The Wannabe Hamilton
3rd August 2011
Read it.
On June 13, the resident conservative (which means additional leftist) on The New York Times’ editorial page, David Brooks, revealed his plan for “national greatness,” which Brooks designates as the “Hamiltonian agenda.”
For those who may have forgotten, “national greatness” was a theme that Brooks’s pals Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan discussed at length in The Weekly Standard and Foreign Affairs in the 1990s. Back then this term meant a neo-Wilsonian foreign policy characterized by the militaristic promotion of our updated version of “democracy” and “human rights.” Although twenty years ago “national greatness” was not explicitly about glorifying our federal welfare state, it was implicitly about feeding a big government that could mobilize a contented population for war.