Alexander Hamilton And Fear Of The Majority - America Today, The Mob Rule Of The Unwashed

In the early days of the American republic, a vigorous debate went on, especially between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson on the nature of democracy and the balance between the governing and the governed.  

Hamilton was suspicious of Jefferson’s populism – i.e. a deep faith in the wisdom of the people – and new that the American electorate could easily vote with unenlightened self-interest and venality no different from Jake Cade, the anarchist/populist of Henry VI, or the plebeians of the fickle mob of Coriolanus or Julius Caesar.  

In his Speech on the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton said:

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the 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 government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second.

Hamilton wrote further of his concerns in his Federalist Papers:

The republican principle demands, that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they entrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden gust of passion, or every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests...

When occasions present themselves in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. Instances might be cited, in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from the very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men, who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure

The Framers agreed with Hamilton and created the Senate which would be the venue for such ‘cool and sedate reflection’; but Hamilton was far more of an aristocrat to trust an institution which was still an elected body.  His view of statesmanship reflected his views. As Historian Bruce Miroff noted:

Alexander Hamilton attempted to be, an aristocratic yet visionary statesman. Hamilton's statesman would resist and rise above popular prejudices and passions; occupying a commanding eminence, he would plan grand projects for the nation's future. His architectonic vision detailed instruments for efficient action: the energetic executive and the administrative state.

 Having shaped these powerful tools, he turned them to economic use, fashioning a carefully integrated set of policies that fostered the rise of manufacturing in the United States. While the aristocratic statesman did not expect the public to understand his vision, he did expect it to respond to the prosperity and power that his efforts produced. As the nation rose to greatness, so, ultimately, would his fame. 

 

It isn't bad enough that American democracy has devolved from the reasonable governance envisioned by the Founding Fathers - sane, reflective, objective, universally patriotic men providing wise guidance to the electorate - into a free-for-all, a chaotic, inchoate brouhaha of petty demands of insular, selfish motivation. The country has fragmented into artificial, competing interest groups of race, gender, and ethnicity. 

Not only do the unwashed rule, they rule in caviling, self-centered cabals.  The House of Representatives is a side show of bearded ladies, babies with two heads, dwarves, and grotesque giants.  The Senate, the compromise between Hamilton and Jefferson, designed to be a buffer between the caterwauling of the masses and the higher powers of national leadership, had descended into the same mindless anarchy. 

The very idea of federalism, the core principle of the Constitution, has devolved into the worst kind of narrow political demands. If the state legislatures aren't bad enough, catcalling, smearing, and food fighting over issues supposedly good for the citizens under their protection, municipalities have sunk to an even lower, unconscionably ignorant morass of vaporous politicians. 

Avowed Socialists are mayors of New York and Washington.  Portland and Seattle have become ungovernable Third World shitholes of crime, addiction, incivility, and political anarchy. Hundreds of people are shot and killed every weekend in Chicago where the mayor claims racism, police brutality, and federal indifference for the violence.  Baltimore, St. Louis, and Memphis ranking near the top of the world's most violent cities are havens for illegal immigrants, safe places for gangs, drug crewes, and wanton criminals.

It is hard to imagine how the country after World War II and its uncompromising defeat of Hitler and Hirohito and recognized as the beacon of sanity, the nation of opportunity, justice and fairness, has so rapidly descended into such political dissension, division, and unholy chaos. 

 

It is even harder to imagine how so many voters think that such division into identity groups who claim legitimacy and justice only by sex, race, and ethnicity is a good thing; voters who have chosen separatism and superficial judgment over  central, universal, moral ethos. 

Jefferson made it quite clear when he explained 'the pursuit of happiness'. Americans were to pursue individual enterprise and benefit from their labors but not at the expense of others.  Individualism and community were two branches of the same tree.  He envisaged a country whose citizens acted with individual spirt, desire, and determination but were mindful of the larger commonwealth in which they acted.  All Americans were to abide the same moral, Christian code. 

