Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 73

REVIEWS

Starting with World War I, Big Government and Big Business began a close collaboration that continued through the Harding,
Coolidge, and Hoover administrations, and
finally became a permanent paradigm with
the New Deal. For Taylor, Franklin D. Roosevelt represented the final triumph of Hamiltonianism within the Democratic Party,
which now was committed permanently
to "state-supervised monopoly capitalism."
And despite the efforts of small-government
conservatives like Robert Taft and Barry
Goldwater, FDR's success convinced a majority of Republicans to buy into the paradigm.
Led originally by Thomas Dewey and Nelson
Rockefeller, these "me-too" Republicans have
controlled the party down to the present.
But what about Ronald Reagan? Surely he
was an exception to Hamiltonian hegemony?
Not really, according to Taylor. Reagan
spoke like a small-government Goldwater
conservative on his way to the presidency,
and his election was helped by the defection
of "Reagan Democrats," who were really
former supporters of George Wallace, the
segregationist governor of Alabama. (For
Taylor, Wallace was, despite his deplorable
racism, a true states' rights populist in the
style of William Jennings Bryan-perhaps
the last of that breed in the Democratic
Party.) Once in office, however, Reagan
fell into the familiar pattern of increasing
federal spending and running up deficits.
And he bequeathed to the Republican Party
big-government advocates like George H. W.
Bush and George W. Bush.
Are there any Jeffersonians left on the
American political scene, then? For Taylor,
very few prominent politicians qualify.
Among those whom he mentions favorably are Patrick Buchanan, Ron Paul, Jerry
Brown, and Dennis Kucinich. These are
"morality-based," antiwar, social conservatives, as opposed to "economic-based" estab-

lishment conservatives. As for writers and
commentators, Taylor rules out prominent
figures like Rush Limbaugh, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, and indeed the whole
Fox News team as pseudo-conservatives,
because they are said to mock Ron Paul,
Pat Buchanan, and the Christian Right. Bill
Buckley comes in for a special rant because
he used National Review magazine to attack
the John Birch Society. Neoconservatives are
dismissed as being predominantly Jewish
and favoring an aggressive foreign policy for
Israel's sake (363). If a new upsurge in Jeffersonianism were to occur, it would have to
originate outside the major political parties
and the mainstream media.
On the Right, an independent Tea Party
might become an effective force against
Big Government and crony capitalism, but
first it would have to overcome its divisions
between the small-government Old Right
conservatives, the evangelicals of the newer
Christian Right, and the rather hedonistic
libertarians. On the Left, there is the latest emanation of the counterculture: the
Occupy Wall Street anarchists, plus various
dropouts from the consumer society. Though
still marginal, these groups have certain
trends on their side. The Internet and other
social media give voice to opinions that lie
outside the governing establishment and the
mainstream media. Social fragmentation
encourages a de facto decentralism through
the forming of subcultural enclaves. These
are, for Taylor, straws in the wind that hint
of future political change.
It is worth reading Politics on a Human
Scale because, whether you agree with
its thesis or not, it is thought provoking.
However, I would recommend reading it
in tandem with Jackson Lears's No Place of
Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. Lears
reminds us that the rapid industrialization
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Modern Age - Summer 2014

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