James Madison: Constitutional Statesman and Practical Politician with Jay Cost | BRI Scholar Talks

0:00 obviously he advocated the bill of rights and he digested all of the suggested amendments um and and really just you know it’s interesting too to look at the annals from the first congress they didn’t want to enact that thing they it was stocked with federalists who didn’t want a hamstring government madison just kind of browbeat them into adopting it

0:21 um but i even that i i think his greatest achievement is and i mentioned this earlier um is the notion of well-organized politics being the key to maintaining a just and fair and decent government [Music]

0:44 hi this is tony williams senior fellow at bri and we are pleased to bring you another episode of scholar talks for this episode we are honored to have on scholar jay cost who is going to discuss his book james madison america’s first politician as part of the american founder series now the guiding question for this series

1:06 is what core contribution did this founder make to liberty and constitutional self-governance now j cost is the gerald r ford non-resident senior fellow at the american enterprise institute aei where he focuses on elections politics and public opinion he’s also a column

1:27 columnist for a national review and the pittsburgh post gazette his articles in the popular press have appeared in national affairs national review the wall street journal and many others he’s also the co-host of the ricochet podcast constitutionally speaking which you should definitely check out and james madison is his fourth book and

1:49 we actually appear together at the national constitution center which i’m sure is available uh at the ncc website on a panel discussing alexander hamilton a few years back if you remember and you were discussing your book uh the price of greatness on on madison and hamilton another remarkable book so jay i want to thank you for joining us thanks for having me

2:10 tony it’s great to be here great to see you again yeah great thank you thank you uh so you know i really love this book and and you know you’ve taken james madison a complicated figure certainly a great thinker as well as a statesman a very long career in public affairs and and you know you’ve made them very digestible very readable um but but

2:32 really some reason judgments as well you know i look for kind of those those key interpretation moments and you know i just think you and basic books have just done a remarkable job putting together just a just a great book on madison i mean i i have a shelf full of books on madison uh behind me and it just it ranks up there with some of the some of the best of

2:53 them so great job thank you and you know you’re i really like your take on madison too right um you know we know that that madison was was a great thinker about constitutional issues republican self-government human nature right but but he wasn’t a theorist right he wasn’t a professor in a classroom he

3:14 was also a practical politician and statesman as well yeah that’s right and i wanted to connect his thinking to his political practice and i guess that was a problem that i had um with the existing madison corpus is that there there seem to be two sets there seem to be

3:36 the intellectual political theory interpretations that focus really on a pretty narrow slice of his life 1787 86 through 89 right so the lead up to the constitutional convention and the defense of the constitution and the ratification debates that’s all very good um but it’s again

3:56 in very narrow slice of his life and then there’s the more biographical works that focus on his entire career um and what i had aspired to do in this book was to try to bridge that gap and try to argue that madison’s thinking about politics is broader than what we

4:17 get in 1786 to 89. and that also the way he thought about politics is very similar to the way he practiced politics that that he was in a lot of respects a new political man um an archetype almost i would say i mean the founders at that time they all were in many respects because

4:38 this is the first moment in you know a millennium or more than a millennia really that we have uh democratic republican politics in any kind of meaningful way um and so they’re all breaking new ground and i and i thought it would be interesting to write a book to try and show

4:58 how the way he practiced politics can inform his political thinking and also how his political thinking um can inform how he practice politics okay yeah makes make sense and you know you describe uh the constitution ratification moment to borrow a phrase from churchill as as

5:19 madison’s finest hour uh and that he was to to quote a saying about washington that he was the indispensable man uh of of american politics uh in creating a new vision of republicanism and constitutionalism during that key madisonian moment you just mentioned

5:39 yeah so the argument that i make in the book is the founders were struggling to they were struggling with questions about justice in the public sphere that plagued the ancient greeks going all the way back how does one secure the public interest through the public

6:00 authority how how do you keep the public authority from being perverted by the rulers and used towards their own ends and their madison felt going into the constitutional convention i mean he wrote a letter to george washington in the spring of 1787 nobody’s come up with an answer to this question

6:20 the problem we have with democracy he told washington was that democracy tends to devolve into mob rule or another way of saying that you know the people the majority have all the power then they’re gonna you know 51 of the people will use the public authority to rob 49

6:41 you know the alternative solution was a sovereign a monarch somebody who’s prestige and glory and honor were so great that he would literally sit above all the factions and all the petty rivalries with only the interest of the country in his heart but madison again says to washington you know we know from

