Is the "Hamilton Project" a Sign of What It Means for Democrats to Transcend "Tired Ideologies" in 2006?

I sincerely hope not--

The new Brookings Institution Hamilton Project Nicely Illustrates One of the Primary Reasons We Need a Genuinely Different Framework for Constructing a Democratic Policy Agenda for the 2006 Elections. This "Project" also suggests why the Democratic Party Agenda we need should not be determined by those who seek to transcend "tired ideologies" by reproducing them--which is so far what the official policy framework of the Democratic Party, structured around the tired old themes of "Security, Opportunity, and Responsibility" seems to be doing:

According to an article posted today on MSNBC, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin has launched a new (?!) economic policy project named, of all things, the Hamilton Project. Perhaps the creators of this Brookings Institution "Project" were a bit too overtaken by the heroic portrayal of this "founding father" by last year's New York Historical Society Hamilton exhibit. Whatever the source of the seduction, the choice of Hamilton as the name for a new Democratic Party policy initiative demonstrates just how Orwellian current understandings of democratic policy seem to have become within both the Democratic and Republican parties. (Either that, or Rubin and the Brookings Institution have developed a wonderfully ironic sense of humor. Now that would be something new!)--

The key question is: Do Rubin and the Brookings Institution have such a shallow historical sensibility, or do they expect American citizens to be so dull as to let pass unnoticed the irony of the fact that Alexander Hamilton was a Federalist whose economic policies were almost universally opposed by the first democrats of the United States, including Thomas Jefferson? Hamilton was reviled by democrats during the 1790s because his economic policies favored the wealthy over the working poor to such an extent that these policies stirred up one of the first major armed insurrections of US history--the Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion).

And in case this little historical irony is not enough to suggest how severely distorted is the vision of "democratic" policy underlying this new Democratic Party economic vision that would, according to Barack Obama, transcend "tired ideologies," we should note that the first "white paper" produced by this Hamilton Project warns that rising economic inequality "risks a backlash that can threaten the very stability of democratic capitalism itself."

The virtue of this warning, of course, is that it clearly underlines the primary concern of this revisionary Hamiltonian-style economic policy: "the stability of democratic capitalism." This critical anxiety about a backlash against capitalism is perhaps what makes the Hamilton Project quite apt to designate the policy priority of both this project and the Democratic party under leaders like Rubin: They recognize with great anxiety the ways in which the glaring inequalities being produced by current economic policies may produce "backlash," or political rebellion against the priorities of both ruling political parties. Hamilton Project indeed!

As an antidote to this growing inequality, Rubin and the Brookings Institution propose the Hamilton Project?! As if Hamilton was somehow a symbol for having successfully countered political backlash in the 1790s? (Well, Hamilton did indeed support the first use of federal military force against US citizens under the Federal Constitution to suppress the Whisky Rebellion--so perhaps he is a good symbol for countering political backlash--the question is: Is this the kind of symbol and policy the Democratic Party wants for its standard?!).

As it was in Hamilton's time, so perhaps in ours--When capitalism is under threat, democracy must yield, and thus is revealed the fundamental weakness of the Hamiltonian/Rubin vision of what appears to be an increasingly oxymoronic phrase under the coercive forces of capitalist globalization: "democratic capitalism." (Fortunately, French citizens have been showing us over the past week that democratic citizens of a self-respecting democracy do not need to concede all their freedoms and liberties to the coercive force of capitalist policy transformation imposed from above)

Is a new globalizing Hamiltonianism really the shape of the "new" economic policy vision we want for the Democratic Party? Those who have been paying attention to the news will have noticed that globalizing capitalism has been the policy of both our political parties for quite some time now. The adoption of Hamilton as a new Democratic standard-bearer against the irrationally extreme economic policy of the Republican party, which threatens to destabilize the progress of globalizing capitalism, may be the clearest sign yet of the fundamental policy vision that informs the elite handlers of the Democratic Party.

If the citizens of the United States want a different kind of Democratic policy to govern them in the future--something other than this new old Hamiltonianism--it is time we get about the work of Building a New Democratic Party and Policy from the ground up--guided by a grassroots democratic vision that can successfully live up to Barack Obama's challenge: Democratic policy should truly transcend, rather than reproduce, "tired ideologies." And, as even Robert Rubin recognizes, a Democratic Party policy worth its name should be "diametrically opposed to the current policy regime." Creating a workable alternative regime will require us to move beyond dear old Alexander Hamilton....