Contemporary Authors

• Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic Broadside Books (New York, NY), 2012
• A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption Encounter Books (New York, NY), 2015
• What's So Bad about Cronyism? Encounter Books (New York, NY), 2015
• The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy Basic Books (New York, NY), 2018

1. The Price of Greatness : Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy LCCN 2017042662 Type of material Book Personal name Cost, Jay, author. Main title The Price of Greatness : Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy / Jay Cost. Edition First edtion. Published/Produced New York : Basic Books, 2018. Description ix, 235 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9781541697461 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER E310 .C795 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. A republic no more : big government and the rise of American political corruption LCCN 2016302889 Type of material Book Personal name Cost, Jay. Main title A republic no more : big government and the rise of American political corruption / Jay Cost ; [with a new preface by the author]. Edition First paperback edition. Published/Produced New York : Encounter Books, 2016. Description xvii, 393 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781594039676 CALL NUMBER JK2249 .C69 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE CALL NUMBER JK2249 .C69 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. What's so bad about cronyism? LCCN 2015028090 Type of material Book Personal name Cost, Jay. Main title What's so bad about cronyism? / Jay Cost. Edition First American edition. Published/Produced New York : Encounter Books, [2015] Description 47 pages ; 18 cm. ISBN 9781594038716 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER JK731 .C67 2015 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER JK731 .C67 2015 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 4. A republic no more : big government and the rise of American political corruption LCCN 2014032671 Type of material Book Personal name Cost, Jay. Main title A republic no more : big government and the rise of American political corruption / Jay Cost. Edition First American edition. Published/Produced New York : Encounter Books, 2015. Description xiii, 393 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781594037276 (hardcover : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER JK2249 .C69 2015 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms Shelf Location FLM2015 099992 CALL NUMBER JK2249 .C69 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) Shelf Location FLM2015 146760 CALL NUMBER JK2249 .C69 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 5. Spoiled rotten : how the politics of patronage corrupted the once noble Democratic Party and now threatens the American Republic LCCN 2011041796 Type of material Book Personal name Cost, Jay. Main title Spoiled rotten : how the politics of patronage corrupted the once noble Democratic Party and now threatens the American Republic / Jay Cost. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created New York : Broadside Books, c2012. Description x, 355 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9780062041159 (hardcover : alk. paper) 0062041150 (hardcover : alk. paper) 9780062041173 (trade pbk. : alk. paper) 0062041177 (trade pbk. : alk. paper) 9780062041166 (ebook) 0062041169 (ebook) CALL NUMBER JK2316 .C67 2012 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER JK2316 .C67 2012 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

