Alexander Hamilton, Excellence, And The Role Of The Elite

Alexander Hamilton argued with Thomas Jefferson about the nature of the American democracy.  Jefferson was more generous in his appraisal of the new citizens of the Republic and wanted to ensure full representation and active engagement of all.  Hamilton was less sanguine about the ability of the masses to decide the future of the country.

It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.

The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?

         

 The debate resulted in compromise – lower and upper houses – but Hamilton was never convinced that the House of Representatives, made up of uneducated, unsophisticated people, would never have the intellectual experience, breadth of vision, and rational skills to be able to rule beyond their own parochial interests.

Jefferson was far more idealistic and felt that the will of the majority was greater than any individual will, and that regardless of the insufficiencies of any one member of Congress, collective decisions would always be right.



Many consider this era the most fractious and divisive of any in American history; but of course only a cursory look at the past shows – as Hamilton saw – that any congregation of ‘ordinary’ citizens would always be riven by dispute and characterized by venal and self-serving decisions.  In other words we are no worse off than we ever were.

Hamilton would have been appalled at the degree to which democracy has fallen into the hands of the masses.  Not only has the political process fallen into the hands of an unenlightened and gullible electorate, but the very institutions that serve to create an upper class are being criticized.  The elite universities of the Ivy League, for example, are being challenged for their exclusivity and are being pressured to become more ‘diverse’ and ‘inclusive’.  Until now they have held the line, arguing that they always have and always will admit only the most intelligent, talented, and gifted students.  Race, gender, and ethnicity must take a back seat to rationality, intellectual discipline, mental rigor, enterprise, and creativity.



Under the administration of educators who subscribe to this doctrine of ‘inclusivity’, public schools have favored the least talented children.  It is the schools’ duty, they say, to raise the level of performance and attainment of those without advantage; not to promote the interest of those already benefitting from good genes, parental guidance, and wealth.

As a result, those children with talent and ambition are deterred and marginalized.  Bored by the lowest-common-denominator instruction, and forced to participate in ‘cooperative learning’ rather than accelerate at their own individual pace, these students either transfer to private schools or if their parents to not have the means, continue to languish in public schools.

Politicians are no longer chosen for their intellect and sophistication; but for their down-home simplicity.  Even those with a premier education like George W. Bush (Yale, Harvard) hide their credentials to be as honestly rough-hewn and unpretentious as their constituents in Middle America. Public speeches are simple and direct with no more oratory or literary quality than Fun with Dick and Jane.



There is increasing hostility towards ‘The One Percent’, those individuals who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth.  There is something inherently wrong in both the size of their personal fortunes and the disparity between their personal worth and those in lower percentiles. 

There is a Puritanical vengeance in this criticism.  Liberal critics like Paul Stiglitz and Paul Krugman still portray the wealthy as men who have made their fortunes on the backs of the poor, modern-day Robber Barons who have raped, pillaged, and destroyed the homeland of good, honest Americans in their rise to the top. These critics are Biblical in their fiery hostility.  The wealthy are innately greedy, venal, and insensitive to the needs of those less fortunate. 

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.  The days of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie are over.  For better or worse government has assumed the role of democratic overseer; and over the last century has broken up trusts, imposed restrictive laws and taxes, and done everything in its power to rein in what it considers the excesses of the wealthy. They point to the capture and punishment of Bernie Madoff, the Enron executives, Goldman Sachs, and the Seven Dwarves of Big Tobacco as prizes in their war against privileged excess.



Most of the ‘One Percent’ have earned their money.  Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Steve Jobs are far from the capitalist predators of the early Twentieth Century. They are innovators – talented, ambitious men who have understood the nature of the American entrepreneurial economy.

The most virulent hostility is reserved for Wall Street, for ordinary Americans feel that the buying and selling of money is somehow immoral.  Investment bankers are not producing or growing anything but simply rearranging the capitalist furniture.  They buy Wexler Industries, gut it, fire the employees, and restructure it as subsidiary of General Foods which, after Wexler has outlived its usefulness, will let it languish, deduct its depreciation, and watch it die.  Wall Street traders buy and sell currency, stocks, and futures.  They speculate with other people’s money.  They operate in an amoral and spiritually arid world.



