Missing a good opportunity to shut up

Provoked by the anti-nationalist New Jersey Plan that was designed to put Band-Aids on the Articles of Confederation and keep the union loose, Hamilton, a leading and ardent nationalist, barged onto the floor.

He spoke to present a nationalist alternative he thought good to recommend by starting off with a confession he was a monarchist and admired, as had a few other speakers at the convention before him, the then British government above all others.

He went on to openly deplore republicanism.

And he urged his own plan be adopted as the closest thing to the British model, with its Lords Temporal and Spiritual and its hereditary throne, that Americans were apt to let the conventioneers get through.

It featured a president with an absolute veto over bills elected for life by a set of electors and senators for life chosen by electors chosen by the people.

State governors were to be appointed by a national legislature that would also have an absolute veto over state laws.

No one seconded it and no one even wanted to talk about it.

He wrote most of the Federalist Papers, so much admired by conservatives, today, and held by them to be nearly as authoritative on the meaning of the constitution as the constitution itself.

He is the second arrant monarchist and hater of democracy and even republics that modern movement conservatism has consistently revered.

The first is Edmund Burke, whose horror of republicanism and support for counterrevolutionary wars against France became even more pronounced in the years after the publication of his Reflections.

It’s the libertarians, not the conservatives, who emphasize the views of Locke and sometimes take (as in consistency they should) a positive view of his epigone, Thomas Paine.

Hamilton had already long been a close friend of George Washington by the time he attended the convention, and would serve in the General’s administration.

When John Adams, another of his party and his ilk, became president, he would put on royal trappings and republicans like Madison and Jefferson would laugh at him.

To this day, conservatives whining about high taxes and democracy attack Jefferson for being on the wrong side of the French Revolution and use the world “Jacobin” to curse him and his political allies.

The Jacobins, of course, were the revolutionary leaders of France who for a while led its resistance to monarchist efforts at counterrevolution and foreign invasions intended to restore the monarchy.

And they were as bloody-minded about it as their aristo opponents.

Conservative republicanism is still in large part hypocrisy, and even today conservatives can be found who insist the British government of that time was the best in the world and the best model for America.