Print Marked Items
The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James
Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy
Publishers Weekly.
265.17 (Apr. 23, 2018): p77.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy
Jay Cost. Basic, $27 (256p) ISBN 978-1-54169746-1
Weekly Standard senior writer Cost traces the republican beliefs of James Madison and the mercantile leanings of Alexander Hamilton, arguing
that competing political philosophies in the earliest years of the United States "prefigured contemporary American politics." Cost's distillation of
the source material--the Federalist Papers and Hamilton's essays on government--allows readers with a basic grasp of Constitution-era U.S.
history to follow along. Madison's views vested the people with sole authority for government, with a great variety of parties and interests in
"well-organized political conflict" and carefully calibrated tension. Hamilton was far more disposed toward strong executive power and favoring
the wealthy. Cost's descriptions of post-independence political wrangling and the first decades of the new United States are clear and easily
grasped, but his application of the extended battle of ideas through the 19th century is less persuasive, as it is based on an out-of-date
understanding of ideas: this early generation of political conflict was vital to the foundation of the country, but given ensuing conflicts such as
those over the acceptability of slavery, the American ideological landscape has since become much more complex than accounted for by this
work. This is more valuable as a resource on colonial political philosophy than as an explanation of the U.S.'s current conflicts. (June)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy." Publishers Weekly, 23 Apr. 2018, p. 77.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532934/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cf283de9. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532934
Cost, Jay: THE PRICE OF GREATNESS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Cost, Jay THE PRICE OF GREATNESS Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 6, 5 ISBN: 978-1-5416-9746-1
Founding Fathers worried over inequality, popular sovereignty, and economic growth.
Controversy over the meaning of the Constitution, the powers of the presidency, and the reach of federal government; concern about the political
influence of wealthy citizens and corruption among elected officials; questions about the effects of tariffs on economic stability--these issues that
beset contemporary America began in its earliest days. Focusing on James Madison (1751-1836) and Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), Weekly
Standard contributing editor Cost (A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption, 2015, etc.) offers a
revealing look at how their contrasting political philosophies shaped the new nation's domestic and foreign policies. Although they eventually
became fierce opponents, Madison and Hamilton began as allies, sharing a belief "that people were easily led astray by selfish interests that
undermined the cause of good government." State oversight could not be trusted to rein in opportunism and greed. Their proposals for fostering a
strong federal government, however, were at odds: Hamilton envisioned a system emulating Britain's, where senators, appointed by an electoral
college, would serve for life, as would the president. Only members of the House would serve three-year terms. The "natural aristocracy" would
be drawn from wealthy men, who, merely by virtue of their wealth, had proven their talent for leadership. He proposed a strategy of mediation
whereby "individual factions within society would receive direct benefits from the government" in the expectation that they would invigorate the
economy and therefore benefit the whole nation by growing its industries. Madison, on the other hand, saw a society dominated by agriculture,
"populated by able-bodied, independent farmers." Deeply suspicious of warring factions, he proposed two chambers of Congress, apportioned
according to population, with the power to veto state laws. Madison's views were held by Republicans, including Jefferson and James Monroe;
Hamilton's, by Federalists, including Washington and John Adams. All recognized the difficulty of balancing nationalism, liberalism, and
republicanism, and all saw the risk of factions usurping popular sovereignty.
A well-argued examination of the nation's founding principles.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Cost, Jay: THE PRICE OF GREATNESS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375022/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=83553bc7. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375022
The cost of limiting limited government
Patrick M. Garry
Modern Age.
57.4 (Fall 2015): p76+.
COPYRIGHT 2015 Intercollegiate Studies Institute Inc.
http://www.isi.org/journals/modern_age.html
Full Text: 
A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption, by Jay Cost (New York and London: Encounter Books,
2015)
Limited-government arguments have battled on the national political terrain for the past six years. Indeed, not since the 1930s have such
arguments been so prevalent. They have inspired a national political movement centered on the pre--New Deal principles of limited government,
while simultaneously prompting virulent derision from opponents. Recall, for instance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's dismissive remark that
limited-government critics of the Affordable Care Act had no legitimate standing. And yet, in its opinion on the Act, the Supreme Court upheld
limited-government arguments regarding both federalism and the Commerce Clause.
But Speaker Pelosi had a point: since the New Deal, limited-government principles have been pushed further and further into the closet of history.
During the 1960s, the Great Society expansion of government seemed to seal the fate of the constitutional and political principles of limited
government that had largely prevailed for the first 150 years of the nation's history. Despite a seemingly brief setback during the Republican
takeover of the House in the 1990s, President Clinton's recognition that the era of big government was over, and the Rehnquist Court's federalism
revolution, big government resurfaced under President George W. Bush with the Medicare prescription-drug program, the No Child Left Behind
Act, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and came roaring back in the Obama era.
And this is where it stands today: the Tea Party presses the kind of commitment to limited government not seen since the 1930s, while political
opponents characterize Tea Party advocates as unhinged, mean-spirited, racist reactionaries. To their opponents, supporters of limited government
take a very simplistic, selfish, and ignorant approach--seeking to dismantle government, reducing it to ineffectiveness, all for the single purpose
of slashing budgets and driving down taxes.
But now comes Jay Cost with his recent book to demonstrate, in a thoroughly researched and insightful manner, all the profound and far-reaching
effects of a federal government expansion that greatly exceeds the visions of the framers. A Republic No More provides a valuable contribution
to a debate that is often mischaracterized as narrow and irrelevant. Indeed, as Cost ably demonstrates, the growth of government has much more
serious consequences than just increasing the federal deficit. According to Cost, the uncontrolled growth of government threatens our republic in
ways about which both the right and left should be equally concerned.
The thesis of A Republic No More is that the growth of government, in ways unforeseen by the framers, sets in motion an institutional corruption
of our republican system of government--a corruption that sacrifices the public interest for the benefit of a privileged few. This institutional
corruption differs from an ethical corruption, which can occur anytime an individual possesses the power or opportunity to act in unethical ways.
Instead, Cost's institutional corruption occurs because the institutions of government, as designed in the eighteenth century, are incapable of
handling the degree of government power being exercised during the twenty-first century. This expansion of power has broken down the system
of checks and balances meant to keep corruption in line.
Cost relies on the theories of James Madison to illustrate the ways in which America's constitutional republic was structurally designed to channel
government power through institutions that would distribute and restrain that power so as to protect the public interest against the corrupting selfinterests
of factions. Madison differed from classical republican theorists, who believed that America's constitutional republic depended on the
virtue of its citizenry. To the contrary, Madison sought to construct a system that did not presume the existence of individual virtue but instead
controlled the inevitable human vices through a system of checks and balances.
Unfortunately, according to Cost, the institutions of government created by Madison and the framers, while competent to handle the powers
initially assigned to them, could not control all the additional powers acquired by government since that time. Consequently, with its essential
institutions overloaded, government behaves irresponsibly, which leads to corruption. An important point made by Cost, and one with which
some limited-government advocates might disagree, is that "the problem is not with expansive government powers per se," but with "the
institutions of government that exercise those powers" (p. 9).
A Republic No More centers on two basic arguments. The first sets out three major powers the federal government has acquired that the framers
of the Constitution never anticipated: the power to forge a national economic marketplace--a power first debated during the 1790s in the battle
over a nationally chartered bank; the power under the Commerce Clause to regulate that marketplace to secure noneconomic goals; and the power
to promote directly a seemingly unrestricted array of social welfare measures, such as Social Security and Medicare.
The second basic argument is that the above-listed power expansions have unbalanced the original Madisonian system in four ways. First,
Congress has been unable to handle the powers it has been given, and therefore has acted irresponsibly by catering to the parochial interests
critical to the reelection efforts of individual members.
Second, the growing complexity of our system of government has made it difficult for an increasingly ill-informed electorate to assign blame for
bad policies. Third, the rise of political parties has made the executive branch much less sensitive to the public interest. And fourth, the rise of the
modern bureaucratic state has been a breeding ground for corruption.
To his credit, Cost portrays the situation in ways transcending the narrow debate of simply more government versus less. And while one might
disagree with him on the bipartisan possibilities in this regard, Cost is to be admired for trying to cast this argument in terms by which both ends
of the ideological spectrum might find common ground.
An enlightening aspect of A Republic No More lies in its historical examination of the growth of government and its corrupting effects on the
institutions of government. Cost begins with the battle over the First Bank of the United States, moves on to the development of political parties,
then to the progressive era's attempt to combat corruption, and on to the all-important New Deal's massive expansion of government power. This
historical inquiry provides the basis for Cost's arguments about the effects of increases in government power.
Cost identifies the New Deal as the historical turning point for the growth of government. The New Deal program "was the single greatest
peacetime expansion of government in the country's history" (153). But the government set up by the framers was not intended to do all the things
the New Deal demanded of it: American constitutional government was "not meant to bring about top-down visions of a better society, especially
when those visions deal with every intimate aspect of American economic life or involve massive transfers of wealth" (170).
This vast expansion of government power spawned widespread political corruption, and A Republic No More provides a detailed analysis of the
patterns of this corruption during the New Deal. And in this respect, the book expands on such recent New Deal revisionist histories as Amity
Shlaes's The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.
Cost's analysis of political corruption during the New Deal provides a timely and insightful preview of the issue of crony capitalism, which has
become so central to the current political debate. Programs that began with good intentions ended up as instruments of political corruption,
because they stemmed from power that had grown beyond the capacity of government institutions to control. President Roosevelt, for instance,
probably never thought the National Industrial Recovery Act would end up mired in corruption and hurting those it was meant to help (like labor
and consumers)--but that is precisely what happened because of the ways in which expanded government power bred corruption. Cost
persuasively demonstrates how programs with roots in the New Deal quickly became controlled by certain interest groups, and hence a vehicle
for private aggrandizement rather than the common good.
Cost does not condemn particular government policies or programs, such as industrial regulation or the social welfare provisions of Social
Security; rather, he evaluates these programs within the context of the particular government institutions implementing them, finding that those
institutions were never designed to handle such exercises of power. And the inevitable corruption resulting from this institutional overtaxing
spreads through the web of interest groups created by the growth of government and that now populate the political landscape.
In response to new government programs, interest groups organize to secure benefits under those programs. They lobby for bigger programs,
thereby increasing their own power, which in turn is used to lobby for more government programs. This is how corruption accompanies the
growth of government power: the institutions of government fall prey to the special interests, because those institutions have not been updated to
manage the vast new powers asserted by government.
In its analysis of interest groups, A Republic No More takes up where Theodore Lowi's famous 1969 book on interest-group liberalism left off. In
The End of Liberalism, Lowi observed that interest groups had proliferated since the Great Depression and predicted that the new interest-group
society would entrench itself in the political process, threatening the pursuit of the common good. Cost demonstrates how the interest-group
liberalism decried by Lowi has led to today's crony capitalism and its widespread corruption. Moreover, in his subsequent chapters on various
contemporary policy domains like Medicare and Fannie Mae, Cost shows how specific interest groups have captured public policy and perverted
it to their own ends.
A well-designed government, like the one created in the U.S. Constitution, should provide checks and balances to prevent factions from
frustrating the public good. However, as Cost argues, the constitutional system designed in 1787 can no longer handle the vast, unanticipated
expansion of government power. This acquisition of government power has inverted the original intention of the Constitution: whereas Congress
could once only do what the Constitution expressly allowed, it is now essentially free to do whatever the Constitution does not expressly forbid.
But Cost focuses his discussion on institutional incapacitation, not constitutional incapacitation. He examines how the institutions of Congress,
the presidency, and the administrative state are unable to exercise adequately all their new powers, not how unenforced or misapplied structural
provisions of the Constitution have allowed the power to be exercised in the first place.
Consequently, his prescriptions for reform center on institutional reform, not constitutional reform. For instance, his model is not the grandiose
Constitutional Convention of 1787, but the more legislatively defined and achievable Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883.
The lasting contribution of A Republic No More lies in its revelations of how the post--New Deal expansion of government power threatens our
constitutional republic in ways that should worry adherents of all political orientations. Cost's proposed remedies are limited and narrow, which
reflect an admirable authorial humility, given the magnitude of the problem as it has developed over the centuries. He states that the current
political polarization makes any proper rebalancing of the Madisonian scales highly remote.
However, in an effort to find some politically unifying ground, Cost hopes that we may be able, for a time, to pass some sensible reforms that
control the factions, disrupt their pathways of corruption, and buy the nation a respite from the rampant graft that afflicts it. He recognizes that,
"absent enduring structural reforms, pressure groups will find new ways to misuse government power; but perhaps we can throw them off their
game for a little while" (317).
Cost is cautious about the prognoses for the specific and relatively modest reforms he proposes, and this is probably wise in a politically strategic
sense. However, his proposals may leave readers with a certain letdown. All throughout this excellent book, Cost has built a momentum for a
conclusion befitting his historical analysis of a pervasive and increasingly threatening problem with our system of government. And as a national
political movement has already coalesced around this problem, perhaps now is the time not just to manage corruption but to try to realign the
exercise of government power with the constitutional vision for controlling that power.
Patrick M. Garry is the author of An Entrenched Legacy: How the New Deal Constitutional Revolution Continues to Shape the Role of the Court.
Garry, Patrick M.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Garry, Patrick M. "The cost of limiting limited government." Modern Age, Fall 2015, p. 76+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A434225577/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=eeafec6e. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A434225577
A new form of government
Matthew Spalding
National Review.
67.7 (Apr. 20, 2015): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2015 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Full Text: 
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption, by Jay Cost (Encounter, 408 pp., $27.99)
RECENTLY, former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell (R.) and his wife were convicted on federal charges for accepting over $100,000 worth
of shoes, watches, and golf clubs from a political donor. That's small potatoes compared with what some of the heavy hitters of the Gilded Age
could rake in: In one year alone, Joseph Foraker (Ohio's U.S. senator from 1897 to 1909) took in nearly $1.2 million in today's dollars. And
Foraker was hardly the worst offender. Matthew Quay, boss of the Pennsylvania political machine, apparently demanded so much money that
deep-pocketed Standard Oil had to pay him in installments.
Following closely in the tradition of Theodore Lowi's classic The End of Liberalism, Jay Cost's A Republic No More is less about the
distinguished history of corruption he chronicles than about how our ways of governing have changed, and how the maldistribution of federal
powers feeds corruption and is destroying our constitutional republic.
Cost takes his bearings from James Madison's theory of republican government, famously outlined in Federalist 10. Madison warns of the danger