This populist criticism is nothing but romantic idealism. The activities of investment bankers and Wall Street traders are what finance the American economy.  Pensions and retirement accounts are in their hands.  Loans to finance start-ups or to expand growing enterprises come from them.  Houses and cars are bought thanks to them.  Nearly every economic transaction in America has either started with or been supported by Wall Street money.

The vitriol does not stop with the professional activities of the One Percent, but their personal lifestyles.  Middle America smirks at their multi-million dollar mansions, yachts, Ferraris, summers in Rimini and winters on the slopes of Gstaad.  There is an immorality in the spending of money as well as the acquisition of it.



The country – and the world – needs more talented, ambitious, and supremely intelligent men like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.

“Amidst the oceans of enforced mediocrity in the bland, deflavorized culture of managed-by-committee corporate behemoths,” the entrepreneur Perry Metzger posted on his Google+ page, Mr. Jobs “showed that the real path to excellence was excellence — that you could do great things by, who would have imagined, being smart and having excellent taste and not ever settling for second best.” (David Streitfeld, NYT 6.12.11)

As much as Bill Gates has turned his attention to the needs of the poor, he never flinched from his pursuit of capitalist greatness. He understood that he – because of his brains, upbringing, education, and natural talent – had revolutionized the American economy; and he knew that to preserve his vision and protect his legacy he would have to be ruthlessly competitive.  The growth of his fortune was commensurate with the growth of a unique capitalist enterprise.

The comment about Jobs is telling.  America must indeed be characterized as a nation adrift in an ocean of enforced mediocrity. Excellence has been devalued. The dumbing down of America seems to have no limits. Primary school children are given trophies for failure.  High schools students are moved along as long as they are not disruptive or anti-social.  Colleges and universities take any graduate with cash, loans, or federal grants.  Everyone has the right to a college education, progressives say.  It is a validation of America’s democratic, egalitarian principles; a display of American exceptionalism.  As a result young people who never should have set foot in a quadrangle are in hock for years, chattel to an exploitive system and to an irrational, idealistic dream.

Graduates of Yale and Harvard are not privileged because of entitlement, but because of native intelligence, engaged parents, and a superior secondary school education.  Thanks to large endowments, any student who has the qualifications is admitted regardless of ability to pay.  These schools are not elite, artificially privileged institutions, but meritocracies.



Those men and women who are the CEOs of major corporations, executives in smaller enterprises, administrators of universities, top scientists and engineers, biographers and historians belong at the top; and many more would be there if the culture of excellence replaced the culture of inclusivity.

A culture of excellence is the proper environment for everyone, not just the highly talented. Instead of being praised for everything, children should be praised only if they perform well in those disciplines which are required for social and economic success – mental acuity and discipline, reason and logic, interpretation and analysis.  Schools should provide an unequivocal moral basis for right action and should rigorously discipline those students who persist in dysfunctional, anti-social behavior.  The pursuit of intellectual, academic, moral, and social excellence should be the goal; and the goal of America should be to increase the ranks of the privileged

Immigration Is The American Way–Let ‘em In!

In the 50s everyone was defined by ‘nationality, and everyone knew where everyone else was from. Bruce was Jewish, and his parents were camp survivors who had been liberated from Buchenwald.  Herbie’s parents were Swedes who had originally migrated to Minnesota but who made their way east after a particularly brutal and early winter had destroyed their small corn crop, killed their pigs, and wiped out their chickens.  My family had come to America from Southern Italy in the late 1800s, joined their Sorrento relatives in New Haven, and never moved more than thirty miles away. There was only a smattering of Puerto Ricans in town, and blacks were late-comers, arriving only slowly in the early Sixties.

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New Brighton may not have been the bubbling melting pot of garlic, gefilte fish, and stuffed cabbage as it was in the Lower East Side, but Italian houses like ours still had a parlor, Italianate sconces, antimacassars, and ornate marble tables.  Nevertheless we lived next to a Norwegian family and across from a Slavic one, and my sister and I went to a public school that was as ethnically mixed as any in the city.