7:02 experience that that doesn’t work either um so madison is confronting this question and again like i said this is a question that i mean polybius was asking this question about ancient rome what was the solution the romans had figured out politics wanted and madison’s solution i think is really interesting and really bracing and i think that it has ended up becoming the

7:22 defining solution which is politics itself a well-organized political system is the way in which you can reconcile competing factions and i think that that is the centerpiece of his political thinking and in especially the idea of politics

7:44 being the way by which diverse interests find consensus i think that that’s embodied in his virginia plan and i also think that even though he was immensely frustrated by the compromises of the constitutional convention i do think the constitution as a whole embodies this notion of madisonian consensus so that’s really

8:05 what i think what i was going for in the book john no i think you nailed it and and you know so madison shifts from this constitutional uh moment over to the 1790s right we’re in the new nation and he becomes very concerned rather quickly about alexander hamilton’s

8:25 centralizing policies particularly his financial policies in the 1790s and he and madison serving you know as part of the jeffersonian political opposition right we sort of this idea of a legitimate opposition uh so and and you argue that this is a reaffirmation so unlike some other scholars you argue this is a reaffirmation of madison madison’s

8:48 republican principles rather than let’s say a break with the past yes um i and i think that where i differ from a lot of other uh writers about madison and those who have argued that this is a problem for him it’s an inconsistency is that it’s it’s important not to get

9:08 uh too hung up on the debate over the size and scope of political power of governing power i think that meaningfully for madison um his objections to hamilton’s system were rooted in in a sense that that he was trying to stretch things beyond what

9:29 the convention had suggested and and i also think as well um that that because the virginia ratifying convention was very closely fought and a lot of promises were made to skeptics people in the middle um that this was not going to be some immense power grab because that’s what

9:50 patrick henry and george mason were arguing in virginia in june and and madison was very careful in making the point that this is not going to be some power grab i also think that’s why he pushed so hard for the bill of rights too i think he felt obligated by his experience in the ratifying convention um but put that aside

10:11 i think the bigger issue for madison in his opposition to hamilton gets down to this divergence about who governs right so in madison’s conception of republican politics um you know i talked about this a moment ago broad diverse factions emerge and arrive and they compromise and they reach consensus

10:32 hamilton’s vision of who governs is more elitist um i think hamilton was more struck and inspired by the walpole’s vision of governance where the executive uses patronage to uh secure votes in congress for what is

10:52 essentially the public good and you know that’s hamilton will honestly believe that and at the time that was a perfectly legitimate understanding of how republican politics should function but i think for madison it was too elitist in the sense that it was going to uh he felt and i think he was right to feel this way that it was

11:12 going to ensconce empower uh what madison what they would have called a moneyed class um because hamilton was using um the instrument of the public debt as a way to you know secure the national interest but that was very very beneficial for the holders of the debt who were also going to

11:34 be able to become owners of the bank of the united states and all of this added up to madison’s feeling that hamilton’s economic program uh was too elitist even if going into the convention he would have said okay it’s fine for the national government to exercise these types of powers coming out he would have said well no we agreed we wouldn’t but i think the bigger issue

11:55 was not so much the scope of the government’s power but who is wielding it and on whose behalf very good uh and and a great segue uh speaking about hamilton because later on after some of the failures of the war of 1812 as as you write about uh you know madison does seem to embrace some hamiltonian economic policies

12:17 although admittedly you talk about how you know you made them his own and sort of more republican character uh to them uh this is at the end of his second term uh and so again the question is you know is he being inconsistent adopting these hamiltonian policies that he had argued against 20 years ago or you know do politicians or statesmen

12:40 do they adjust to changing circumstances you know do they just act in the public good uh you know and 20 years later we just have changing you know changing world and changing america well i think that um madison was incorrect in the set i think that his

13:02 analysis of the power relations in hamilton’s economic system were very on point but i think that he misunderstood the utility of of hamilton’s system and i think that he and jefferson were both um locked into an understanding of republicanism that

13:23 i i mean i think was basically the agrarianism of the ancient romans to be honest and it was just not something that was going to be relevant moving into the 18th century where was britain is already in the midst of the commercial revolution america aspires to be this was an outdated economic world it was already an outdated economic

13:45 worldview now hamilton what makes hamilton so unique i think and so worthy of honor is that he saw this before anybody else so saying that madison didn’t see this is really just a way of praising hamilton in the 1790s madison does see it in in the uh after

14:05 the war of 1812 because the the financial condition of the country is an absolute uh disaster in the war of 1812. um the bank they kill the bank of the united states in 1811 and you get all these state banks that are just running amok because there’s no central financial institution that’s able to kill them and the next thing you know they stop having to suspend