of factionalism, of a minority or a majority "united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or interest" adverse to the permanent and
aggregate interests of the community. Madison's constitutional system is carefully designed to separate and check power so as to break and
control faction, thereby keeping narrow special interests from dominating public policy for their own selfish ends.
But things have not worked out that way. From the very beginning, politicians have ignored Madison's advice and constantly expanded their
powers beyond the Constitution, throwing off the delicate institutional balance and separation of powers at the heart of the Madisonian structure.
Without the proper institutional checks, politicians behave irresponsibly and, with more and more money flowing freely, there is more and more
corruption.
So who let the moneychangers into our constitutional temple? Cost charges that the flashpoint was in 1790, when the first secretary of the
Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed the Bank of the United States as part of his national economic program. This unprecedented expansion
disrupted the constitutional balance and affected everything that followed, launching America on the slippery slope of living constitutionalism
and rampant corruption. All the Jeffersonians (including Jefferson and Madison) eventually adopted Hamilton's plans, which became the basis of
Whig and Lincolnian Republican economic policy over the next century.
But the Bank is not the prototype of modern problems that Cost thinks. The bank dispute was an important policy debate over the kind of
economy the new republic would foster. Madison opposed Hamilton's initial bank proposal. But he supported the Second Bank of the United
States not because he had changed his constitutional philosophy but because he had become convinced that a national bank was legitimately
necessary and proper under the Constitution. Similarly, it was never really doubted that Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana (Cost's other example of
Constitution-busting by the Founders) was a constitutional act by a sovereign country (despite Jefferson's problematic theory of prerogative
power). These were not the fathers of big government birthing an unlimited state.
What then is the story? The popular argument is that big government is the problem and that size matters. True enough. But the real question is
not just the degree but the kind of government that has been metastasizing throughout American society.
The problem is what Alexis de Tocqueville called the "centralization of administration." In Democracy in America, Tocqueville foretold how
citizens' lives would become subjected to the uniform, scientific, deadening rules of a centralized administration of experts bent on mastering
every social condition in pursuit of egalitarian ends. The outcome of the drive for bureaucratic rule would be a new form of despotism, promoting
the narrow, selfish, petty interests of ruling oligarchs and their favored cronies. Tocqueville even predicted that the most advanced form of
bureaucracy would also be the most corrupt.
This understanding accords well with the Founders' view of the need for decentralized administration under a limited but energetic federal
government meant to secure unalienable rights. Their improved political science--an improvement on classical and medieval regimes--would
vindicate republican liberty through the constitutional rule of law and by limiting the power of narrow interests in favor of the common good.
After the Founding era came a new science of politics--rooted in the French philosophes and embraced by American progressives--that offered
the promise of technocracy, applying modern science to bring continuous improvement to man and society through the administration of things
rather than the politics of self-government. (Alexander Hamilton had called it a "heresy" to suggest that, of all forms of government, "that which
is best administered is best.")
Cost describes this new type of politics well. His underlying narrative therefore eventually supports a more sophisticated analysis, and a more
persuasive argument, than the neo-anti-Federalist account on the book's surface. Connecting the new theory of governance with the new forms of
corruption that result is Cost's most important contribution.
We get a whiff of the change in the 19th century, and then see the phenomenon become full blown in the progressive movement's argument for
separating administration and politics, to elevate supposedly neutral expertise over partisanship. Cost sees the New Deal as the key turning point,
combining robust national patronage with the programmatic infrastructure of the welfare state.
But the fundamental change is when government becomes professionalized, sophisticated, regulatory, and all-embracing. This happened when the
national government, in principle, assumed responsibility for the socioeconomic well-being of every American and set out to build the programs
for managing, from the center, the interactions of consumers and producers, employees and employers, husbands and wives, parents and children-
-virtually every aspect of Americans' day-to-day lives. This is precisely because bureaucracy demands that there be no sources of authority
independent of the administrative center.
This centralization of administration has changed the nature of American governance. Massive bureaucracies of unelected experts, who have been
delegated virtually endless authority by an increasingly irresponsible Congress, exert enormous discretion over extensive financial resources and
political patronage. The ever-growing imperial presidency seeks to unify those resources for ideological political benefit.
The perennial old-style corruption (think of George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall) was mostly personal, parochial, and oddly quaint--
greedy and vulgar, to be sure, but also unbureaucratic and unidealistic. The new corruption is different: As the personal and parochial is drawn
into the administrative machinations of the federal government, everything becomes social, systemic, and comprehensive. This creates a paradise
for the grand corruptions of multiplying political factions--for preferred corporations (Solyndra), whole industries (the auto bailout), voting
groups (immigration executive orders), and segments of the economy (Obamacare).
The various domains of corruption that Cost aptly describes--from ordinary pork-barrel politics and farm subsidies to Medicare and Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac--are the fulcrum of what he calls the "interest-group society" that now predominates.
This is not an extension of the Founders' recognition of the need for decent political management under the Constitution, or a necessary
adaptation of the existing constitutional structure to new circumstances, but an altogether new and all-encompassing form of political
organization. The fact of the matter is that we are today subject to a different form of government than the one designed and practiced by the likes
of Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton. Indeed, from a broader Madisonian point of view, we should consider whether government itself has
become a faction, with its own interests and passions separate from the public good, supported by its own unionized labor, and surrounded by
lobbyists and cronies dealing with agencies and bureaucracies that for all intents and purposes act without the consent of the governed.
In the end, Cost is doubtful much can be done: The structural defects in our constitutional regime leave government "poorly suited" to wield the
power it now possesses. Congress is overwhelmed and the executive too democratized for serious institutional adjustments.
But while we are not on the cusp of a Madisonian restructuring, Cost concludes, we may be capable of what he calls a "Mugwump moment"--a
reference to the anti-corruption Republican Mugwumps, who threw the 1884 election to Democratic reformer Grover Cleveland--in which we can
harass the factions, disrupt their pathways of corruption, and buy some time until major institutional reforms can be implemented.
Perhaps Cost is right about that. Nevertheless, we should be mindful that bureaucratic rule--as Tocqueville and Madison held--violates man's
natural liberty. Which means that, as the political corruptions of expanding administrative rule become more apparent and objectionable, the
American people--who have not consented to an oligarchy of experts--may reassert their popular authority over centralized rule and use
Madison's still-surviving institutions of constitutional government to become a republic once more.
Mr. Spalding is an associate vice president of Hillsdale College and the dean of its educational programs in Washington, D.C.
Spalding, Matthew
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Spalding, Matthew. "A new form of government." National Review, 20 Apr. 2015, p. 42. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A408649505/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7990ead7. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A408649505
The Middle Kingdom; Everybody loves the spirit of
compromise. Except voters
Jay Cost
The Weekly Standard.
19.25 (Mar. 10, 2014):
COPYRIGHT 2014 News America Incorporated
http://www.weeklystandard.com
Full Text: 
Byline: Jay Cost
Historically, potent third parties or outside political movements have had one of two origins. On the one hand, they were driven by powerful
personalities who did not fit cleanly within either of the major parties: Theodore Roosevelt (1912), George Wallace (1968), and H. Ross Perot
(1992, 1996) are the three primary examples. On the other hand, they represented some interest or faction that was being ignored by the two
major parties: Among such groups, we may count the abolitionist movement of the 1830s-50s as well as the populist movement of the 1880s-90s.
The group called No Labels fits neither of these categories. So what is it? Judging by No Labels: A Shared Vision for a Stronger America, it is a
vanity project for politicians looking to inoculate themselves from the electoral downsides that their party labels might carry. Its rallying cry is
"Republican politicians of blue states, Democrats of red states ... UNITE!"
That is scarcely a stirring call to action--and of course, No Labels does not want you to walk away thinking this. Still, the impression is
undeniable, at least when you get beyond the cliches and tautologies with which this book is riddled. My favorite among its many non sequiturs
comes from Alice Rivlin, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Bill Clinton, who explains, "We must break the gridlock
by restoring dialogue and cooperation right now." In other words, we must break gridlock by breaking gridlock. In another section, we are told,
"Washington isn't lacking a way, but increasingly, it seems to be lacking the will."
If you ever played junior varsity football and would like to revisit the pep talks about giving 110 percent, then this book is for you. If, on the other
hand, you're looking for serious solutions to today's problems, then you'd do best to look elsewhere. The Big Idea of No Labels is that America
must plan to have a plan for national greatness. Beyond that, this is mostly an opportunity for incumbent politicians to tell us how awesome they
were before they got to Congress. Representative Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), for instance, regales us with a story of how he and the Republican
leader of the legislature worked together to build a veterinary college. Representative Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) explains how he and Ron Kind (DWis.)
almost got the medical device tax repealed (which, by the way, Kind had voted for in the first place). Representative Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.)
explains how she prevailed upon a Democratic-controlled Congress to help the 66 families of Treece, Kansas, relocate because of an
environmental hazard.
Verily, these stories of courage and perseverance can serve as a template for tackling Medicare and the runaway cost of college educations. Yet
the central premise of No Labels--If only all of Washington were more like Jon Huntsman, Joe Manchin, and Charlie Dent--makes it not so much
useless as harmful. It implies, falsely, that personalities and partisanship are the cause of our problems, when in fact the opposite is true: The
nation's problems are sufficiently substantial that there is no consensus on how to solve them, hence the yawning partisan divide. Democrats and
Republicans disagree on basic premises about what to do next, and, as is evident from No Labels, nobody in the middle has any actual ideas about
how to bridge the divide.
In the end, political disagreements are not about people in Washington being jerks; they are about real trade-offs between competing visions of
the public good, something that No Labels willfully ignores. For instance, No Labels calls for a balanced budget in 2030, as if that were possible
without substantially raising taxes, cutting the military to the bone, or totally reorganizing the welfare state. In other words, absent the kind of
robust economic growth that the United States witnessed in the 1990s, balancing the budget will create vast classes of winners and losers--hence
the gridlock of today.
The same goes for No Labels' call to reform Social Security and Medicare to ensure that they are sustainable for the rest of this century. Great!
But that would require either raising taxes or altering the structures of these programs, which means that somebody, somewhere, is going to be
much worse off.
The country at large is certainly frustrated by the lack of consensus in Washington, but if people want someone to blame, they should look in the
mirror. There are many dysfunctional things about our government, but gridlock isn't one of them. Gridlock is a product of the absence of public
consensus. Both parties offer divergent paths forward, but election cycle after election cycle, the nation as a whole exclaims, "I can't decide!"
In the past, compromise has been possible on certain issues, but not on anything like the challenges we face now: a looming entitlement crisis, a
middle-class squeeze, persistently weak economic growth. Moreover, none of these problems can be solved by men and women of goodwill
simply hammering out a bargain. It would require some kind of guidance from the nation at large, and the country has steadfastly refused to offer
any. By pointing the finger at Washington, No Labels plays to the vanity of the "undecided" voter much as it plays to the vanity of moderate pols
in Washington. In so doing, however, it offers no solutions.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
Jay Cost
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cost, Jay. "The Middle Kingdom; Everybody loves the spirit of compromise. Except voters." The Weekly Standard, 10 Mar. 2014. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A360523945/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5ac0add3. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A360523945
Cronies, clients, and corruption
Vincent J. Cannato
National Review.
64.14 (July 30, 2012): p39.
COPYRIGHT 2012 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Full Text: 
Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic, by Jay
Cost (Broadside, 368 pp., $26.99)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
'It wasn't supposed to be like this." So begins Spoiled Rotten, Jay Cost's new history of the Democratic party. Cost is referring to the presidency
of Barack Obama, who was going to be a post-partisan, post-racial leader for the 21st century. More importantly for Democrats, Obama was also
going to usher in a new era of Democratic dominance based on the changing demographics of American society.
Since the 1960s, Democrats have increasingly pinned their electoral hopes less on white working-class voters and more on an alliance of uppermiddle-class
professionals, minorities, young voters, and women. The election of 2008, which included Democratic victories in previously
Republican states such as Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, Florida, Nevada, and Colorado, at the time seemed to have proven the 40-year
strategy correct. Amid an economic crisis, Obama was inaugurated with high approval ratings, a strongly Democratic Congress, and a Time
magazine cover showing the new president as the reincarnation of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Liberals, it seemed, finally had their new New Deal.
In 2012, those dreams are a distant memory. Although no longer in a recession, the economy has been limping along with anemic growth.
President Obama's signature policy change, healthcare reform, is not widely popular, and many of the initial claims about its contents and costs
are proving to be untrue or exaggerated. The stimulus plan now looks more like a grab bag of political handouts than a serious economic policy.
So why did things go so wrong? Part of the problem is with President Obama himself. He has proved to be a far less adept politician than many
people once believed. He routinely shows a political tin ear and has expended little of the energy required to make the wheels of government turn.
The president seems oddly disengaged and even uninterested in leadership. Speeches, not policy, drive Barack Obama. On top of this, the
president's overweening narcissism gives the administration an odd, disconnected feel. The president seems to be saying by his body language
that the country doesn't deserve a president as gifted as Barack Obama.
Cost is a writer for The Weekly Standard who brings a political scientist's keen eye to the analysis of campaigns and elections. Spoiled Rotten is
part polemic, part history, and a must-read for political junkies. There are many flashes here of the political smarts and good sense that fans of his
writing have come to expect.
In this book, Cost claims that the problems of the Obama administration go far beyond the failings of the president and extend to a fatal flaw
within the modern Democratic party. He argues that the party has increasingly succumbed to the vice of what he terms "clientelism," which he
defines as "transforming factions of voters into loyal members of a party's coalition by offering them special privileges." The Democratic party
breaks down the American population into discrete groups and then proceeds to win their votes with government benefits.
In doing so, Cost writes, the Democrats have "become a threat to the American republic itself." Instead of working for the public interest, "the
Democrats are the party of, by, and for the politically privileged few, at the expense of everybody else."
Readers of the book will be treated to a lengthy tour of Democratic-party history, from Andrew Jackson to Obama, although most of the book
focuses on the post-New Deal period. In his detailed and persuasive recounting of political history, Cost shows how Democrats continually
sought to expand the powers of the federal government and create programs they believed would both solve social problems and win the
allegiance of voters. They broke down the American public into discrete groups and tried to make those groups "clients" of the New Deal
coalition.
Discussing the post-1960s period, Cost takes us into the era of the "New Politics," where increasingly the most pressing issues became social and
cultural rather than economic. He ably shows how Democrats added new "clients" to their coalition: African Americans, abortion-rights
supporters, environmentalists, and gays.
In our own time, "clientelism" is really another term for "crony capitalism," and therefore the book is firmly rooted in the Age of Obama. From
energy policy to health care to the stimulus, special interests have certainly had a strong hand in the shaping of policy under this ad ministration.
Attacks on cronyism have become one of the most potent Republican criticisms of the Obama administration.
One small issue with Spoiled Rotten is that Cost borrows a rhetorical trick often used by liberals, who criticize Republicans by complaining that