Other powerful nations of the world, many America's adversaries have understood the absolute necessity of a central ethos around which all enterprise - personal, regional, and national - revolves.  China has refused to tolerate ethnic separatism, and seen such parochial demands antithetical to the nation.  The Uighurs, the Tibetans, and the Taiwanese are insurrectionists, antithetical to the smooth running or the state. a

Autocracy? Hardly. Based on a Confucian ethos, a long history of Chinese world influence, and thousands of years of dynasty and high culture, China has raised hundreds of millions out of poverty, engineered wealth, prosperity, and world leadership. 

Russia, renascent after decades of ruinous Communism has harkened back to its imperial past and brooked no dissension from separatist ethnic groups in the Caucasus. A united, indivisible Russia must never be challenged. 

Turkish President Erdogan has the same intimations of empire and is determined to return the country to its Ottoman, fundamental Islamic roots.  Iran, however insidious and adversely militant as the theocratic regime might be, it has the same unifying, absolute commitment to its Persian and Islamic past. 

Europe is in the process of electing ultra-conservative governments in France, Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands.  Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland have already vowed to shut the door to unwanted African and Middle Eastern immigrants, to close mosques and to deport any imam or mullah who preaches separatism and anti-European, Christian values. 

'I am Giorgia', shouts Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy. 'I am a woman, I am a mother, I am a Christian, I am European, and I am Italian', the litany of new wave Europeanism sweeping the continent.  Enough 'diversity' and calls for 'the other'.  It is time to recognize Europe's greatness and return it to his legendary leadership. 

Only the United States clings to its febrile, fantastical, baldly idealistic view of society.  Not only does the American Left lionize the mob, but in its call for Diversity Equity Inclusion, encourages its basest, least intelligent, bottom-feeding instincts. 

Hamilton is turning over in his grave and Jefferson stirring.  How could this new country, born of the Enlightenment, guided by such profound and universal moral and ethical values have fallen so far into anarchy and international disrepute?

It is probably too late to reverse the course, to re-establish the moral order, patriotism, and universal civility envisaged by the Founding Fathers; to late to center the nation, to end deliberately engineered divisiveness and hostility, to return to civilized values and culture; and so be it.  You reap what you sow. 

Historical revisionism - the rewriting of history, the expunging of inconvenient truths, and the blatant ignorance of the past can only accelerate America's descent to the bottom.  The unwashed majority, already ignorant, marginally educated, decidedly fundamentalist, and unremittingly parochial will continue to grow at the country's peril. China and Russia are watching from the wings, patiently awaiting its downfall. 

Love With A Proper Stranger - Vetting, Triage, Bad Cards, And Muffy Potter's Search For The Holy Grail Of Romance

Muffy Potter had tried everything - singles bars, the Whitney, the National Gallery, the Vassar Club, and even box seats at Nationals Stadium - with no luck.  She never thought that she would have to put in overtime for finding a husband - the best schools, college, the right milieu, and enough gifted genes to make her a passable find for any man should have been enough. 

 

Yet there she was dabbling in the personals of the New York Review of Books, 'SWF seeks lover of Great Falls, Bach, and afternoon tea', and checking out online dating sites.  How unexpected, how disgraceful, how sick! A woman of her pedigree, talents and not inconsiderable beauty scrounging around the personals for a 'likeminded lover of Nature and Bayonne, New Jersey'. 

A friend at work suggested a popular and apparently successful online mating service - a simple matter of filling out a detailed questionnaire and waiting for a vetted list of compatible men.  The temptation to overdo it, warned Muffy’s friend, is strong; so don't give in to vanity. Those on the other side of the fence will be doing the same thing and you will end up with some deformed caricature of your dreams. 

So Muffy signed up, paid the fee, and set to work.  There were two parts to the questionnaire - what she wanted in a man, and how she would describe herself.  She tackled the 'him' part first, but her entries were replays of the personals in the New York Review - 'someone to share books, firelight, and poetry' and the like, when what she really wanted was a rutting ram. How to express this without attracting unwanted attention?  She didn't want to come off like some tart, a hooker on a street corner on the Rue St. Denis.

