Eunomia

You're too hard on Hamilton, in my view. He should have a distinguished place in the Conservative pantheon for being the primary mind behind The Federalist alone. There is no more important work in the American political tradition, and if our charge as American Conservatives is to conserve that tradition, then The Federalist must be the very touchstone of an authentic American Conservatism.

His work on the Federalist certainly earns him the respect of conservatives, and it serves as an important basis for understanding the Constitution, and if he had stopped there I would have no great problems with him. His later work as Treasury Secretary, while it may be admired by more than a few, showed him to have principles of constitutional interpretation that lended themselves to the broadest possible reading in his time. Besides the danger that there has always been in allying a concentration of wealth in the Bank with a concentration of power in government, his flexible reading of the Constitution paves the way (as does so much Federalist mischief in judicial interpretations) for the later deformations of the Republic. That is not to write Hamilton off, but it is to question whether he, and not Adams (or perhaps Adams and Jefferson together, to avoid sectional bias), should be called father of conservatism. Certainly his more realistic understanding of human nature and passions, and his skepticism of democracy show him to have had additional admirable traits, but John Adams shared these views, tended not to possess his flaws and had what I regard as a generally more conservative temperament. He was not interested in wielding money and finance to break local social hierarchies and replace the old guard with money men, in part because he was part of an established social hierarchy while Hamilton was an ambitious and talented climber. Perhaps that's quibbling, and perhaps someone will rush to the defense of Hamilton's desire to break down social structures, but I don't see how it can be a conservative defense. Hamilton's "early" writings have much to recommend themselves to us, but I think it is misleading to endorse him as "father of American conservatism."

As I mentioned in the post, it suits the Democrats who go to Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners to believe that they represent something more than a technical partisan continuity with those individuals, just as it might suit the GOP to consider itself to be the natural heir to the conservative lineage, but neither of these claims is true.

Yes, the "father of American conservatism" is too much. I would say, however, that the closest thing there is to a "father" of American Conservatism is The Federalist.

Also, I am very skeptical of the standard attack on Hamilton as a social climber. Ambitious he surely was, and certainly not without flaws; but he surely died an honorable Christian man -- something that cannot be said for all of great American fathers.

Fair enough. I can certainly acknowledge The Federalist as the source of a specifically American conservative tradition.

Perhaps I was a bit hard on the man. His conduct towards the Burrs was not exactly classy, but he ended up paying for it enough already. I meant to point to his ambition to rise up in society as the source of his hostility to established social hierarchies. It was not really intended as a shot against his character, but as an explanation for why he, as a "new" man, was a very different sort of Federalist than Adams or my cousin, William Plumer that put him less in sympathy with conservative sensibilities than most Federalists were.

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