Some sought to resist this by denying the reality. But others, like Madison, accepted the reality of interests. He hoped the same thing would happen in the larger sphere of interest-group politics. I think he really saw himself as a disinterested person, capable of rising above narrow marketplace interests, and hoped to create a government that would be more or less dominated by his kind of person.
There were too many Federalists who had interests to promote, even though they were presumably an aristocracy. They were an aristocracy caught up in interests. I think the intriguing and revealing person in all of this is Aaron Burr. Burr was the one aristocrat among the Founding Fathers who never made any claims for virtue and had no visions of an America based on virtue and republican idealism.
The explanation may be that he was a more authentic aristocrat who never needed to justify himself; his father was the second president of Princeton. He had as much aristocratic lineage as anybody in New England. Burr never had the insecurity of the rest of the Founding Fathers, many of whom had to justify themselves in terms of achievement. He was always writing letters to people promoting some kind of interest, trying to make money.
I owe him something. Burn this letter. As a consequence he comes to be feared by both ends of the political spectrum. Both Hamilton and Jefferson fear Burr long before his ventures in the West.
He had the gall to wonder if it would be possible for him to continue to practice law while he was Vice President. Burr was actually hoping to practice law while Vice President.
What really scared his contemporaries, the real treason of Aaron Burr, is that he was a traitor to his class. They expected more from him. He had all the promise of leadership, which is why he got elevated so quickly, first to the Senate and then to the Vice Presidency at a time when you had to be somebody to be Vice President.
Think of who his predecessors were: Jefferson and Adams. He was expected to be one of the shining lights of the new Republic. He had a distinguished war record, he had everything going for him—looks, charm, extraordinary abilities —but he failed the test of disinterested leadership, and he scared the bejesus out of the other Founding Fathers. And what was Burr? He was just an anticipation of a real American politician. He had written no great documents, he had won no battles, he had no great distinctions.
But he had built the best political machine the country had ever seen. He was the most astute politician of his era and a great champion of the legitimacy of parties and interest groups in politics. There is a kind of spiritual tie between Burr and Van Buren, which Vidal hit upon.
You seem to suggest that self-interest is unchallengeable in American politics, that government can never stand above it but must merely accommodate as many interests as possible. One of the appeals of Perot is that he had so much money he would not be beholden to special interests.
Perot in this sense has that independence that the gentleman are supposed to possess in classical political theory. But when you get down to it, everybody has interests. But surely there is a persisting sense that the use of political power for economic purposes is illegitimate. I do agree that there is a dream of a leader out there who stands above interest. That persists in American life, and it accounts for our periodic election of military heroes and accounts as well for our anti-partyism, which continues right up to the present.
The liberal Republican movement, the Mugwump movement, and the Progressive movement were all anti-party. A party necessarily suggests interests; the term party does, after all, mean just that: taking a partial view. Later in your book you argue that in the world created by the Revolution great disparities of wealth are not considered antithetical to a democratic order.
Americans then clearly accepted—at least for a while—unprecedented disparities of wealth, disparities far greater than those of the eighteenth century, and nonetheless called their era the age of equality. This has led some historians to think that the first post-revolutionary generations misunderstood their own culture, that theirs was the age of the uncommon man, not the common man.
I think the historians are wrong and the contemporaries were right when they called it the age of the common man, because differences of wealth are the least mortifying and least humiliating of the various ways in which people on top have made those on the bottom feel their inferiority. To have wealth become the only source of distinction is to place only a weak social barrier between classes. Now more than ever, your support is critical to help us keep our community informed about the evolving coronavirus pandemic and the impact it is having locally.
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