This was more like her senior essay, one with frankness, sincerity, and innuendo; and she worked at it just as hard she did at Vassar.  Yet, it still came out stilted, fabricated, and far from the truth. 

Her side of the coin - 'Describe yourself honestly, correctly, and exactly' the instructions indicated - but how was one to assemble all the subjective, intuitive, sensitive parts of one's character without some embroidery? Isn't that what she did at the bars on the Upper East Side?  Or how she adjusted her persona to accommodate the more rarified environment of Soho? 

She was creative in spirit, but had never gotten beyond stick figures in reality; intelligent but well behind the curve when it came to differential calculus and organic chemistry; athletic but somehow just shy of the goal.  What she was, was an interesting person that had been in Europe, could converse about Styron, Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy with some fluency, and....goddamn it, something real, palpable and within reach. 

She finally completed the questionnaire - the man she was looking for might not be Adonis but close, a man of scruples but fun, one of sexual maturity but adolescent desire, a man of intelligence and breeding...She erased it all.  She had fallen into the smarmy trap of sexual idealism, and would not tolerate it for an instant more. 

But looking at the now erased, scrubbed, and empty questionnaire, she was stuck. She knew exactly what she wanted, but couldn't quite put it into words.  

There was the 'Help' option on the site. AI would suggest, picture, and describe men she might, according to her demographic data, like.  Not real men, of course, but generated images and confected characterizations.  The avatars were given names - Bob, Billy, Lance, Pedro and the like; and the seeker was to pick and choose.  The computer would do the rest, winnowing, vetting, searching, and suggesting on its own.  The 'reactive mode 'rather than the 'proactive' one. 

Trial and error, entries and erasures, assisted searches, end-arounds, fictions, hard facts, and closure.  Muffy could only hope for the best.  The service provided her with a short list of eligible men, asked her to review their annotated CVs and photo albums, to pick the most likely and contact them through the company's secure server. 

It was an out-of-body experience, as Muffy described it.  The man sitting across the table from her was not there by circumstance - two needy souls at the Mayflower bar just before closing - but some electronically facilitated, virtual assignment.  Bruce - the guy sipping his pina colada across from her -was not real, nor imagined, but generated. 

She went through three of these programmed meetings, all pleasant enough, respectful, dutiful, and serious.  The men were well dressed and groomed, tapered properly, and reasonable enough, but the thought of any one of them on top of her was disgusting.  It wasn't so much the guys, all decent enough, but just the idea of some virtual stranger in an intimate, compromising position was disgusting.

'You weren't honest', Muffy's friend said, 'try again and this time go deep'; but once again without sounding like a tart, a Belle de Jour, a Happy Hooker, a loose woman, how could she find the Lawrentian partner she was looking for. 

Connie Chatterley left her crippled husband in a wheelchair looking at the smoldering embers of the fire, while she had her way with Mellors, the gamekeeper and they came together in ecstatic union.  Sexual complementarity, expressed in the moment of simultaneous orgasm is epiphanic and soul- releasing, wrote Lawrence.

How to put that in words, wondered Muffy? and Lawrence gave no clues as to finding that one, orgasmic partner; so she soldiered on, increasingly frustrated with the lame, weak Nellies, overbearing sods, and blowhards as ridiculous as Portia's suitors who came her way. How did one do it?  How did one find a match from the overwhelmingly indecorous lot of ordinary men?

'Time out', she shouted to no one in her Dupont Circle walkup, and decided to let serendipity take its course. Perhaps her bullying intent was the problem.  Let love come to her; but as the months passed with no dice, she was tempted to re-up, to give it a go once again, to take hold of the reins. 

She looked at the calendar. She wasn't getting any younger and her biological clock was ticking.  She wanted to be taken, to be impregnated, to give birth and to be fulfilled as a woman, and her she was watering her petunias alone on a Saturday night. 

It would be nice to report that Mr. Right appeared thereafter - a knight in shining armor, a Mellors, the man of her dreams, her ying-yang Tantric complement - but some women are destined for spinsterhood, old maids, and aunties

It was surprising to many that Muffy Potter ended up in this leaky lifeboat - so attractive, appealing, and available was she - but the gods of determinism have some say in the matter. Who knows why she was so picky - an unreliable father? A snipped, curt, and sexually diffident mother?  Father Brophy and his apocalyptic warnings?  Mrs. Linder, the dancing teacher who showed her perhaps too much interest?