The only uniform group were the Poles who lived on Broad Street and had their own cathedral, stores, restaurants, and beauty parlors; and who only left Little Warsaw to work in the factories in the other part of town.  Actually ‘Little Warsaw’ was a misnomer, since most of the over two million Polish immigrants who came to the United States in the peak period 1879-1914 came from Polish regions of Russia, Austria, and Germany. New Polish immigrants continued to refresh the older stock, and assimilation was slower and more difficult. 

Although all families were aware of ‘nationality’, most first generation parents did their best to expunge the last bits of ethnicity, dressed their children in Brooks Bros. and J.Press, set them away to school, and fought as hard as any parent today to get them into Harvard and Yale.  The Ivy League meant even more then, for it did not only provide a premier education and grease the rails to Wall Street, it was the credential of full and complete Americanization.  Ethnic students were few and far between at Yale in the late 50s; and a Yale sticker on the back window meant far more than one from UConn, Bridgeport, or Quinnipiac.  Second generation Italians and Poles weren’t completely accepted into the ranks of the Old Guard, but they had taken a big step forward.

Coming from this background it is very hard to understand the growing hostility to immigration. Mexicans, Central Americans, and Africans want to come here just like the Poles, Italians, and Norwegians of a century ago.  The problem is not with immigration per se, but with the number of people who want to come – everyone does.  A recent compilation of Google searches from Iran showed that the most hits of all related to emigration to the US.  If the US were to open its borders, there would be no stopping the flood of immigrants.   Although intellectuals in Mexico City or San Salvador might oppose our wars and condemn our persistent racism, income inequality, and increasingly militant Christianity; many of their citizens still want to head to El Norte.

The conditions in Chad, Niger, and Equatorial Guinea are miserable.  Entire villages are economically marginalized, politically impotent, and exploited by venal and corrupt politicians. Life is still medieval and without hope.  Where do these villagers want to go? America. The luster of the shining city on a hill may be tarnished in the eyes of the French intelligentsia, and American exceptionalism ridiculed; but not in the eyes of millions who would give their eye teeth to come here.

Therein lies the dilemma.  We cannot possibly let in all comers, but there is also no reason for strident, vitriolic, and xenophobic expressions of hatred.

At a dinner in Los Angeles a number of years ago, I heard hateful, derisive, and incontinent attacks on Mexican illegal immigrants. These immigrants were not taking the jobs of the host or his guests, nor threatening to undermine the municipal tax base with their social demands; but providing needed labor – gardeners, construction workers, maids, and fruit-pickers.  The agricultural economy of California would collapse, in fact, if all migrant workers packed up and went home. Hundreds of thousands of service jobs would go unfilled. Perhaps most importantly immigrants work at jobs that Americans don’t want.  They complement our labor, not take it away.

Study after study has shown that at worst the immigration balance sheet is neutral – i.e. immigrants cost as much as they contribute – but at best they are net producers to the American economy.  Illegal immigrants buy things, spend money, generate money, and contribute significantly to local economies.  If it weren’t for Salvadoran nannies, thousands of native-born American women would not be able to rejoin the workforce. If it weren’t for migrant farm workers the price of lettuce would be sky-high.  Moreover their remittances back home provide necessary capital for domestic improvements, provide economic breathing room for poor families waiting patiently for national economic development.

Many critics contend that these are simplistic arguments which ignore economic reality.  If we were to keep all illegal immigrants out, the wages paid to American workers would go up significantly; the price of fruits and vegetables would rise to their real market value; and pressures to the environment would be reduced.

Perhaps, but immigrants are no fools. They work the shit jobs because their wages are worth ten times what they could make in their own countries if they can find employment. They know that in one generation, two at the most, their children and grandchildren will be better off.  In the Washington, DC area, there are more Latino service businesses.  Hispanics, like the Italians in the 40s and 50s who moved from working construction to owning construction, are running landscaping businesses, not just blowing leaves. 

No one is exploiting an illegal immigrant who comes to the United States of his own volition, who willingly accepts wages which he knows are low for Texas but high for San Pedro de Las Cumbres, and who understands that he has no political rights but is treated far better than in his own country.

