No Labels, a national bipartisan political advocacy group, is currently busy establishing a ‘Problem-Solvers Caucus’ in the U.S. House of Representatives. The caucus would include dozens of representatives from both parties who can agree to work together to accomplish a pre-determined set of goals -- the “National Strategic Agenda.” The National Strategic Agenda contains some fairly straightforward policy goals, including job creation, budget balancing, entitlement reform, and energy security. ...

In the last article we covered how short-term thinking and the here-and-now instinct in American politics institutionalized by Franklin Roosevelt combined with the utopian rationalism of the Woodrow Wilson presidency to create the part-beneficial and part ignorantly-malevolent monster that was and is the New Deal. In this article, we will cover the further institutionalization of that instinct with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and observe how a plan formulated on the best of intentions can s...

In the last article, we covered how utopian dreaming and rationalistic faith in planning undermined the fundamentally conservative nature of the old Hamiltonian tradition and brought about a deformed and idealistic Progressivism. In this article, we will cover how that idealistic Progressivism led to a government, under Franklin Roosevelt, that placed too much of an emphasis on short-term projects and consumption, in service of perfecting life and remedying the ills of the human condition. This...

In the last article in this series, I covered the strong-government/pro-business tradition of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. In this article, we shall see how the utopianism of later Progressivism subverted the fundamental conservatism of the original Hamiltonian political philosophy. In his column, The Role of Uncle Sam, New York Times writer David Brooks writes of the decline of old Hamiltonianism and the onslaught of Progressivism: "But this Hamiltonian approac...

Listening to political debate, it would seem that in contemporary America, you have the anti-government fiscal conservatives on one side, and the pro-expansionary government progressives on the other. This sort of ideological polarization rightly drives many citizens to the center, and from there they are unable to find a policy approach and ideology that can fit their proclivities. Fortunately, there are indeed several American commentators actively espousing a coherent centrist philosophy; th...

There’s a sizable population of this country that’s been disenfranchised by our current two-party system and its sharp ideological divisions. That population isn’t minorities, it isn’t the poor, and it isn’t the youth, though these groups have been disenfranchised in their own way. No, the population of the United States most cruelly disenfranchised by the sharp progressive/libertarian division between the Republican and Democratic parties are America’s moderates and centrists. Polls every yea...