Who's to say, and what does it matter?

It would be nice to say - a fitting end to the story - that Muffy Potter found Mr. Right, but the cards had been dealt long before she knew what was what. Given the configuration of ancestry, parentage, environment and the quirky genes of Aunt Melissa and Great Uncle Hiram among others, she had no say in whether the matter, so despite her desire, ambition, and good intention, she ended up a crotchety, testy old maid. 

Middle Class, Middle Brow, Middle Of The Road - The Very American Tale Of A Social Climber Who Fell Short

Most New Brighton families never thought of themselves as anything more than what they were.  Mr. Harris was one of the three optometrists in town, his wife was a schoolteacher, and their two sons were altar boys and on the Little League team. The Harris family was exactly like their neighbors and differed only by type of work not class of work.  

One was an associate bank manager, another a pharmacist, and a third an insurance salesman for Connecticut General.  They all shared the same cultural milieu, background, aspirations, and activities.  They were all solidly middle class, middle Americans. 

The Harrises had an ice sculpture at their wedding, put balloons on the front porch and festoons on the lawn when their children were born, watched television serials every evening after an early dinner, and turned in after all the doors were locked, the lights turned off, and the alarm clock set. 

Their next door neighbors, the Mitchells, had never set foot in the New Brighton Art Museum, a small but well-known gallery started by an industrialist whose family had owned two of the biggest factories in town. Both factories were suppliers to the Union Army in the Civil War, and the United States Army in WWI and WWII and were among the most profitable companies in the United States until business moved offshore. 

The museum was unusual in that New Brighton was such a working class town, one of the many Rust Belt cities in New England.  There were Polish laborers, Swedish carpenters, Italian barbers, and Jewish tradesmen all cared for by doctors, dentists, and lawyers from middle-ranked professional schools but who were attentive, careful, and affordable. 

None of the Harrises had ever set foot in the museum and knew no one who had. It was for them, Martha Harris said, referring to the West Enders, the private income families whose homes overlooked the golf course, who summered on the Vineyard, and wintered in Gstaad. 

For the middle class the museum was not just a place ignored, but a place unattainable, aspired to, but far out of reach.  For all the talk about America the melting pot, the public commonwealth with all equal at work or at play, it was as highly structured as any in Europe. It was just that Americans did not define themselves by social categories. 

New Brighton was a good example of American social hierarchy.  The heirs to the captains of industry, those who enjoyed wealth and privilege lived in a leafy neighborhood where homes were colonial, historic, simple, but classically landscaped and trimmed.  Then came the professional class, the doctors, lawyers, and dentists, themselves divided by ethnicity and class. Polish doctors took care of Polish patients, Italian doctors Italian patients etc.  

The tradesmen - carpenters, plumbers, house painters and the lower echelon white collar workers like the Harrises and the Mitchells - lived in other quarters of the city and took care of the West Enders. The merchants, largely Jewish lived in Myrtle Hill, were prosperous, secretive, and suspicious.  The working class, the factory workers, lived across the tracks on Broad Street. 

Never did any of these well-defined, well-organized, and culturally homogeneous groups ever meet. There were some exceptions.  School districts were not perfectly aligned with social class, and there was some intermingling of students, but in few other places.  New Brighton was a class-defined, settled place. 

Cora Hansen was an interloper, an ambitious, determined girl who trolled the upper classes.  She was bright and intelligent; and felt that by her charms she would move up and out of Arch Street, her saltbox, her Swedish relatives, and the constant, cloying, rancid smell of housepaint.  Her father no matter how much his wife hectored him, could never get off-white, grey, and canary yellow out from under his nails, his hair, his fingers, and his clothes.  

Cora loved him because he was her father, but hated him for his complaisance, his quiet acceptance of his lot. He was the reason that the Hansens were still on Arch Street, still in the prefab salt box, still driving a third hand car and forever without hope of rising above it all. 

