But even to assert
this class interest efficiently they have been obliged to abandon, in
fact if not in word, their correlative principle of national
irresponsibility. Whatever the national interest may be, it is not to be
asserted by the political practice of non-interference. The hope of
automatic democratic fulfillment must be abandoned. The national
government must stop in and discriminate; but it must discriminate, not
on behalf of liberty and the special individual, but on behalf of
equality and the average man.
Thus the Jeffersonian principle of national irresponsibility can no
longer be maintained by those Democrats who sincerely believe that the
inequalities of power generated in the American economic and political
system are dangerous to the integrity of the democratic state. To this
extent really sincere followers of Jefferson are obliged to admit the
superior political wisdom of Hamilton's principle of national
responsibility, and once they have made this admission, they have
implicitly abandoned their contention that the doctrine of equal rights
is a sufficient principle of democratic political action.
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