the current party has drifted from its noble past. Liberals argue that the GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, or even
Goldwater and Reagan, but instead in the thrall of extremists.
As his subtitle states, Cost believes that the Democratic party has become unmoored from its "once noble" past. To Cost, that means the era of
Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, when the Democratic party stood for the interests of "humble members of society" against special interests. Count
me skeptical, both on the history and on the usefulness of this trope. As Cost correctly notes, factionalism is rooted in the very nature of party
politics, a development that the Founding Fathers despaired of and hoped to avoid in the new republic; yet in the nation's infancy, factionalism
and party politics took hold with the participation of many of those who had just years earlier fretted about the problem. Even the Jacksonian
Democrats that Cost lionizes played the game of factionalism and patronage.
Cost demonizes Gilded Age Republicans and argues that their support for high tariffs during the late 1800s was akin to a "shakedown racket" to
use government policy to support Republican manufacturers. But Democratic policies during the Gilded Age were just as guilty of "clientelism."
Free silver was an attempt to inflate the currency to assist debt-ridden farmers and others who suffered during a time of deflation.
Nor does Cost grapple with the fact that Republicans during the presidency of George W. Bush also tried to play the "clientelist" game. The Bush
administration pursued policies that targeted specific groups in the hopes of building a new, stronger Republican party. Economic conservatives
got tax cuts. Religious conservatives got faith-based initiatives. Laxer policies on homeownership were especially geared toward minorities.
Suburban independents got No Child Left Behind. Seniors got the Medicare prescription-drug benefit. Immigration reform was supposed to
attract Hispanic voters, while young voters were offered Social Security reform. The latter two ideas never came to fruition, and the strategy
largely failed as both politics and policy.
Cost's attack on "clientelism" is mostly a moral one. Spoiled Rotten is a spirit ed defense of the virtues of republican government and the general
idea that our public policy should be created in the interest of the public good, not for the fostering of a political base. It is a compelling argument
that dates back to the American Revolution, one that is written into the nation's ideological DNA.
The problem, however, is that while it may in fact be immoral and anti-republican, "clientelism" makes rational sense as a political strategy for
the Democrats. Sure, "green" energy companies and other crony capitalists get subsidies and benefits from government, but the "humble
members" of society also get benefits at the same time, including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, student loans, housing assistance, WIC,
food stamps, and myriad others. Too often Cost writes as if only well-connected fat cats make out from Democratic policies, not mentioning that
lower-income Americans vote disproportionately Democratic for good reasons. Those "humble members" turn out to be clients as well.
As the size of government grows, so does the number of potential clients for future Democratic politicians. One of the
biggest problems that fiscally conservative Republicans in Washington have had over the years is that the constituencies to keep federal programs
are always bigger (and louder) than the constituencies to abolish or cut back those programs.
Even with the sputtering economy and the problems that Obama has largely created for himself, the 2012 presidential election will probably be
very close largely because of the fact that there might just be enough Democratic "clients" to forge a new political coalition. In Spoiled Rotten,
Jay Cost provides a much-needed history lesson for Republicans trying to figure out how to appeal to 21st-century voters, as well as for
Democrats seeking to reshape their party away from the divisiveness of "clientelism."
Mr. Cannato teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Cannato, Vincent J.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cannato, Vincent J. "Cronies, clients, and corruption." National Review, 30 July 2012, p. 39. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A297138168/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f52b176a. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A297138168
A fool for a client
Fred Siegel
Commentary.
134.1 (July-August 2012): p73+.
COPYRIGHT 2012 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com
Full Text: 
Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic BY JAY
COST Broadside Books, 368 pages
J AY COST'S Spoiled Rotten tells the story of the Democratic Party's transformation over the past 100 years--from an alliance of local Catholic
political machines such as Tammany Hall and Dixiecrat racialists to today's assemblage of bureaucrats, environmentalists, feminists, African
Americans, public-sector unionists, and rent-seeking corporations. The 2012 Democratic Party is organized, Chicagostyle, as a patronagedispensing
national version of the old Tammany political machine. What remains constant, as Cost explains, is clientism , the process whereby
"factions of voters" are transformed "into loyal members of the party's coalition by offering them special privileges."
Spoiled Rotten is a profoundly important book that locates President Barack Obama's precipitous fall from grace in the insatiable demands placed
on the American government by the Democratic Party's entitled interest groups. "This is a story," he writes, "not about morality" but about the
effect of patronage politics on national policy. "The more client groups the party has brought on board" he argues, "the more it is obliged to tend
to their needs, and the less able it is to govern for the people as a whole."
Obama entered office with unemployment at 7.8 percent. He had a 70 percent approval rating and a mandate to repair the damaged economy. But
by the time he pushed through the stimulus bill--"the single largest payoff in history to the party's vast clientele" Cost says, with goodies for the
teacher's unions, construction unions, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the green lobby--the impact of the bill's spending on the overall
economy had become an afterthought. By the end of 2009, unemployment was up to 10 percent, the national debt was skyrocketing, and the
president's approval rating had sunk by 20 points. The president promised a "pivot towards jobs" but instead dedicated his second year to the
passage of a health-care package that would create vast new clienteles for the Democrats.
Cost journeys back to describe the process whereby FDR remade the Democratic Party by sharply reducing the power of the two groups--
Southern segregationist landowners and Tammany Hall urban profiteers--that had long dominated the party. In their place FDR created something
new: Federal patronage, in the form of the Works Progress Administration (later found unconstitutional) and the National Labor Relations Act of
1935 (the so-called Wagner Act that gave unions legal privilege).
FDR developed the concept of collective and economic rights as represented first by the Wagner Act (which gave organized labor the power to
displace the declining political machines in the North's manufacturing cities) and then by his Second Bill of Rights, issued in 1944, which
asserted the importance of the government's providing material benefits to citizens without listing any corresponding obligations. In this way,
FDR began the process whereby a constitutional order organized around individuals was subtly displaced over time in favor of a social order
reorganized around group interests vested with claims against the society and the treasury. Cost does not go into this, and his failure to do so is
the book's primary weakness.
The party of FDR derived its legitimacy from its claim to represent the great majority of Americans. Its clientism was not inherently at odds with
political majoritarianism. That cannot be said of the party under the dominance of rights-based client groups. Those groups looked to courts, not
to the political process, to secure their aims. Abortion, racial quotas, and environmental overreach were delivered not by presidential or
congressional majorities but by courts and an iron triangle of interest groups, congressional subcommittee staffers, and the liberal media. The new
clients had little interest in the compromises needed to allow Democratic presidential administrations to succeed--which explains why there has
been just one, Bill Clinton's, over the past half century. The party, Cost writes, became "so dominated by clients that it became virtually
impossible for it to govern for the public at large."
Spoiled Rotten is at its best when explaining the failures of Carter and Obama beside those of Clinton. Here Cost, a staff writer for the Weekly
Standard , makes an interesting and unexpected argument that Jimmy Carter actually tried to fight the good fight against his party's newly
dominant powers-that-be: "Carter in office saw himself defending the national interest against clients like labor at a time when the growth
machine had slowed down." They did not take it lying down. When Carter reduced the subsidies to cities that went to the rising power of often
heavily minority public-sector unions, the United States Conference of Mayors denounced him as a "traitor to urban America." And when Carter
backed the Hyde Amendment banning federal rinds for abortion, he set off the greatest firestorm of feminist denunciation a president had yet
seen.
In 1980, the interest groups revolted against Carter and backed Ted Kennedy for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Carter adviser
Stuart Eizenstat noted that Kennedy "took little cognizance of the roaring inflation, high interest rates, and a ballooning federal deficit ... and
pushed instead for a huge domestic spending package." Despite Kennedy's failure to unseat the sitting president, it was Teddy's troops who wrote
the Democratic Party platform, featuring desiderata that were echoed eerily 29 years later when the Obama administration came into office.
After landslide Democratic losses in 1980,1984, and 1988, Bill Clinton broke partially free of the clients. The governor from Arkansas ran, like
Richard Nixon in 1968, as "the voice" of "the forgotten middle class." Clinton's denunciation of the reverse-racist rapper Sister Souljah
established his distance from the racialist interests of Jesse Jackson; his support for the North American Free Trade Agreement made it clear that
he placed the health of the national economy ahead of the interests of private-sector unions.
Still, Clinton's success depended on his party's devastation by the Newt Gingrich Republicans in the 1994 midterm elections. That freed him from
the millstone of the Congressional Democrats who represented client groups more than geographic areas. As a result, he became the first
Democrat elected to two terms in the White House since FDR. Alas, thanks in part to the foolish Republican attempt to impeach him, Clintonism
left no lasting political imprint on his party.
Al Gore's subsequent loss of the 2000 election displaced the centrists and turned power over to the increasingly left-wing, client-driven
Democrats in Congress. It was at this time that public-sector unions instead of private-sector unions began dominating the labor movement. This
was a major change. Private-sector unions have an interest in a growing economy because growth leads to higher wages and more jobs for their
ranks. But public-sector unions, which became the mainstays of the Democratic Party's electoral machinery locally and nationally, are extractive.
They are interested in the "socialization of private-sector income" regardless of the overall condition of the economy, because the more money
the government collects, the better they do. A Democratic Party dominated by the public-sector unions came to believe without question that
what is good for government is good for society.
Cost argues that a Democratic Party "dominated by its clients" can't "govern for the public at large" His argument would have been stronger if he
had noted the plight of the overtaxed yet fiscally stressed Democratic-voting states run by an alliance of gentry liberals and public-sector unions.
Illinois, California, and New York would have provided neat case studies for Cost's thesis. Their client-driven politics, embossed with the
ideology of rights, have sent middle-class families streaming to the exits.
President Obama is often likened to Jimmy Carter. But while their problems with over-mighty interest groups were similar, their responses were
dramatically different. Carter, a former governor, tried to constrain the clients. Obama, by contrast, owed his political career to clients descended
from the New Left, such as the corrupt voting-registration group ACORN and the Service Employees International Union. He handed over the
power to write his major legislation to the aging Congressional Democratic leadership--and they gave the clients, who supposedly represented the
interests of social justice, unprecedented influence.
In 2009 and 2010, the public good required a focus on economic recovery and job creation. Instead, Obama expended his efforts on feeding the
beast with the stimulus and creating new ones with Obamacare. FDR dismantled Tammany. Thanks to changes in demography and the vast
growth of government over the past half century, Obama wants to build on the group rights FDR first created, and which were expanded in the
1960s, to impose a national version of Tammany on the entire country. As Cost notes, this poses a "threat to the Republic itself."
FRED SIEGEL is a scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.
His article "How Highbrows Killed Culture" appeared in our April issue .
Siegel, Fred
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Siegel, Fred. "A fool for a client." Commentary, July-Aug. 2012, p. 73+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A294825704/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8663643e. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A294825704
Cost, Jay: SPOILED ROTTEN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2012):
COPYRIGHT 2012 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Cost, Jay SPOILED ROTTEN Broadside Books/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 5, 15 ISBN: 978-0-06-204115-9
Weekly Standard blogger Cost examines what he sees as the dangerous domination of the Democratic Party by special interests. The author looks
at how Democratic presidents have handled various groups in the party coalition, including African-Americans, unions, feminists and
environmentalists. He argues that Democratic presidents have long catered to such groups with expensive programs, to the detriment of "the
public interest"--a practice that has made the party "a threat to the American republic itself." His historical overview is wide-ranging, extensively
researched and often engagingly written, but readers who don't share Cost's conservative outlook will not be won over. Often, he seems to
conflate "the public interest" with right-leaning policies. He lauds President Clinton for pursuing goals that liberal groups disliked, such as
welfare reform and the North American Free Trade Agreement, while deriding Clinton's attempt to allow gays to serve openly in the military as a
mere sop to a Democratic constituency. The author also roundly criticizes Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who shepherded
especially large government programs. But Cost saves his harshest words for President Obama, who he claims has "focused relentlessly upon the
interests of the party clients over the public good." In particular, the author characterizes the president's health-care reform policies as a massive
handout to left-leaning special interests. It is interesting to note that some members of these same groups regularly criticize Obama for not being
liberal enough, a fact Cost does not explore. He also doesn't address how Republican Party policies have been influenced by its own coalition
groups, which would make for an informative comparison. An impassioned argument that will only appeal to a conservative audience.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Cost, Jay: SPOILED ROTTEN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2012. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A284567599/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b6a10d4f. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A284567599
Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted
the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens
the American Republic
Publishers Weekly.
259.6 (Feb. 6, 2012): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic Jay Cost.
HC/Broadside, $26.99 (368p) ISBN 978-0-06-204115-9
According to conservative Weekly Standard columnist Cost, clientelism is "the exchange of votes for governmental favors between a faction and
a party," and Democrats have signed on so many hungry mouths that demands for "gimme" have overwhelmed the public interest. In this
revisionist history, Cost convincingly argues that, in striving to revive the national economy, FDR's administration created a "Tammany on the
Potomac," which attracted elements of the ruling coalition to "the private benefits they enjoyed from the party's benevolent protections."
Ironically, Cost says, although Andrew Jackson founded the Democratic Party in 1828 in reaction to rampant government corruption, modern
Democrats evoke nothing so much as the venal Republicans of the Gilded Age, and they are "no longer capable of governing for the public
good." Cost suggests that the party has "become a threat to the American republic itself." The book raises timely concerns in an election year.
Agent: Byrd Leavell, Waxman Literary Agency. (May)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic."
Publishers Weekly, 6 Feb. 2012, p. 49. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A279612376/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f12bc3ae. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A279612376
The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989
Jay Freeman
Booklist.
103.18 (May 15, 2007): p16.
COPYRIGHT 2007 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text: 
The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989. By Frederick Taylor. June 2007. 486p. HarperCollins, $27.95 (9780060786137). 943.
On August 13, 1961, Berliners from both the western and Soviet sectors awoke to find their city divided by a barbed wire barrier. Within weeks
the barrier would be converted into a wall, and eventually other obstacles and guard towers would be added. The effect was devastating, as
families were divided, friendships severed, and East Berliners forced to live in a virtual prison state for 28 years. Symbolically, the wall presented
a physical manifestation of the division of Europe; it also served as a brutal reminder of the tyranny and failures of communism. Yet, as Taylor
eloquently illustrates, the wall served the purposes of both the Eastern bloc and the major Western powers. For the fragile East German state, the
barrier stopped the intolerable drain of the best and brightest citizens; for the Americans and other Western powers, the sealing off of the Sovietcontrolled
sector provided a measure of stability and predictability in their relations with the Soviet bloc. Taylor provides a fascinating and often
heartbreaking account of both the human costs and the geopolitical effects.--Jay Freeman
Freeman, Jay
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Freeman, Jay. "The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989." Booklist, 15 May 2007, p. 16. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A164523452/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a54380bd. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A164523452