America needs low-wage immigrant workers just as we always have.  Not only do immigrants contribute to the economy here, they contribute to the one back home, thus doing their part to slow emigration to El Norte.  Immigrants now and in the past refresh the population pool, provide the same entrepreneurial energy that European immigrants did years ago.  There is no difference between the poor, rural Mexican emigrating to the United States and laboring at jobs Americans don’t want and the Pole from Silesia who worked the factory floor in New Brighton, Connecticut.

Immigration is to a large degree self-regulating and subject to market forces. Between 2007-12, the five worst years of the Recession, there was a net out-migration of Mexicans from the US to Mexico.  There were more jobs there than here.  Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans do not come here to get fat on welfare.  They are here to work, and if jobs move south they will follow them.

NAFTA was an important agreement, for it moved significantly towards a regional economic goal of the free movement of goods and services.  While the focus has been on goods, in time it will expand to labor. In the meantime open trade borders plus individual remittances to Mexico have helped both countries.  The US has been, although somewhat reluctantly, in favor of regional trade agreements.  We have fought against protectionism and moved gradually towards mutually beneficial cooperative trade.

In short there is no evidence that illegal immigration is the scourge it is made out to be by the ultra-conservative Right, a xenophobic movement which irrationally fears an erosion if not destruction of ‘The American Way of Life’. Irrational because studies have shown that: a) most Hispanic immigrant families speak English after one generation; b) they are Christian ;and perhaps most importantly, c) they subscribe to the fundamental principle of America – making money.  Our culture is not rooted in a far-distant past of 1000 years ago. It is much easier to understand French resistance to Muslim immigration, for they consider themselves the saviors of Christian Europe who fought off the Muslim hordes at Roncesvalles, kept the Saracens in check in Palestine, and originated the fundamental democratic concept of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. We have no Palais de Versailles, no Rouen, Notre Dame, or Descartes.  We have nothing to preserve if you think about it.

Immigration reform is necessary and important not to figure ways to keep people out, but how to let them in. One recent iteration of the proposed Immigration Act was so punitive and aggressively hostile to those illegals already living here, that it had no chance of passing.  Politicians have been incapable of resisting the xenophobia of the rabid Right and looking objectively and carefully at the balance sheet.  To make a reasoned and intelligent decision, policy-makers must look at supply and demand, balance sheets (economic contributions and liabilities), environmental impact, social and cultural contributions, the value of remittances and regional trade, minimum wage, civil rights, and a whole host of other socio-economic and cultural variables.

Americans are fortunate that they are not facing the divisive, corrosive, and ultimately damaging issue of Muslim immigration to Europe.  Radicalized Muslims from Africa and the Middle East are indeed threatening the liberal democratic ethos of Europe, for they want separatism, not inclusion; and France in particular, because of its deeply-held principle of “We are all French” are having a rough time of responding to legitimate cultural concerns while safeguarding a historical tradition.

The issue of immigration in America, therefore, should not be as contentious as it is in Europe.  Hispanic immigrants are Christian; they subscribe to the bedrock American values of work and family; follow in a long and familiar history of profitable and productive immigration; and are contributing more than they are taking. 

What could be bad?  If we – politicians and citizens – first agree that immigration is good and always has been, we can more rationally and dispassionately address and resolve the complex issues of numbers.

Progressive Angst–So Much To Worry About, So Little Time To Be Happy

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Not only is the Earth heating catastrophically, black churches burning, economic equality increasing, home-grown terrorism a real threat, campus rape at epidemic proportions; but all these destructive trends are linked. Capitalism is at the heart of America’s evils. Our market-driven, free-enterprise system has always been a predatory, savage system of injustice. Industry has always exploited labor, squeezing the last bit of dignity and honor from the working man. 

Corporate money rules Washington and statehouses, and right-to-work laws, spreading to over half the country, are emasculating the labor movement. The inner cities have been forgotten and dismissed by investors who cannot look beyond profit and see the pain and suffering of poor, marginalized communities.  Greedy land developers, venture capitalists, and multinational corporations have ignored the planet, seeking only short-term profits regardless of the environmental impact of their investments.