14:27 uh gold payment in gold and and it’s just a disaster so economically there was really no alternative to renewing rechartering the bank of the united states but i think though uh our two points for you is that the way it was designed the second bank was designed uh was designed in a way where the

14:49 benefits of the bank were spread more evenly across the country even by that time the american economy had evolved into a way that a central bank like that would be more beneficial to poor farmers in the south and west because new england and the mid-atlantic already had state banking systems and also they they changed the

15:10 organization of the bank in ways to give it tighter control uh from from the government so i think in in those ways if you look at the bank of the united states in as it was recharted in 1815 it’s much more much more egality character so it’s much more consistent with madison’s politics but this is i think this is one of madison’s

15:32 great faults here and and i think that he tried to adopt the bank of the united states without coming out and saying okay we need a constitutional amendment um the issue is is that in the 1790s madison threw pretty much every argument that he could against the bank and one

15:53 of the arguments that stuck the hardest was the constitutional argument that this is not um legitimized by the necessary and proper clause right um and and by 1815 madison doesn’t even want it he’s not even willing to admit okay that was wrong it is he’s what instead he says well i thought that but we have 20

16:15 years of precedent saying it’s fine so it’s fine and i and i don’t think that’s a legitimate constitutional hermeneutic um and i don’t think that madison was willing to um apply it evenly across the board because his last major act as president was to veto what was called the bonus bill which would have created a fund for

16:37 internal improvements madison said well we don’t have precedence press a sufficient precedent for internal improvements of course he did have precedent for internal improvements when jefferson um in congress admitted ohio into the union they created exactly that kind of a fund land sales would go to subsidize the cumberland road and madison himself as

16:57 president expanded the cumberland road project and then in retirement of course he gets letters from republican congressmen saying if the bank’s legitimate why isn’t this legitimate so i don’t think madison uh had a consistent understanding of what the constitution allows and what the constitution doesn’t allow and i

17:18 think that that was a great i think that that was his one great intellectual failure i don’t see it as inconsistency uh in the 1790s but i i do think that in 1815 you should have said i’m sorry we need an amendment right right okay uh this is a big question we can talk about it all day but but our last

17:39 question is you know we have this lifetime of public service i think you mentioned 41 plus years uh just great service for the to the republic um you know what is uh to answer the main question for the series what is madison’s main contributions to liberty and self-governance constitutionalism

17:59 yeah i think i mean there’s so many things you could say i mean obviously he advocated the bill of rights and he digested all of the suggested amendments um and and really just you know it’s interesting too to look at the animals from the first congress they didn’t want to enact that thing they it was stocked with federalists who didn’t want a hamstring government

18:20 madison just kind of browbeat them into adopting it um but i even that i think his greatest achievement is and i mentioned this earlier is the notion of well-organized politics being the key to maintaining a just and fair and decent government

18:42 and and a vision of politics that i think um he articulated is politics being the way by which we find uh mutually satisfactory compromises and i think that that vision of politics is so strikingly at odds with how we view politics today where we see politics as a as almost

19:04 kind of a as a war where the goal of one side is to crush and destroy the other side which is ridiculous in and of itself because nobody’s going anywhere but also that’s not what he thought politics should be and i think you know one of the things that i think jefferson and madison don’t get credit for is the era of good feelings i mean it’s

19:26 usually like well you know it only lasted a couple years and the next thing but think about this that when madison retired from public life the minority party the federalist party had basically been absorbed uh his successor was effectively unanimously chosen as president when he was re-elected in 1820 there was widespread

19:47 political harmony in many many respects you can chalk that up to the victory of the war of 1812 but you know madison and jefferson were very intent on reconciling former federalist opponents to their cause and i think it’s really striking that when madison died probably the most memorable uh encomium for him was written and

20:10 delivered by john quincy adams who was the son and himself had been a federalist in his youth and i think that speaks a lot to how seriously he took the project of politics as an attempt not at war but at reconciliation and mutually satisfactory compromises and i think that that is his most important contribution

20:33 that’s a wonderful optimistic note to end on i wish we could emulate it today right but uh but j cost uh author of james madison america’s first politician i want to thank you very much for joining us thank you tony thanks for having me and thank you all for joining us on this episode of scholar talks please check

20:54 out our other interviews in this series on the american founders also check out our interviews on the american founding including rob mcdonald on thomas jefferson david stewart on george washington lindsey schravinski on washington’s cabinet and bradley thompson on the declaration of independence and check out bri’s curricula on the american founding which

21:15 are several but they include life liberty in the pursuit of happiness and also the updated being an american thank you