"The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy." Publishers Weekly, 23 Apr. 2018, p. 77. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532934/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Cost, Jay: THE PRICE OF GREATNESS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375022/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Garry, Patrick M. "The cost of limiting limited government." Modern Age, Fall 2015, p. 76+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A434225577/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Spalding, Matthew. "A new form of government." National Review, 20 Apr. 2015, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A408649505/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Cost, Jay. "The Middle Kingdom; Everybody loves the spirit of compromise. Except voters." The Weekly Standard, 10 Mar. 2014. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A360523945/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Cannato, Vincent J. "Cronies, clients, and corruption." National Review, 30 July 2012, p. 39. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A297138168/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Siegel, Fred. "A fool for a client." Commentary, July-Aug. 2012, p. 73+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A294825704/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Cost, Jay: SPOILED ROTTEN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2012. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A284567599/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic." Publishers Weekly, 6 Feb. 2012, p. 49. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A279612376/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Freeman, Jay. "The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989." Booklist, 15 May 2007, p. 16. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A164523452/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018.

• Claremont Review of Books
  https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/why-im-still-a-democrat/
  Word count: 1880

  Why I'm Still a Democrat

  By: John J. DiIulio, Jr.

  Posted: March 20, 2013
  This article appeared in: Vol. XIII, Number 1 - Winter 2012/13

  A review of Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic, by Jay Cost

  Every morning my grandmother, an Italian immigrant, would light three candles in our Philadelphia neighborhood church, one each for the two sons she had lost during World War II, and one for "Mr. Roosevelt." At home, a bust of Saint Anthony of Padua, the Patron Saint of lost things, sat on the living room mantel next to a tiny statue of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sometimes Sant'Antonio didn't come through, but FDR always delivered. He and his New Deal padroni practiced what they preached about using government to give average men, women, and children a chance to lead peaceful and productive, even if not uniformly prosperous, lives. Neighbors helped neighbors, the Church did what it could, and city agencies ran shelters. But "the relief" kept the family in its house and put an extra loaf of bread on its table.

  FDR also took on the bastardi that owned "free enterprises" like the coal mines and sweatshops that my grandmother and other family members knew first-hand. With the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, the Democrats became the party of the unionized working class. In Philly, as in most other big cities, grateful ethnics who were registered Republican or not registered at all became loyal Democrats. My father, a precinct captain, helped to make that happen, and was rewarded with a patronage job that later became a civil service job.

  By the early 1980s, most relatives and friends had moved to the suburbs. Many became Reagan Democrats or re-registered as Republicans. But my grandmother did not move. She lived among what by then were her predominantly black, low-income neighbors. The only difference between us and them, she insisted, was that while they, too, had "the relief," they did not yet have the bellavoro (good jobs). I was by then a doctoral student in political science at Harvard. Pestered by self-proclaimed "Marxist" peers to "articulate" my "ideology," I suppressed the impulse to punch the weirdoes in their faces (reactionary?), and then said something like "Catholic Democrat—abortions are bad, unions are good, and America is great."

  * * *

  I would say the same today. From the New Deal to the present, the Democratic Party, for all of its insufferable radical-liberal elites, and despite its morally fatal failure to care for unborn children, has generally stood for average American families, wageworkers, immigrants, and the poor. Democratic leaders from FDR to President Barack Obama have appreciated that demography is, and should be, electoral destiny in a representative democracy. Thus it is that the Democratic Party is now favored by most Latinos, an ethnically diverse subpopulation that will constitute one third of U.S. residents before mid-century. And thus it is that in three straight presidential elections a majority of voters under age 30 have voted for the Democrat.

  Jay Cost is a young, talented, and accomplished writer for the Weekly Standard with an M.A. in political science from the University of Chicago and Philly ties of his own. He sees the Democratic Party far less nostalgically and favorably than I do. His well-worth-reading book's title minces no words: Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic.

  "Why," asks Cost, "has the Democratic party gone from being the people's party of reform to the party of special interest carve-outs?" His answer is "clientelism—transforming factions of voters into loyal members of a party's coalition by offering them special privileges." He allows that the party "is as full of upstanding people as any other organization." And he believes that it once approximated the "noble" thing that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, and William Jennings Bryan aspired for it to be, namely, "a reform party for and of the people."

  Yet today, claims Cost, an 80-year descent from populist grace—purchasing big labor's loyalty during the New Deal; buying blacks' allegiance during the Great Society; and more recently favoring feminists, environmentalists, trial lawyers, and other "factions" with government-financed goodies—"has rendered the Democratic Party incapable of governing a republic such as ours" and bereft of "the spirit of republicanism that inspired the national founding."

  * * *

  Speaking on November 14, 2012, Governor Mitt Romney seemed to be channeling Cost's "politics of patronage" thesis. According to Romney, President Obama won by giving many a "big gift" to young people ("forgiveness of college loans"), poor people ("free health care" worth "$10,000 per family"), Latinos ("free health care" plus "amnesty for children of illegals"), and other groups that voted Democratic.

  As Cost would have it, FDR was the first such blue gift horse. Like Woodrow Wilson before him, Roosevelt used federal power to help "the humble members of society," but he "also borrowed a page from the urban patronage machines and transformed the national Democratic Party into a kind of Tammany on the Potomac." After FDR, Harry Truman consolidated the New Deal coalition, Lyndon Johnson bolted blacks to the party with the Voting Rights Act, and Jimmy Carter gave teachers' unions their own federal cabinet agency. Cost sees the Bill Clinton presidency as "a brief moment when a centrist Democrat could free himself from the party's clients and govern with Republicans," but that eight-year "moment," he concludes, represented no "great change in the structure or ideological outlook of the Democratic coalition."

  In the book's final chapter, Cost frets that the "Democratic party under Obama is now the faction that robs Peter to pay Paul—with Peter being the fellow smart enough to vote or contribute to the party, and Paul being the guy who didn't have such foresight." He invokes Tom Donohue, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce chief who "commented during the health care debate, ‘If you don't get in this game...you're on the menu!'"

  But powerful Republican client groups avoid being on the menu by buying the restaurant. From 1998 to 2010, Donohue's pro-business body spent more than $850 million lobbying policymakers. The next biggest spenders were also pro-GOP business interests. In the 2012 book, The Unheavenly Chorus, political scientists Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady report that in Washington, D.C., business lobbyists now outnumber lobbyists for labor unions and other liberal causes by 16-to-1, up from 12-to-1 in 1986.

  * * *

  Party-building politics ain't bean bag, and it never was. As Richard Brookhiser recounts in his 2011 biography, James Madison, Madison lost his 1777 bid for a Virginia Assembly seat to a tavern keeper who was more ready than he was to win voters by "giving them treats." Madison never made that mistake again. Instead, he cobbled together the nation's first political party (the Republican Party that evolved into today's Democratic Party).

  Woodrow Wilson is my least favorite president ever, but he was not, as Cost contends, the first Democrat to dishonor the "Jacksonian notion of limited government." That would have been Jackson himself, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed in The Age of Jackson (1945). While Jefferson ignored limited government principles whenever it suited him (see: Louisiana Purchase), Jackson and his party men, "under the banner of antistatism," carried on a "vigorous program of government intervention" and expansion that gave Democratic lackeys and loyalists a leg up (and first National Republicans and then Whigs a kick in the chops).

  As the late James Q. Wilson noted in The Amateur Democrat (1962), no president "used the power of patronage more ruthlessly than Abraham Lincoln." Among other less-than-noble party-building tactics, the post-Lincoln GOP courted anti-Catholic Nativists; used "states' rights" and "law and order" as dog whistles for Southern whites (once mostly all Democrats) opposed to civil rights for blacks; and, trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt exempted, greased its corporate and other wealthy comrades with enough tax loopholes, bailouts, and mega-bucks government contracts to keep their votes and campaign contributions safely Republican.

  Democrats, observes Cost, crafted Obamacare so as to satisfy a long "line of groups demanding to wet their beaks." This "political debacle," as he dubs it, featured the party's leaders "pushing for reforms that the people don't want and that cater to the very kinds of special interests Democrats have opposed for generations."

