I want to talk about something Alexander Hamilton wrote about in 1787.
Not because I think you need a history lesson. You don’t. But because I read it recently and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t writing about 1787 at all. He was writing about right now. About us. About exactly what we’ve become.
Federalist No. 1 was the first of 85 essays written to convince the American people to ratify the Constitution. Hamilton wrote it knowing the fight ahead was going to be ugly. He knew that powerful people on both sides of the argument were going to say whatever it took to win. He knew that truth was going to get lost somewhere between ambition and tribalism. And before he even made his first argument about the Constitution itself, before he wrote a single word defending what the founders had built, he stopped and said something that I think is the most honest thing ever written about American political life.
He said that nothing is more dangerous than the intolerant spirit of political parties. That trying to make converts by force, by pressure, by shame, by social punishment, is just as absurd in politics as it is in religion. Two hundred and thirty-nine years ago. He already saw it coming.
Here’s Hamilton was actually saying in plain terms.
He was watching the very first American political factions form in real time. Men he had fought beside in the Revolution, men who had risked everything for the same cause, were now organizing against each other with a ferocity that alarmed him. He could see that the argument over the Constitution wasn’t going to be settled on its merits. It was going to be settled by whoever could apply the most pressure, generate the most fear, and make the other side feel most ashamed for their position.
Sound familiar?
He wasn’t naive about human nature. He understood that ambition, self-interest, and the desire for power were going to be present on both sides. He wrote that openly and honestly — which is itself remarkable. He didn’t pretend that the people supporting the Constitution were all purely motivated by love of country. He knew some of them had personal and political interests at stake. He said so.
What he was asking for, and what he was almost pleading for, was that Americans be honest enough with themselves to evaluate the arguments on their merits. To resist the pressure of their faction long enough to actually think. That’s all. Just think.
I’ll be honest with you. When I first started The Sensible American, I wasn’t thinking about Hamilton. I was thinking about the America most of us actually live in, the one that barely shows up in any news feed, from any direction.
But the more I write, the more I keep arriving at the same place Hamilton arrived. The problem isn’t that Americans disagree with each other. Disagreement is healthy. It’s American. The founders disagreed constantly and loudly and in writing for everyone to see. The problem is that we’ve stopped being willing to think.
We’ve sorted ourselves into camps. And once you’re in a camp, thinking becomes dangerous. Because thinking might lead you somewhere your camp doesn’t approve of. It might make you question something your side has decided is sacred. And the social cost of that; the ridicule, the exclusion, the labels, has become so high that most people would rather just stop thinking altogether and go along.
Hamilton called this the intolerant spirit of party. He said it had characterized political parties at all times. He wasn’t optimistic that it would ever fully go away. But he had to believe, because he was staking his reputation and potentially his life on it, that Americans were capable of something better.
I think about September 11th when I try to explain this.
I was just a kid. And what I see most when I look back at the aftermath today, isn’t just the tragedy, as enormous as it was. What I see is two or three weeks after is something no one may have fully seen since. People were just Americans. Not conservatives or liberals. Not red or blue. Just Americans who had been hurt and were holding onto each other.
It didn’t last. It never lasts. Within months, patriotism got drafted into the culture war like everything else. And a generation of Americans watched it happen and quietly filed it away as evidence that nothing is really sacred.
That not the America Hamilton was trying to build. That’s not the America most of us want to live in.
Here’s what I think Federalist No. 1 is really about, underneath the constitutional argument.
It’s about intellectual courage.
Hamilton was asking Americans to have the courage to think for themselves even when it’s uncomfortable. Even when their friends disagree. Even when the pressure to conform is enormous. He was asking them to be the kind of people who care more about getting it right than about being on the winning team.
That is genuinely hard. It was hard in 1787. It’s harder now because the tools for applying social pressure have never been more powerful or more immediate. You can be publicly shamed before breakfast and unemployed by lunch for saying something that one faction or the other has decided you’re not allowed to say.
But the alternative, the world where nobody thinks and everybody just performs their tribal loyalty louder and louder until the noise becomes unbearable, that world is exactly what Hamilton was warning us about. And we are living in it right now.
I don’t write this to tell you which side is worse. They both know what they’re doing. Hamilton knew it about the people on his side too and he said so.
I write this because I genuinely believe that most Americans, most of the people reading this right now, are not the people you see in the loudest places online. Most Americans are capable of exactly what Hamilton was asking for. They just don’t feel like they have permission to do it. They don’t feel like there’s a space where thinking is allowed.
That’s what I’m trying to build here. Not a political platform. Not a place where one team celebrates and the other team is the villain. Just a place where Americans who love this country can think out loud together without getting punished for it.
Hamilton thought we were capable of that. I do too.
A question that two hundred and thirty-nine years later still seems unanswered.
— Andrew, The Sensible American