“While I am a Jeffersonian in my genuine faith in democracy and popular government,” President Theodore Roosevelt once said, “I am a Hamiltonian in my governmental views, especially with reference to the need of the exercise of broad powers by the National Government.”

By invoking both the author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, Roosevelt was giving voice to two contrasting yet often harmonized strains in the American tradition: on one hand, the independent, individual, government-skeptical streak of the Democratic-Republicans embodied by Thomas Jefferson ; and, on the other, the centralizing, national, energetic government favored by the Federalists, whose avatar was Alexander Hamilton .

As Jeffrey Rosen, the president and CE

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