  But with respect to how various political oxen got gored or gratified and how key deals got cut behind closed doors, Obamacare's legislative genesis was neither unique nor uniquely unsavory. The Supreme Court upheld the law. Its namesake got reelected. Public support for repeal has trended way down from its 2010 peaks as the law's main provisions have become better known. And millions more fellow citizens, including children, now have affordable health care.

  Cost criticizes liberal Democrats for being "inclined to point a finger at the voters when faced with indications of their party's weakness." It seems to me, however, that conservative Republicans are no less challenged when diagnosing their weaknesses. Unlike Cost, I believe that Clinton did lastingly pull my party back closer to the center on crime, welfare, religion in the public square, fiscal policy, national defense, and more. And I am also pretty sure that, had far-right Republicans not reduced President George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" to libertarianism in religious drag, and had party leaders sustained his outreach efforts to blacks and heeded his call for a fair, balanced, and bipartisan immigration reform policy, the GOP would be in a far stronger position today.

  * * *

  I preceded Cost as a regular Weekly Standard writer from 1995 to 2008. I stressed in several articles that the electorate mixes "red" conservative and "blue" liberal values in ways that leave it "purple." Before the 2008 election, my last such piece was entitled "The 3.6 Percent Republicans: The GOP Needs McCain Democrats to Win." The 3.6% referred to the percentage of all voters that in various surveys had self-identified as both Republican and "very conservative." It seemed clear in 2008 that the GOP was becoming like the leading carriage manufacturer at the dawn of the automobile age, enjoying a bigger and bigger share of a smaller and smaller market.

  The American Enterprise Institute's Henry Olsen argued months before Romney lost that there simply are not enough white male voters or enough church-going evangelicals for Republicans to remain competitive in presidential elections—not unless they broaden their electoral base.

  Unduly hard as I think it often is on my party, Cost's book is a considerable intellectual achievement, and he is manifestly among the nation's best young journalist-scholars. But rather than deriding how Democrats win, I hope that Cost, grayer conservative thinkers, and GOP leaders will focus more on how to engineer a big, bold rebirth of the Republican Party. My grandmother would spin in her grave, but give America a truly populist GOP—pro-life, pro-religious pluralism, pro-immigrant, pro-worker, pro-small business, and pro-poor—and I might become a Republican myself. But this Democrat for life hardly expects the big gift of a newly purple GOP.

• AEI
  http://www.aei.org/events/the-price-of-greatness-madison-hamilton-and-the-struggle-to-create-a-national-republic/
  Word count: 1099

  Tuesday, July 10, 2018 | 5:30 pm - 7:15 pm

  The price of greatness: Madison, Hamilton, and the struggle to create a national republic
  AEI, Auditorium
  1789 Massachusetts Avenue NW
  Washington, DC 20036
  Politics and Public Opinion, Society and Culture

  Event Summary

  On Wednesday, AEI’s Jay Cost discussed his new book “The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy” (Basic Books, 2018) with Stephen Knott of the United States Naval War College and Luke Thompson of Applecart.

  Dr. Cost argued that Madison’s and Hamilton’s rivaling republicanism and nationalism can inform our understanding of today’s politics. Per Dr. Cost, Madison was for too long written off as Jefferson’s lieutenant. He and Hamilton have only recently come into public focus, and, for Dr. Cost, their unique relationship — first allies, then political enemies — warranted investigation into their rivaling ideologies in the US liberal constitutional regime.

  Mr. Knott discussed early nationalism’s continental education of parochial early Americans. Dr. Thompson furthered Mr. Knott’s points by relating Hamilton’s theories to Madison’s extended republic solution to the problem of faction. Dr. Cost critiqued Hamilton’s thought, noting that his strong economics were politically limited by his patrician focus on and faith in the wealthy. He reviewed Madison’s valuable critiques of Hamilton’s prescient vision, arguing for shared legitimacy rather than a right-or-wrong approach.

  — Christopher Paludi

  Event Description

  Of all the Founding Fathers, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had one of the most tumultuous relationships. Partners and even friends in designing and defending the Constitution, they turned into bitter partisan rivals when the new government was implemented.

  In “The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy,” AEI Visiting Scholar Jay Cost argues that their fight came down to conflicting values at the heart of the American project — nationalism for Hamilton and republicanism for Madison. Their divide has much to teach us about the politics of today, as we continue to face trade-offs between promoting national development and maintaining a polity that is above special interests.

  Join the conversation on social media with @AEI on Twitter and Facebook.

  If you are unable to attend, we welcome you to watch the event live on this page. Full video will be posted within 24 hours.

  Agenda
  5:15 PM
  Registration

  5:30 PM
  Welcome:
  Ryan Streeter, AEI

  5:35 PM
  Discussion

  Panelists:
  Stephen Knott, United States Naval War College
  Luke Thompson, Applecart

  Moderator
  Jay Cost, AEI

  6:20 PM
  Q&A

  6:30 PM
  Book signing and reception

  7:15 PM
  Adjournment

  Event Contact Information
  For more information, please contact Doug Lewis at Douglas.Lewis@aei.org, 202.828.6027.

  Media Contact Information
  For media inquiries or to register a camera crew, please contact MediaServices@aei.org, 202.862.5829

  Jay Cost is a visiting scholar at AEI, where he focuses on elections, politics, and public opinion. He is also a columnist for National Review and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. Before joining AEI, he was an election analyst for RealClearPolitics and a lecturer at Robert Morris University. Dr. Cost’s interests are broadly focused on civic republicanism in the United States, with emphases on the political theory of James Madison, the problem of political corruption, the role of political parties, the development of civic institutions over time, and the power and responsibility of Congress. His articles have been published in National Affairs, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard, among other outlets. He also cohosts the Ricochet Audio Network podcast “Constitutionally Speaking” with Luke Thompson. His books include “The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy” (Basic Books, 2018), “A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption” (Encounter Books, 2015), and “Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic” (Broadside Books, 2012).

  Stephen Knott is a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Before accepting his position at the War College, Dr. Knott co-chaired the Presidential Oral History Program at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia. His books include “Washington and Hamilton: The Alliance That Forged America” (Sourcebooks, 2015) and “Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth” (University Press of Kansas, 2002). He was designated a National Hamilton Scholar in January 2017 by the Alexander Hamilton Awareness Society for his outstanding scholarship, research, and writing on Alexander Hamilton.

  Ryan Streeter is the director of domestic policy studies at AEI, where he oversees research in education, American citizenship, politics, public opinion, and social and cultural studies. Before joining AEI, he was executive director of the Center for Politics and Governance at The University of Texas at Austin. He has had a distinguished career in government service, which includes being deputy chief of staff for policy for Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, special assistant for domestic policy to President George W. Bush at the White House, and policy adviser to Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith. Outside government, he has served as a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute and a research fellow at the Hudson Institute. In addition to his many television and radio appearances on such networks as BBC News, CNBC, and Fox News, Dr. Streeter has published articles in outlets including National Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and The Washington Post. He has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Emory University.

  Luke Thompson is vice president of public affairs at Applecart. He has supervised strategy, messaging, and targeting in dozens of state and federal campaigns nationwide and has directed advocacy efforts for leading trade associations and corporations. Before joining Applecart, he was director of analytics at the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the 2014 cycle and chief empiricist at Right to Rise. In addition to his campaign work, he cohosts “Constitutionally Speaking,” a podcast on the history of the American constitution, with Jay Cost. He has a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

  Founding fathers Hamilton James Madison US Constitution
  AEI Participants

  Jay Cost

  AEI Visiting Scholar

  AEI scholar Ryan Streeter
  Ryan Streeter

  AEI Director of Domestic Policy Studies

  Ryan.Streeter@aei.org

• National Review
  https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/alexander-hamilton-james-madison-american-paradox/
  Word count: 2352

  U.S.
  Hamilton, Madison, and the Paradox at America’s Heart
  By JAY COST
  June 27, 2018 6:30 AM

  Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (Portraits by John Trumbull, John Vanderlyn/Wikimedia)
  The tension between nationalist ambitions and republican principles goes all the way back to our nation’s founding.
  Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Mr. Cost’s new book, The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy. It is adapted here with permission.

  James Madison and Alexander Hamilton belonged to a political movement in the 1780s that generally cohered around three basic principles. The first was a commitment to liberal government, which emphasized the protection of individual rights. As Thomas Jefferson argued in the Declaration of Independence, “governments are instituted among men” to secure certain “unalienable rights,” including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Mason, added the protection of property to the list. This view of the ends of government was heavily influenced by the writings of English philosopher John Locke.

  Second, they were part of the tradition of republicanism, or self-government. As Cicero put it, “res publica, res populi” (the commonwealth is the concern of a people), who are “associated with one another through agreement on law and community of interest.” Liberty, in the republican conception, has less to do with protecting property and more to do with the proper construction of the state. Citizens in a republic are free because they are governed by laws that they themselves have a hand in making and not by the whims of an arbitrary sovereign. Typically, republics were thought to be unstable — easily corrupted from their proper form in a tyranny (misrule by a king), oligarchy (misrule by the rich), or ochlocracy (misrule by the mob). Philosophers had concluded that a secure government required mixing the republican principle of majority rule with some other form, like monarchy, to create a balance between factions of society as a bulwark against decay. Montesquieu, a French philosopher and historian who was widely read in the United States at the time, had argued in The Spirit of the Laws that Great Britain’s — which balanced the democratically elected House of Commons against the aristocratic House of Lords and a hereditary sovereign — was the one system in the modern world founded on the spirit of liberty. The Founders, however, had rejected the mixing of classes or estates in government and sought to found a stable republic solely on the principle of majority rule.

  Third, they were nationalists, arguing that the 13 states had to bind themselves more firmly together if the ideals of liberalism and republicanism were to be secured. This view was more practical than moral, as it involved a question of how to achieve the shared principles of liberalism and republicanism. It was also much more controversial. Though most Federalists and Anti-Federalists agreed in general on liberalism and republicanism, they disagreed on the nature of the union. The Anti-Federalists, having just thrown off the shackles of a distant government in the Revolution, were not too keen on sanctioning another one. Plus, the Federalists were arguing against the conventional view of republicanism, which held that a smaller republic was preferable, because the citizenry would be more homogeneous and better able to keep an eye on their representatives. Nevertheless, the miserable experiences of the 1780s — an impotent national Congress combined with selfish and often illiberal states — had convinced most Americans that a firmer union was necessary.

  Liberalism, republicanism, and nationalism were broad categories, and it was up to each statesman to figure out for himself how they should be blended together. As such, it was typical for the Founders to disagree, if not on the big principles then at least on the finer points. Even Jefferson and Madison — whose friendship and political alliance endured for half a century — had respectful but sharp disagreements about the permanence of the Constitution and the role of the masses in government. Meanwhile, Hamilton and Madison agreed on enough points to align in the 1780s, but they always had vast disagreements, which came to the forefront in the 1790s.

