American nationalists, part 2
American nationalists, part 2
Reflections on Chapter 2, Parts 6-10, of Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery
The second half of chapter 2 (“American Nationalists”) offers a window on the tensions at the heart of the American republic, and thus at the heart of Hazony’s argument.
It’s hard to appreciate now the enormous risks America’s founders were taking. They were consciously building a nation not with the ordinary tools of construction—kinship ties, a long shared history on the land, etc.—but based on ideological commitments, a shared set of values, beliefs, and ideals. This had never been done before. And it gave rise to a puzzle: how to ensure that these commitments were truly shared? As Hamilton recognized, the success of the American project “depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment” and “a uniformity of principles and habits.”
There was a tool readily at hand for this: religion, and particularly established religion. The national government could sponsor and privilege a particular faith tradition, sideline and even punish dissenters, and thereby foster the sort of common sentiment that Hamilton urged. And state sponsorship of religion had its supporters. In a letter to his friend James Madison, Richard Henry Lee wrote that “the experience of all times shows Religion to be the guardian of morals,” and he worried that “avarice is accomplishing the destruction of religion, for want of a legal obligation to contribute something to its support.”
Yet though religious establishment was historically the norm in Europe—the Church of England in Britain, Roman Catholicism in France, Calvinism in the Swiss cantons—the founders consciously rejected it. In America, there would be no established church, and all would be permitted the full and free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience. Madison laid the philosophical groundwork for this in his famous Memorial and Remonstrance: “Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” Madison criticized religious establishments as unnecessary, counterproductive, and strife-inducing.
For the founders, religious freedom—and its handmaiden, free speech—were supreme values. And it’s on this point that Hazony’s account of the early “American nationalists” falters. Allow me three brief points of criticism.
Downplaying Divisiveness: Hazony praises the Federalist-sponsored Alien and Sedition Acts for creating a 19-year path to citizenship (pp.69-70). But he fails to mention the most controversial part of that law: it imposed criminal penalties on anyone who criticized the national government, and it was selectively weaponized against Democratic-Republican newspapers. It remains today one of the worst betrayals of the First Amendment in the nation’s history, and it led directly to John Adams’ defeat and the Democratic-Republican sweep of the White House and Congress in the famous election of 1800. Hazony suggests Jefferson won the presidency on the “immigrant vote” (p.70) but there’s no evidence of that.
Elevating Establishment: Hazony is right that a “wall of separation between church and state”—Jefferson’s metaphor—is not the American model. But neither is “an alliance between Christianity and the state” (p.75). The Establishment Clause bars setting up a national religion, and soon after it was ratified, the States followed suit and disestablished their own state-sponsored churches. Beyond doubt, faith is indispensable to a strong republic and a virtuous citizenry, and the founders held that view. But they specifically rejected the sort of church-state “alliance” that seeks to foster faith through legal coercion. As Madison put it, “reason and conviction” alone must guide individual decisions in these matters.
Misconstruing Madison: Finally, throughout chapter 2, Hazony puts Madison firmly in Jefferson’s orbit, pigeonholing him as a utopian, Lockean, anti-nationalist. But the real Madison is far more nuanced—in some ways an ardent nationalist and thus the principal architect of the Constitution (he even favored giving Congress a veto over state laws), yet also deeply distrustful of centralized government, with its bloated bureaucracies, standing armies, and power to tax and wage foreign wars. Madison was neither a Hamiltonian Federalist nor a Jeffersonian Republican. He was, well, Madisonian, and we would all benefit from a better understanding of his vision for the nation. ‘‘Notwithstand[ing] a thousand Faults and blunders,’’ John Adams wrote to Jefferson in 1817, Madison’s “Administration has acquired more glory, and established more Union than all his three Predecessors Washington Adams Jefferson put together.’’