Politics & Power Quote by George Will

Hamilton doesn t get a marble angel; he gets the wiring. George Will s line works because it flatters the reader with a bracing, almost accusatory insight: stop hunting for monuments in bronze and start noticing the infrastructure of power you take for granted. The punch is in the reversal. Americans perform reverence for Jeffersonian ideals - agrarian virtue, localism, suspicion of centralized authority - while inhabiting a polity built on Hamiltonian assumptions: credit, industry, national coordination, and a federal state sturdy enough to steer them.

Will s intent is less historical housekeeping than ideological intervention. By framing Hamilton as the architect of the lived present, he is quietly arguing that debates over big government are often cosplay. The United States already made the Hamiltonian bet, and it paid off in the form of economic scale, military capacity, and a national marketplace. Jefferson, in this telling, becomes the patron saint of rhetoric: the language Americans love to speak about themselves even as their daily life contradicts it.

The subtext is also a warning to conservatives and liberals alike. For conservatives who invoke Jefferson to oppose federal reach, Will implies they are standing inside a Hamilton-built machine while pretending it s a cabin. For liberals inclined to romanticize decentralization, he suggests that modern rights and modern prosperity ride on centralized levers.

Context matters: Will, a prominent conservative columnist, has long championed constitutional structure and institutional restraint. Here he s reminding his side that American conservatism is not merely nostalgia; it s stewardship of a national system Hamilton designed and Jefferson never quite imagined.