My new year’s resolution has been to spend more time reading random things, and it’s delightfully turned out that random things do a surprising amount to illuminate things I’m working on. For example, a few separate essays in Gordon Wood’s collection The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States shed surprising light on some of the discussion in the progressive blogosphere of the political economy of deflation.

He argues that the “republican” ideology that prevailed in the late 18th century held that public officials should be disinterested participants. But they needed some form of income. Ideally, that income would take the form of land rents. But under American circumstances, interest payments might have to substitute:

But with the exception of rents from property, most such direct sources of income were defiled by interest. That is, the income of most American gentlemen did not come without work and participation in commerce, as Adam Smith suggested it ought to for leaders to be truly disinterested. The “revenue” of the English landed aristocrats was unique, said Smith; their income from rents “costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own.” Thus would-be disinterested American public leaders struggled to find an equivalent, a reliable source of income that was not stained by marketplace exertion and interest. Many gentlemen of leisure found such a source in the interest from money they had lent out. It is not surprising that so many of the gentry used their wealth in this way. After all, what were the alternatives for investment in an underdeveloped society that lacked banks, corporations, and stock markets? Land, of course, was a traditional object of investment, but in America, as John Witherspoon pointed out in an important speech in the Continental Congress, rent-producing land could never allow for as stable a source of income as it did in England. In the New World, said Witherspoon, where land was more plentiful and cheaper than it was in the Old World, gentlemen seeking a steady income “would prefer money at interest to purchasing and holding real estate.”

Of course “disinterested” people of this sort weren’t actually disinterested. Instead, they had strong economic interests in perpetuating slavery and avoiding inflation.

And, indeed, James Madison was very upset about inflation:

In his working paper drafted in the late winter of 1787 entitled “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” Madison spent very little time on the impotence of the Confederation. What was really on his mind was the deficiencies of the state governments: he devoted more than half his paper to the “multiplicity,” “mutability,” and “injustice” of the laws passed by the states. Particularly alarming and unjust in his eyes were the paper money acts, stay laws, and other forms of debtor-relief legislation that hurt creditors and violated individual property rights. And he knew personally what he was talking about. Although we usually think of Madison as a bookish scholar who got all his thoughts from his wide reading, he did not develop his ideas about the democratic excesses of the state governments by poring through the bundles of books that Jefferson was sending him from Europe. He learned about popular politics and legislative abuses firsthand—by being a member of the Virginia Assembly.

Last (but first in the book), Wood draws a contrast between noting that ideas and interests were bound together, and making the vulgar argument that the constitution was nothing but a plot to advance the interests of creditors:

Such realists or materialists—that is, the Progressive historians—may be right that ideas do not “cause” behavior, but it does not follow that ideas are unimportant and have little or no effect on behavior, or that they can be treated as just one “factor” that now and then comes into play in human experience. Otherwise we would not spend so much time and energy arguing about ideas. I think it is possible to concede the realist or materialist position—that passions and interests lie behind all our behavior—without deprecating the role of ideas. Even if ideas are not the underlying motives for our actions, they are constant accompaniments of our actions. There is no behavior without ideas, without language. Ideas and language give meaning to our actions, and there is almost nothing that we humans do to which we do not attribute meaning. These meanings constitute our ideas, our beliefs, our ideology, and collectively our culture. As we have learned from both “the linguistic turn” and “the cultural turn” over the past several decades, our minds are essential to the ordering of our experience.

In other words, the leaders of the early republic had an ideological account of what sort of person was suited for public office. That naturally led to an ideological account of what sort of interests were legitimate. If a creditor isn’t just a member of an interest group, but actually someone earning a living in a uniquely virtuous way, then those advancing an inflationary agenda are a uniquely pernicious brand of conspirators.

With Robert Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 I’ve now read six of the ten published volumes of the Oxford History of the United States and I have to say that it’s just a really excellent series. These kind of broad surveys are most helpful when dealing with a period you don’t know anything about, and Middlekauff is covering the relatively familiar terrain of Revolution and Founding so it doesn’t stand out quite as much as, say, the Wood or Howe books on the early 19th century. But it’s still quite good. In particular, though America is kind of soaked in information about the personalities of the era the predominant form is the biography, which winds up obscuring all context. The wider view gives you a better sense of what’s actually going on.

The main theme is the ways in which America changed over the course of a struggle that, though certainly not a “social revolution” was nonetheless a prolonged political and military undertaking that entailed mass participation and naturally involved substantial changes. The war was fought in part because people had a sense of their own identities as Americans and the rights that entailed, but the process of fighting for those rights, and then for independence, and then to create a workable system of government also brought that consciousness into being. Middlekauff remarks that the American Revolution is remarkable for seeming so inevitable in retrospect while simultaneously having been so unforeseen at the time.

The disappointment of the book is in terms of what it doesn’t cover. As a volume in a History of the United States it’s very focused on what the Revolution meant for America and Americans. That means that in terms of the war qua war you get scanty treatment of the global strategic situation and the thinking in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Madrid. The war was substantially unleashed in parliament, where there was no willingness to renounce taxing power over North America, and it was won there as well when English elites decided that pouring more resources into trying to establish that principle didn’t make sense. That said, a book can’t be everything and this is a good one.

William Wallis profiles Rwandan President Paul Kagame under the headline “Lunch with Paul Kagame: Is the Rwandan leader a visionary statesman, or a blood-stained tyrant?”