  It is not my intention to elaborate the full scope of their political thought, as that would be an unwieldly task; rather, I will emphasize certain themes within each view that help account for their complicated relationship. Hamilton’s program emphasized what I call national vigor. He thought it was necessary to develop the country’s commercial strength to bind the country together and strengthen its ability to rival foreign powers. In Federalist No. 11, he described this vision as “one great American system” that “would baffle all the combinations of European jealousy to restrain our growth.” This meant establishing a reliable currency, encouraging the expansion of credit, and promoting economic diversification. These policies admittedly rewarded the wealthy, but he had a bigger purpose in mind. He wished to turn the wealthy into mediators of the general welfare — dispensing benefits to them in the short run but ultimately reorienting their self-interests to the national interest. Hamilton’s vision of government was not “of, by, and for rich people,” as some critics have said, but rather a public–private partnership between the wealthy and the state, for the benefit of all Americans. The quintessential example of Hamilton’s approach was the Bank of the United States — mostly owned by private investors but holding federal tax revenues and serving as a lender for the government. Yes, the wealthy would profit from their ownership of the stock, but a well-run bank promised benefits that would flow throughout the whole economy.

  Madison’s views, on the other hand, emphasized what I call republican balance. He believed that the government had to behave like a neutral judge, fairly dispensing policy benefits and burdens according to the merits of each case. As such, he thought Hamilton’s policies were too one-sided in their favoritism to the wealthy. The rest of the nation should derive some immediate benefits too. He also worried about the potential for Hamiltonian mediation to corrupt republican government. He perceived a dangerous dynamism inherent in the secretary’s use of the moneyed class to promote the general welfare. Institutions such as the Bank of the United States are not a one-way street: The government can employ it for the public good, but the bank’s directors and stockholders can leverage themselves at the public’s expense or even to take control of economic policy. In the parlance of classical republicanism, this is corruption, as the government begins to look like an oligarchy — rule by and for the rich at the expense of the national interest. Madison looked warily at the experience of Great Britain, which had empowered private corporations like the East India and South Sea Companies to execute national economic policy, only to see those private corporations come to wield political influence in Parliament and wreak economic havoc when their schemes failed. He feared the same dangers from Hamilton’s system.

  It seemed as though the country could become a strong and mighty nation, or it could remain a true republic, but it could not be both. Hamilton was the advocate of vigorous nationalism, while Madison defended the principles of republicanism — and the tension inherent in these principles turned the old friends into bitter enemies.

  As it turned out, both were right, each in his own way. Hamilton’s economic plan was brilliant and has rightly been praised for establishing the financial foundation for the Industrial Revolution in the United States. He borrowed the best ideas from the great European finance ministers in the 1700s and reimagined them for the American context. His plan for the national and state debts created a stable currency for the first time since the Revolution. The Bank of the United States kept tax revenues secure and was always ready to lend money to the government as the need arose. Moreover, it facilitated economic development by responsibly extending credit throughout the private sector. And though Hamilton’s program to protect American manufacturing was too controversial for the 1790s, it eventually came to form the basis of the nation’s industrial policy.

  Even so, the criticisms Madison leveled against Hamilton had merit. The secretary’s program was egregiously one-sided, offering few direct benefits to common people, most of whom were farmers. Moreover, Hamilton’s policies did in practice breed corruption, in that they intermingled popular sovereignty with oligarchy. He wanted to redirect the interests of the moneyed class toward the needs of the nation, and he succeeded, but the relationship was dynamic, as Madison had feared. The wealthy effectively captured the government, at least in crucial instances. The protracted fight in 1790 over the assumption of state debts was in large part due to the defiance of wealthy speculators, who risked the national credit to reap a windfall profit. The Panic of 1792 was a product of speculative frenzy by this same group, whose key players had been in or were closely connected to the new government. Ultimately, they forced Hamilton to, in effect, buy them off with federal tax dollars.

  –– ADVERTISEMENT ––

  The key lesson from the Madison–Hamilton battle is not that one was right and the other wrong, but that their feud represents a clash of fundamental American values. The Constitution was premised on liberalism, republicanism, and nationalism — on the supposition that only a stronger, more prosperous union of the states would protect individual rights and secure self-government. But after the Constitution was ratified in 1789, the principles of republicanism and nationalism came into conflict. It seemed as though the country could become a strong and mighty nation, or it could remain a true republic, but it could not be both. Hamilton was the advocate of vigorous nationalism, while Madison defended the principles of republicanism — and the tension inherent in these principles turned the old friends into bitter enemies.

  Hamilton died in 1804, but his death did not bring an end to the conflict of values. Jefferson and Madison had their own ideal of national development, a vision that emphasized small farms as the backbone of a commercially vibrant nation. This was more in keeping with strict republican probity, but it did not do enough to keep the nation independent of European powers. After years of futile efforts to vindicate U.S. neutrality through peaceful means, the country returned to war with Great Britain in 1812. However, the United States was in no condition to wage such a conflict, and was lucky to sign a peace treaty in 1815 that ceded no territory or rights to Great Britain. By war’s end, it was clear to many that the old Jeffersonian vision for the nation was insufficient.

  After the war, Madison and his Republican allies resolved to strengthen the nation’s economic foundations, and they embraced Hamilton’s old strategy of mediation. This was not simply a rote repetition of the old Hamiltonian system but an expansion and broadening of it. Whereas Hamilton had privileged the wealthy few, the Republicans invited all kinds of economic factions to receive benefits from the government. So the Second Bank of the United States would have branches dispersed across the country rather than concentrated in the northeast. Industrial protection would take the form of tariffs that benefited whole sectors of the economy rather than bounties or cash payments to a handful of firms. And an ambitious program of internal improvement would benefit many locales by directly connecting the country together via a network of roads and canals. In sum, the postwar Republican program was an effort to finally reconcile Hamiltonian nationalism with Madisonian republicanism.

  Yet this hybrid of Hamiltonian economics and Madisonian civics was just as dangerous to republicanism as the Hamiltonian original. Once again, oligarchy began to creep into the republic, as the directors and stockholders of the Second Bank of the United States misused their public authority to line their own pockets and influence the course of public policy. Even more dangerous, this Hamiltonian–Madisonian synthesis gave rise to a new kind of mob rule, or what Madison called majoritarian factionalism, via federal tax policy. A diverse array of small economic factions eventually realized that they could combine into a legislative majority to manipulate the tariff rates for their own benefit, at the expense of the good of the nation. This produced the first great constitutional crisis of the young republic in 1832–1833, when South Carolina declared the Tariff of 1828 null and void.

  COMMENTS
  And so the battle between Madison and Hamilton was not merely a clash of personalities but, rather, a durable conflict between nationalism and republicanism, two values at the very heart of the American creed. The preamble to the Constitution proclaims:

  We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.

  This single, forceful sentence introduces a Constitution grounded in the principles of liberalism, republicanism, and nationalism. The 13 states were to form a single nation, governed by the people for their own benefit, under the condition that certain rights cannot be abrogated. These three values, inextricably linked, serve as the foundation upon which our Constitution was framed. But as the quarrels between Madison and Hamilton illustrate, republicanism and nationalism are also in conflict with each other — in their day and in our own. Here then is a paradox at the heart of the Constitution. Just as a circle cannot be squared, our nationalist ambitions cannot always be reconciled to our republican principles.

  JAY COST — Jay Cost is the author of The Price of Greatness: James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the Creation of American Oligarchy.

• New York Journal of Books
  https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/price-greatness-alexander-hamilton-james-madison
  Word count: 1006

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  The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy
  Image of The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy
  Author(s):
  Jay Cost
  Release Date:
  June 5, 2018
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Basic Books
  Pages:
  256
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  Jerry Lenaburg
  “a fascinating look at the interaction of money and politics in the early years of our republic . . .”

  Skyrocketing government debt, political corruption, foreign influence in American politics, and the political struggle between wealthy and average Americans over control of governmental power are not matters ripped from the headlines. As this remarkable and insightful book recounts, these issues have been around since the founding of our country.

  Students of Revolutionary and Early American History have long studied the divide between Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist and Thomas Jefferson’s Republican philosophies of government, finance, and foreign policy. However, the divide between Hamilton and James Madison, following their remarkable alliance that produced the Federalist Papers supporting the ratification of our Constitution, is equally fascinating and perhaps more important politically.

  After the Revolutionary War ended, the newly independent United States were basically broke, militarily weak, and on the brink of a rupture between the new states over issues of trade, debt, and taxation. The weak Articles of Confederation did not provide any means of relief so a new Constitution was created, which laid out federal powers of taxation, regulated commerce, and attempted to balance national and local power.

  However, as the author demonstrates, the devil of any plan for governance is always in the details, and no detail was more vexing to the new Administration of George Washington than settling both the national and state war debts, establishing a stable national banking system, and ensuring a secure currency to get the economy moving after eight years of war and an additional eight years of lurching from crisis to crisis due to an ineffective government.

  Hamilton was a proponent of using the power of the new Federal government to implement a series of what today would be called public works projects, protective tariffs, a National Bank, and an industrial policy designed to create a diversified economy. Madison, like his fellow traveler Jefferson, stubbornly clung to an idealistic vision of an agrarian American economy built on the yeoman farmer, with minimal government involvement or support for industry or finance.

  These political differences led to the first disagreement between the two men over the role of government versus private finance, in particular the involvement of wealthy financiers in settling the war debts and kick starting the economy.

  Hamilton assumed that with the perilous state of the new country’s finances, only those with hard currency would be able to buy the war debt, which meant they would demand some guarantee of profit. Madison considered this little better than graft and had bitter disagreements with Hamilton and his fellow members of Congress over the terms of the eventual deal that settled the war debt.

  While many of these financiers did commit what today would be considered insider trading, making a large profit in purchasing Revolutionary War bonds, there were few good alternatives that would have satisfied all the stakeholders, so Hamilton simply made the best choice from many impalpable alternatives.

  Compounding this feud between the two men was the area of foreign policy, with Hamilton pushing for reconciliation between the United States and Britain based on their common heritage and economic interests, while Madison sided with Jefferson in championing the French Revolution. As President Washington tried to steer a hazardous course of neutrality between the warring European powers, Madison and Jefferson bitterly opposed the Jay Treaty championed by Hamilton that settled many of the disputes between Britain and American remaining after the Revolution.

  Both sides sought to influence public opinion with a duel of essays in allied newspapers, which might shock modern Americans accustomed to the forlorn notion of an unbiased press, but in this era, newspapers were critical tools of political parties, and openly advocated partisan points of view. Both Madison and Hamilton wrote lengthy anonymous essays attacking the other’s positions, sometimes devolving into thinly disguised ad hominem attacks.

  In the end, the author notes that neither of the two philosophies provided the complete answer to balancing the competing interests of nationalism, liberalism, and republicanism. While the naïveté of the Jeffersonians and their utopian nation built on yeoman farmers clearly ended with the military and economic realities of the War of 1812, so did Hamilton’s notions of concentrating political and economic wealth in the hands of a few wise and wealthy financiers and politicians.

  The eventual compromise produced the so-called “era of good feelings” after 1817, which ended during the more turbulent times of the Jacksonian Era, the end of both the reign of the Revolutionary generation in the White House and the conclusion of the book.

