Historiography: Douglass Adair and the Triumph of Founding Ideas over Founding Action

I swore I’d never abuse a blog this way, but the following is straight b-roll. I’m cutting this out of a book I’m just now finishing. George Wolfe, playwright and sometime artistic director of New York City’s Public Theater, was reputed to respond to actors’ suggestions for things they might want to add to a [...]

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How the Government-Finance Connection Makes Being in the Upper Part of the 99% Sweet

Cross-posted from Alternet, my piece critiquing the 99% meme: I’m not in the 1%. At the lower end of what I think of as the upper middle class, I nevertheless take daily advantage of a raft of systems intended to ensure that people who have less money than I do pay more than I do. [...]

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Liberal Hamiltonians (One Sect of) in “Vanity Fair” Get Whiskey Rebellion, Tea Party, Hamilton Himself Way Wrong

Or: How Liberalist Consensus Fails Both History and Politics This is just classic: With their steadfast resistance to taxes, their hostility toward central government, and their willingness to risk a national default, today’s Republican candidates tap into a different American tradition–one that begins not with tea but with whiskey: the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. To [...]

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“Occupy Wall Street” and the History of Democratic Finance Protest

Given some of my key subjects, I can’t help but be interested in the “occupy” movement that, at the moment, has a few hundred protesters [UPDATE: Now a lot more; I was there on Tuesday] more or less living in Zuccotti Park near the New York Stock Exchange in lower Manhattan, and is apparently starting [...]

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“Constitutional” Conservatives v. “Constitutional” Liberals

Charles Rappleye, in an op-ed published by the L.A. Times on August 12 (I just caught up with it via the Bangor Daily News), might seem at first glance to be saying pretty much what I’d been saying in my New Deal 2.0 post of August 1 (also on AlterNet and Salon) regarding the framers [...]

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The Founders vs. American Democracy

Here’s another comment that helps refine the discussion I’m interested in, this time posted on New Deal 2.0 in response to my final “Founding Finance” post there: I am curious where Jefferson (and for that matter Madison, Adams, Washington, and the other main framers) spoke hesitantly about democracy, the people, and the state legislatures. Conservatives [...]

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Is Social Democracy French?

Wow. In the comment thread on Naked Capitalism, regarding my final New Deal 2.0 “Founding Finance” post, the commenter Peripheral Visionary offers the best-informed, most gracefully and concisely written summary I’ve ever seen of the classic interpretation of the American founding from which my work is precisely intended to dissent. This is so commonly believed, [...]

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“Founding Finance” and New Deal 2.0

My final post in the Founding Finance series at New Deal 2.0 went up yesterday. It’s been both fun and demanding. I can’t imagine any other blog running that series, and while the series certainly dissents from the Tea Party’s anti-government, anti-tax claims on the founding period, it also questions liberal preconceptions. In fact, given [...]

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Naked Capitalism

Yves Smith (nice nom) of Naked Capitalism (and author of ECONned) has been cross-posting my Founding Finance series for New Deal 2.0, I’m happy to say, in part since her posts drive at least as much traffic to this blog as Salon and Huffington whenever they cross-post. Naked Capitalism has an interesting readership, and while [...]

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Robert Morris and Founding Wealth Consolidation

New post on Robert Morris, our first central banker, in my “Founding Finance” series at New Deal 2.0.  I take issue with the defense of Morris by Charles Rappleye in his recent biography — my point, though, is not to excoriate Morris but to understand where he wanted to take the country and why. Readers [...]

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