Moments from an Interview with Roger D. Hodge

Harper's Magazine recently published an interview with Roger D. Hodge, the author of The Mendacity of Hope. Although I disagree with many of his views on Obama, I thought the interview had some golden moments particularly when discussing the founding fathers. Here are a few of those moments:

Americans are preoccupied with the Founders, and that is not at all a bad thing, yet much of the contemporary discussion of the revolutionary generation and the early years of the republic is appallingly shallow. In my view, too little attention has been paid to James Madison’s political philosophy—which is surprising, since Madison is the principal author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Founders did not speak in one voice, and careful attention to the substance of their debates (which were in many ways far more acrimonious than our own cable TV spectacles) can help clarify contemporary controversies, especially when so many of our present political combatants are merely reenacting old debates in seeming ignorance of the principles that were originally at issue.



Madison provides a particularly apt perspective on our current predicament because as a politician he devoted much of his energy to fighting precisely the sort of corruption that has swamped our political system. Madison was the intellectual and political force behind the republican opposition to the Federalists, who very much like the present-day Republican Party saw themselves as the natural rulers of the United States. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, sought to protect a narrow financial oligarchy from the interests of the great majority of American citizens. Hamilton’s ambition was to bind his “moneyed men” to the state through an innovative financial program that would at the same time lay the foundations for an international commercial empire. Madison and Jefferson did everything they could to obstruct the Hamiltonian agenda, correctly perceiving that such policies would lead, in time, not only to a sundering of republican philosophy from the reason of state but also to an aggressive militarism. And, as Madison wrote, “of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.” Those other enemies, he continued, include excessive debts and taxes, the domination of the many by the few, the extension of executive power, and the inequality of fortunes—all of which lead to that degeneration of manners and morals known to republicans as corruption.

As for James Madison, without whom the Bill of Rights would never have been brought before Congress, much less ratified, we can be reasonably certain that he would never have extended First Amendment protection to the expenditures of corporations. In fact, during the First Congress, on February 8, 1791, in the midst of debate over Alexander Hamilton’s proposal to charter a Bank of the United States, Madison delivered a speech on the floor of the House denouncing the corrupting effects of “incorporated societies”: They are “powerful machines,” he argued, which often pursue principles that are very different from those of the people. No one who is familiar with Madison’s horror of all forms of political corruption could believe that he would have blithely extended the rights of citizenship to soulless creatures of pure commerce. Even so, the point is not whether one or another eighteenth-century politician would approve of a current law or court decision; what is at issue is the integrity of our political system. Citizens United confirms that we do indeed live in a “capitalist democracy,” as current usage has it, one in which a tiny minority quite literally votes with its pocketbook and in which laws and even lawmakers can be bought and sold like any other commodity.