Dick Armey Has No Idea What Alexander Hamilton Was About

Don’t know anything? Make shit up!

Former House Majority Leader and tea party financial backer Dick Armey spoke to the National Press Club on Monday, and made the following claim, cited here by Dana Milbank in his latest Washington Post column:

“The small-government conservative movement, which includes people who call themselves the tea party patriots and so forth, is about the principles of liberty as embodied in the Constitution, the understanding of which is fleshed out if you read things like the Federalist Papers,” Armey explained. The problem with Democrats and other “people here who do not cherish America the way we do,” he explained, is “they did not read the Federalist Papers.”

A member of the audience passed a question to the moderator, who read it to Armey: How can the Federalist Papers be an inspiration for the tea party, when their principal author, Alexander Hamilton, “was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government”?

Historian Armey was flummoxed by this new information. “Widely regarded by whom?” he challenged, suspiciously. “Today's modern ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton.”

As one of those “ill-informed political science professors,” I can say unequivocally that Armey is wrong. As Milbank points out in his column, Hamilton once advanced the idea of a president serving for life, senators serving for life, state governors appointed by the president, and a national bank. What Milbank and every other commentator on this story has missed, is that in his unadopted proposal for a new Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention, Hamilton also proposed giving the national government veto power over the actions of the states. If Hamilton were alive today, Dick Armey would be railing against him as an apologist for monarchy or tyranny. But most people don’t notice this discrepancy because 206 years have passed since Hamilton took an Aaron Burr gunshot to the abdomen. Plenty of time for a mythical status to be achieved—one that can be used to inspire any cause, no matter how at odds the philosophy of that cause and the ideas of Hamilton might be.

Dick Armey isn’t some shitkicking teabagger from rural Arkansas who happened to get quoted by the media. He’s a leader of the tea party movement. And he doesn’t know shit about the founding of America.

- Max