national debt. I still don't call him a conservative, because he was involved in the creation of a new society, but it's conservatives that have picked up his cue.

Jefferson, in contrast, with all his dreadful faults, really believed in the exact opposite:

I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.... My most earnest wish is to see the republican element of popular control pushed to the maximum of its practicable exercise. I shall then believe that our government may be pure and perpetual. (1816) 

And it is his liberality of conviction and policy, not some personal antagonism, that is his legacy to our country (I love America more than Brooks).

Bonus: Hamilton wasn't exactly the abolitionist he is often cracked up to be, either; successfully pursued marriage into a New York slaveholding family, and in all his dealings agreed that while black people in principle should be free, the white person's property rights always outweighed the principle. (Michelle DuRoss)