She did her best to emerge, to infiltrate, and be seen by the West Enders.  She visited the art museum at openings and special events, stood expectantly before paintings of Thomas Hart Benton and the tableaux of Church.  She had some nibbles, some smiles and almost introductions, but the prep school boys home for the holidays from Exeter and Andover knew that she didn't belong.  The pull of class, expectations, and social propriety trumped sex every time - that was how important milieu was to the residents of New Brighton. 

Cora saved her money from her after school job and went to West Hartford to shop for more class-suitable outfits, but found them well out of her price range.  There was no way that with her clothes, her hairstyle, her attitude, and her bearing she could be anything but a working girl. 

Sex was all she had, but she knew that unless husbanded carefully, used wisely and well, it could lead to trouble.  At the same time, a savvy, ambitious girl could not afford to keep herself under lock and key; and so it was that she was finally noticed by the grandson of one of the industrial scions of the city.  She had picked the right time, the right season, and the right venue, and Anson Hearst paid attention, and before long they were lovers. 

If you can call it that, for the very reason that Anson was with her was because he lacked the upper class, prep school, old New England aristocratic confidence to shop where he should. 

She knew she had struck oil.  It wasn't every day that the daughter of a housepainter consorted with a family whose wealth was beyond imagining, who carried the genes of the first American settlers, whose legacy was Plymouth, Salem, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and whose corridors were those of kings. 

Anson's family to no one's surprise did everything they could to discourage the affair, but no amount of blandishment, explanation, or threat had any effect.  He had found the girl for him, and he would stay the course. His parents eventually gave in, gave lukewarm blessings, and a not ungenerous wedding gift. 

At the wedding the Hansens did their best to fit in and listened to talk of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel by the hors d'oeuvres, Transcendentalism and the maples of Walden Pond on the lawn, and Chopin and Brahms by the string quartet in the hall. Ma and Pa Kettle, newcomers fresh off the boat. Mr. Hansen perspired under his new blue serge suit but hesitated to mop his brow. Mrs. Hansen fidgeted with her hair and smelled strongly of too much Lanvin. 

Cora had learned her part well.  She was able to demur, deflect, and avoid sticky situations that might give her away, and if not the belle of the ball, was a good imitation of the second Mrs. De Winter who tried her best to make her way from ladies' travelling companion to mistress of Manderley. 

Yet you can't teach an old dog new tricks; and Cora's inclusion into the social life of Anson Hearst, Wall Street, Palm Beach, and Nantucket was impossible.  First, she found the routines of the well-to-do boring, trifling, and tedious. Second, there was no way to acquire that ineffable but essential upper class demeanor. It was a matter of posture, tone of voice, laughter, insouciance, indifference, and complete confidence, and she was no match for it.  

 

As well-trained as she now was, as well dressed as the best of them, able to refer to Biarritz and St. Tropez without a hitch; she never could be anything but a housepainter's daughter.  Essence escaped her. It was not a matter of training but breeding. 

The upper class into which she married had a clear, definable, evident, and unique culture. It had ethos, appointments, trappings, dress, choice, and location.  The lower middle class of which Cora was a part had nothing whatsoever to distinguish it, to call hers, something noticeable, remarkable. 

She had nothing to stand on, no pedestal from which to look out and over others, no calling, no heredity, no legacy; and here she was in the heart and soul of the American aristocracy who knew their part well. 

She pushed and prodded, kept herself up at night with biographies of Shakespeare and Moliere, gave golf and tennis her all, but ended up dry, her tank empty and nothing to show for the effort 

She was tired to death of it all - the table settings, the Revere ware, the Copley portraits of the family, it was exhausting.

And so it was that Anson Hearst had to admit to his parents that they were right.  He should have listened to them, paid more attention, taken stock of who he was and always would be. 

The divorce was amicable and the settlement fair and quite generous.  At least Cora got something out of the laborious few years of the marriage.  She had learned enough about the upper crust not to marry a housepainter, and settled for something in the middle.  At least she had moved up, and that was saying something.