Hamilton and Jefferson: America's First Political Party Wars | Federalists and Republicans

Описание: America’s Founders hated political parties. In fact, they intentionally designed their new republic to ensure that political parties would never arise. Yet when those same Founders turned to actually administering their new republic, they quickly created two new parties—the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans—and fell into the same pattern of two-party politics that has defined all of American history.

In this episode, we discuss how philosophical disagreements between George Washington’s Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, led to the creation of these two new political parties. These Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians were all believers in the new Constitution and the idea of republican democracy. Yet they had very different beliefs about what their new republic would require to actually work in practice. This big ideological fight over what a republic needed to succeed divided the early republic, splintering the nation into its first two political parties.

The rise of this First Party System provided a perfect experiment about how American political parties, and party systems, inevitably work. America’s Founding generation, living in a world of kings, had limited experience with political parties or republics to draw upon. They had no idea how their new republic, created from raw ideas, would actually function in practice. They loathed the idea of political parties at all. Understanding how and why they nevertheless fell into our familiar patterns of two-party politics therefore provides important lessons we can apply to our own era about how American political parties and party systems inevitably work.

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