Not wanting to comment on the specifics of a region of the world with which I’m not that familiar, I’m left to wonder why this is meant to be an either/or issue. Andrew Jackson is responsible for ethnic cleansing that could make any blood-stained tyrant proud, but he’s also the main founder of America’s oldest political party, featured on the $20 bill, etc. Napoleon Bonaparte didn’t engage in that kind of massacre and displacement, but surely plenty of people died in the wars he launched. Yet he’s also an important statesman whose various conquests and administrative reforms shaped the subsequent 200 years of European governance in a profound way. If Deng Xiaoping wasn’t a visionary leader then I don’t know who was, but that doesn’t mean nobody ever got run over by a tank protesting the regime he led.

It’s difficult to understand world events by trying to reductively view everything as a struggle of visionary good guys against blood-stained tyrants. Returning to the subject at hand, I think the piece actually makes it perfectly clear that you won’t be able to understand Kagame’s role through this lens, so it’s annoying to see it headlined in this way. Precisely the danger posed by a figure like Kagame is that western leaders will look at his very real and very important accomplishments, conclude that he’s “one of the good guys,” and then turn a blind eye to real flaws in his conduct. Politicians are normally a mixed bag, and need to be assessed as such.

The United States sure is a strange country:

[John] Adams runs the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Florida. What he wants to express on his license plate is his affinity with the Confederacy. A few years ago he designed a plate that reads “Confederate Heritage,” with a rebel flag in the center.

It’s a similar design currently on license plates in nine other states, including Alabama, Georgia, Maryland, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

You read these stories now and again where Israelis take issue with some street or town square in Palestine or whatnot being named after a “martyr” who killed Israeli civilians. It’s conventional to fight back with citations to some Israeli monument or other to an Irgun guy. But at least Israelis and Palestinians are genuinely in a state of conflict. The Civil War is over and American public culture generally avows the principle that abiding by election results is good, armed rebellion against the US government is bad, and chattel slavery is very bad. Nonetheless monuments to the idea of launching an armed rebellion against the US government when a political party hostile to chattel slavery wins an election are incredibly widespread.

Letter from Alexander Hamilton to John Laurens, September 12, 1780:

The truth is I am an unlucky honest man that speaks my sentiments to all and with emphasis. I say this to you because you know it and will not charge me with vanity. I hate congres—I hate the army—I hate the world—I hate myself. The whole is a mass of fools and knaves. I could almost except you and Meade. Adieu. A Hamilton.

Personally, I like his later stuff better.

This series of videos brought to us by Mike Huckabee in which time traveling teens save American history by re-writing it to be more Reagan-centric marks, I think, the point at which the farce of conservative Reagan-worship passed through the veil and once again becomes tragic:

Some would say the right has a cartoonish view of American history.

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, Eric Foner offers a critical review of a new book taking the line that Abraham Lincoln wasn’t really interested in fighting slavery. Foner says:

Ultimately, Gallagher’s sharp dichotomy between the goals of Union and emancipation seems excessively schematic. It begs the question of what kind of Union the war was being fought to preserve. The evolution of Lincoln’s own outlook illustrates the problem. On the one hand, as Gallagher notes, Lincoln always insisted that he devised his policies regarding slavery in order to win the war and preserve national unity. Yet years before the Civil War, Lincoln had argued that slavery fatally undermined the nation’s ability to exemplify the superiority of free institutions. The Union to be saved, he said, must be “worthy of the saving.” During the secession crisis, Lincoln could have preserved the Union by yielding to Southern demands. He adamantly refused to compromise on the crucial political issue — whether slavery should be allowed to expand into Western territories.

I’m always interested in this debate because I think it reveals something about the general question of how to evaluate politicians. When you look at the career of Abraham Lincoln, you see a guy who joined the more slavery-skeptical of the two political parties. As a member of the Illinois state legislature, he opposed the short-lived effort to bring slavery to the state. As a member of congress he criticized the Mexican War as a slave power land-grab and backed the anti-slavery Wilmot Proviso. He got back into politics to criticize the Kansas-Nebraska Act as too favorable to slavery. He helped found a new anti-slavery political party. He ran for Senate in 1858 as a member of the new anti-slavery party and criticized his opponent as an appeaser of the pernicious slave power. Then he ran for president in 1860 as the nominee of the new anti-slavery party against a number of candidate who all warned, accurately, that his election would precipitate secession. Then when his election did precipitate secession, he implemented a policy of military coercion against the seceding states rather than compromise on slavery even though he knew this would prompt even more states to secede. Then he fought and won a war against the seceded states, during the course of which he freed the slaves!

On the other side of the ledger, you have the fact that he spent a lot of time saying that he was only interested in saving the union. But the entire point of the Republican Party was to break the hold of slaveowners over the national government at the cost of provoking sectional conflict. There was a whole other political party—the Democratic Party—organized around the principles of white supremacy and sectional accommodation and it’s a party Lincoln never belonged to.

Back to the present day, this all reminds me of the idea that Paul Ryan is a “deficit hawk.” Sure throughout his career his regularly voting for deficit increasing measures and regularly voted against deficit cutting ones. Sure his budget plan actually cuts taxes on the rich. But he talks a lot about the deficit. So that must be what’s really driving him! Political actors never use rhetoric to try to broaden their coalition and advance their real aims.