  Although Mr. Cost does occasionally rummage into arcane matters of finance, especially when discussing the issues of settling the Revolutionary War debt and the founding and operation of the first National Banks, overall this book provides a fascinating look at the interaction of money and politics in the early years of our Republic, showing that, like much of human nature, issues of greed and corruption are not sudden creations of the modern era.

  Jerry D. Lenaburg is a Project Manager and Military Analyst with 30 years experience in government and industry. A 1987 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he served as a Naval Flight Officer from 1987–1998 and has published in the Journal of Military History.

• National Review
  https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/alexander-hamilton-james-madison-american-paradox/
  Word count: 2352

  U.S.
  Hamilton, Madison, and the Paradox at America’s Heart
  By JAY COST
  June 27, 2018 6:30 AM

  Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (Portraits by John Trumbull, John Vanderlyn/Wikimedia)
  The tension between nationalist ambitions and republican principles goes all the way back to our nation’s founding.
  Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Mr. Cost’s new book, The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy. It is adapted here with permission.

  James Madison and Alexander Hamilton belonged to a political movement in the 1780s that generally cohered around three basic principles. The first was a commitment to liberal government, which emphasized the protection of individual rights. As Thomas Jefferson argued in the Declaration of Independence, “governments are instituted among men” to secure certain “unalienable rights,” including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Mason, added the protection of property to the list. This view of the ends of government was heavily influenced by the writings of English philosopher John Locke.

  Second, they were part of the tradition of republicanism, or self-government. As Cicero put it, “res publica, res populi” (the commonwealth is the concern of a people), who are “associated with one another through agreement on law and community of interest.” Liberty, in the republican conception, has less to do with protecting property and more to do with the proper construction of the state. Citizens in a republic are free because they are governed by laws that they themselves have a hand in making and not by the whims of an arbitrary sovereign. Typically, republics were thought to be unstable — easily corrupted from their proper form in a tyranny (misrule by a king), oligarchy (misrule by the rich), or ochlocracy (misrule by the mob). Philosophers had concluded that a secure government required mixing the republican principle of majority rule with some other form, like monarchy, to create a balance between factions of society as a bulwark against decay. Montesquieu, a French philosopher and historian who was widely read in the United States at the time, had argued in The Spirit of the Laws that Great Britain’s — which balanced the democratically elected House of Commons against the aristocratic House of Lords and a hereditary sovereign — was the one system in the modern world founded on the spirit of liberty. The Founders, however, had rejected the mixing of classes or estates in government and sought to found a stable republic solely on the principle of majority rule.

  Third, they were nationalists, arguing that the 13 states had to bind themselves more firmly together if the ideals of liberalism and republicanism were to be secured. This view was more practical than moral, as it involved a question of how to achieve the shared principles of liberalism and republicanism. It was also much more controversial. Though most Federalists and Anti-Federalists agreed in general on liberalism and republicanism, they disagreed on the nature of the union. The Anti-Federalists, having just thrown off the shackles of a distant government in the Revolution, were not too keen on sanctioning another one. Plus, the Federalists were arguing against the conventional view of republicanism, which held that a smaller republic was preferable, because the citizenry would be more homogeneous and better able to keep an eye on their representatives. Nevertheless, the miserable experiences of the 1780s — an impotent national Congress combined with selfish and often illiberal states — had convinced most Americans that a firmer union was necessary.

  Liberalism, republicanism, and nationalism were broad categories, and it was up to each statesman to figure out for himself how they should be blended together. As such, it was typical for the Founders to disagree, if not on the big principles then at least on the finer points. Even Jefferson and Madison — whose friendship and political alliance endured for half a century — had respectful but sharp disagreements about the permanence of the Constitution and the role of the masses in government. Meanwhile, Hamilton and Madison agreed on enough points to align in the 1780s, but they always had vast disagreements, which came to the forefront in the 1790s.

  It is not my intention to elaborate the full scope of their political thought, as that would be an unwieldly task; rather, I will emphasize certain themes within each view that help account for their complicated relationship. Hamilton’s program emphasized what I call national vigor. He thought it was necessary to develop the country’s commercial strength to bind the country together and strengthen its ability to rival foreign powers. In Federalist No. 11, he described this vision as “one great American system” that “would baffle all the combinations of European jealousy to restrain our growth.” This meant establishing a reliable currency, encouraging the expansion of credit, and promoting economic diversification. These policies admittedly rewarded the wealthy, but he had a bigger purpose in mind. He wished to turn the wealthy into mediators of the general welfare — dispensing benefits to them in the short run but ultimately reorienting their self-interests to the national interest. Hamilton’s vision of government was not “of, by, and for rich people,” as some critics have said, but rather a public–private partnership between the wealthy and the state, for the benefit of all Americans. The quintessential example of Hamilton’s approach was the Bank of the United States — mostly owned by private investors but holding federal tax revenues and serving as a lender for the government. Yes, the wealthy would profit from their ownership of the stock, but a well-run bank promised benefits that would flow throughout the whole economy.

  Madison’s views, on the other hand, emphasized what I call republican balance. He believed that the government had to behave like a neutral judge, fairly dispensing policy benefits and burdens according to the merits of each case. As such, he thought Hamilton’s policies were too one-sided in their favoritism to the wealthy. The rest of the nation should derive some immediate benefits too. He also worried about the potential for Hamiltonian mediation to corrupt republican government. He perceived a dangerous dynamism inherent in the secretary’s use of the moneyed class to promote the general welfare. Institutions such as the Bank of the United States are not a one-way street: The government can employ it for the public good, but the bank’s directors and stockholders can leverage themselves at the public’s expense or even to take control of economic policy. In the parlance of classical republicanism, this is corruption, as the government begins to look like an oligarchy — rule by and for the rich at the expense of the national interest. Madison looked warily at the experience of Great Britain, which had empowered private corporations like the East India and South Sea Companies to execute national economic policy, only to see those private corporations come to wield political influence in Parliament and wreak economic havoc when their schemes failed. He feared the same dangers from Hamilton’s system.

  It seemed as though the country could become a strong and mighty nation, or it could remain a true republic, but it could not be both. Hamilton was the advocate of vigorous nationalism, while Madison defended the principles of republicanism — and the tension inherent in these principles turned the old friends into bitter enemies.

  As it turned out, both were right, each in his own way. Hamilton’s economic plan was brilliant and has rightly been praised for establishing the financial foundation for the Industrial Revolution in the United States. He borrowed the best ideas from the great European finance ministers in the 1700s and reimagined them for the American context. His plan for the national and state debts created a stable currency for the first time since the Revolution. The Bank of the United States kept tax revenues secure and was always ready to lend money to the government as the need arose. Moreover, it facilitated economic development by responsibly extending credit throughout the private sector. And though Hamilton’s program to protect American manufacturing was too controversial for the 1790s, it eventually came to form the basis of the nation’s industrial policy.

  Even so, the criticisms Madison leveled against Hamilton had merit. The secretary’s program was egregiously one-sided, offering few direct benefits to common people, most of whom were farmers. Moreover, Hamilton’s policies did in practice breed corruption, in that they intermingled popular sovereignty with oligarchy. He wanted to redirect the interests of the moneyed class toward the needs of the nation, and he succeeded, but the relationship was dynamic, as Madison had feared. The wealthy effectively captured the government, at least in crucial instances. The protracted fight in 1790 over the assumption of state debts was in large part due to the defiance of wealthy speculators, who risked the national credit to reap a windfall profit. The Panic of 1792 was a product of speculative frenzy by this same group, whose key players had been in or were closely connected to the new government. Ultimately, they forced Hamilton to, in effect, buy them off with federal tax dollars.

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  The key lesson from the Madison–Hamilton battle is not that one was right and the other wrong, but that their feud represents a clash of fundamental American values. The Constitution was premised on liberalism, republicanism, and nationalism — on the supposition that only a stronger, more prosperous union of the states would protect individual rights and secure self-government. But after the Constitution was ratified in 1789, the principles of republicanism and nationalism came into conflict. It seemed as though the country could become a strong and mighty nation, or it could remain a true republic, but it could not be both. Hamilton was the advocate of vigorous nationalism, while Madison defended the principles of republicanism — and the tension inherent in these principles turned the old friends into bitter enemies.

  Hamilton died in 1804, but his death did not bring an end to the conflict of values. Jefferson and Madison had their own ideal of national development, a vision that emphasized small farms as the backbone of a commercially vibrant nation. This was more in keeping with strict republican probity, but it did not do enough to keep the nation independent of European powers. After years of futile efforts to vindicate U.S. neutrality through peaceful means, the country returned to war with Great Britain in 1812. However, the United States was in no condition to wage such a conflict, and was lucky to sign a peace treaty in 1815 that ceded no territory or rights to Great Britain. By war’s end, it was clear to many that the old Jeffersonian vision for the nation was insufficient.

  After the war, Madison and his Republican allies resolved to strengthen the nation’s economic foundations, and they embraced Hamilton’s old strategy of mediation. This was not simply a rote repetition of the old Hamiltonian system but an expansion and broadening of it. Whereas Hamilton had privileged the wealthy few, the Republicans invited all kinds of economic factions to receive benefits from the government. So the Second Bank of the United States would have branches dispersed across the country rather than concentrated in the northeast. Industrial protection would take the form of tariffs that benefited whole sectors of the economy rather than bounties or cash payments to a handful of firms. And an ambitious program of internal improvement would benefit many locales by directly connecting the country together via a network of roads and canals. In sum, the postwar Republican program was an effort to finally reconcile Hamiltonian nationalism with Madisonian republicanism.

  Yet this hybrid of Hamiltonian economics and Madisonian civics was just as dangerous to republicanism as the Hamiltonian original. Once again, oligarchy began to creep into the republic, as the directors and stockholders of the Second Bank of the United States misused their public authority to line their own pockets and influence the course of public policy. Even more dangerous, this Hamiltonian–Madisonian synthesis gave rise to a new kind of mob rule, or what Madison called majoritarian factionalism, via federal tax policy. A diverse array of small economic factions eventually realized that they could combine into a legislative majority to manipulate the tariff rates for their own benefit, at the expense of the good of the nation. This produced the first great constitutional crisis of the young republic in 1832–1833, when South Carolina declared the Tariff of 1828 null and void.

  COMMENTS
  And so the battle between Madison and Hamilton was not merely a clash of personalities but, rather, a durable conflict between nationalism and republicanism, two values at the very heart of the American creed. The preamble to the Constitution proclaims:

  We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.

  This single, forceful sentence introduces a Constitution grounded in the principles of liberalism, republicanism, and nationalism. The 13 states were to form a single nation, governed by the people for their own benefit, under the condition that certain rights cannot be abrogated. These three values, inextricably linked, serve as the foundation upon which our Constitution was framed. But as the quarrels between Madison and Hamilton illustrate, republicanism and nationalism are also in conflict with each other — in their day and in our own. Here then is a paradox at the heart of the Constitution. Just as a circle cannot be squared, our nationalist ambitions cannot always be reconciled to our republican principles.

  JAY COST — Jay Cost is the author of The Price of Greatness: James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the Creation of American Oligarchy.

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