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Not only are all of America’s ills thrown into one catch-all basket; but each of them are are functionally related, thus creating a nexus of evil within an already corrupt economic system. Race and gender, for example, are inseparable.  The same conservative sense of white male entitlement which is at the root of racism is at the heart of gender discrimination.  Men’s universal cabal excludes people of color, women, and gays.  If you are against racism, you must be against sexism, for they spring from the same source.

Environmental degradation is related to the exploitation of migrant labor.  Poor Mexicans work long hours in the fields of agribusiness, slaves to abusive overlords and unwillingly but necessarily perpetuating the ignorant overuse of natural resources, pesticides, and fertilizer.

A recent article in a progressive journal suggested that now race and environmental pollution are related.  A disproportionate number of people of color live near coal-fired power plants, the article notes.  Thus not only do the owners of these installations willingly dump billions of tons of mercury, sulfur, and other pollutants into the atmosphere, they are racist in doing so. Not only are they affecting the lives and health of millions of Americans living downwind, they are blanketing poor, black communities with their poisons.

If, then, one looks at America through a progressive lens, the network of evil and the constellation of malicious forces is universal.  There is no institution, no family, no community that is not somehow linked into this web of ignorance and injustice.



The theory of Gaia is popular among many environmentalists.  It states that all living things on the planet are interrelated.  The Earth is one, singular, living-and-breathing organism. There is no such thing as a singular event.  The breaking of a twig, the clearing of land, and coal-fired smoke are universally injurious.


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The James Cameron movie, Avatar was Hollywood’s paean to such environmental and spiritual universalism. The Navi people, unlike the Americans who had colonized Pandora only to extract valuable natural resources, were sensitive to the environment and to the spiritual energy that runs through it.  The Tree of Souls was the cultural and spiritual center of their culture. The toppling of the Tree by the Americans was not only an act of punitive aggression, but a naked attempt to destroy the very heart and soul of the Navi.


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No movie captures progressive angst so well as Avatar. Its elements of capitalist greed, destructive ambition, ethnic and racial hatred, and short-sighted and short-term purpose coincide perfectly with progressive worldview.

The River Road Baptist Church is a small congregation in Robertsville, Mississippi. Worshippers are all devout Christians who have faith in Jesus Christ and who believe that the Bible is the Word of God.  The congregants are united by faith, uplifted in spiritual rejoicing, and are guided in their secular lives by religious principles. 

“Of course they are happy”, said an acquaintance of mine who had worked in The Movement for decades.  He went on to mention how fundamentalism was antithetical to reason and objective judgment. Evangelists reject Evolution, he said, and in their literal interpretation of the Bible slavishly accept its injunctions against homosexuality, its praise of the procreative family and the preeminent role of men – all of which must be seen within the historical and social context of the times and not applied now.  In other words, devout Southern Christians are ignorant and wrong.

Robertsville is a poor community.  Most residents work two jobs to make ends meet, make do with old cars and cranky appliances, eat simply and cheaply, have health issues and little or no insurance.  There is no doubt that they would like a more comfortable, secure life.

“Spiritual joy”, said John Weathers, the pastor of River Road Baptist, “is not happiness.  It is something more fundamental, more universal, and more complete. Only the faithful can know it”.
“Ignorance is bliss”, said my old acquaintance. “A bit harsh perhaps, but true; and ignorant bliss is worse than no bliss at all”; and so the lines were drawn. Progressives believe that the world is becoming a better place but only if the committed work at making it so. “Ignorance has no place in social evolution.”

Even his explanation was morose, dark, and joyless. He had been locked for so long in a ‘serious’ world of ethical and moral conundrums that he had lost all humor, let alone happiness. “There’s nothing funny about racism”, he said.

How hard it must be to be a progressive.  How unpleasant and dire it must be to lose sleep over nothing. One does not have to be a committed nihilist to see that the course of history is a repetitive, predictable one. Men have always been predatory, territorial, aggressive, and self-serving.  There is not one iota of evidence to show that the world is evolving towards a more tolerant, compassionate, and respectful place, so why not relax and enjoy the show.

  “What, me worry?”, said Alfred E. Newman the genius.