In a post some years back, I posed a question about how Jeffersonian principles should be applied in a Hamiltonian world. The question was appropriate, because Jefferson’s vision of America, while accurate and eminently successful in the short run, clearly failed in the longer term. We do not today live in a country of small, independent, yeoman farmers.
For Madison, on the other hand, there was a place for everything in America, as long as the overall picture was balanced. He didn’t have the issues with cities, manufacturers, and merchants that Jefferson did; he simply didn’t want them to run the country unchecked. He also believed that reasonable people could disagree without being personally disagreeable, and that politics was an essentially rational business.
Barack Obama was a Madisonian through and through. Donald Trump, alas, in his own perverted way, is a Hamiltonian. The two represent the national superego and id, respectively. They will probably do battle in perpetuity.
The nation is a better place when Madison’s heirs are in charge, but that only happens intermittently.