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There are parallels between the recent race for the Democrat nomination and the acrimonious presidential campaign of 1800, says David Runciman. Both contests offered a choice between different kinds of hypocrite, but some are more effective dissemblers than others

Two epic political battles have been fought in the US over the past few months. One was the titanic struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic party’s nominee for president. The other is the lifelong rivalry between the second American president, John Adams, and the third, Thomas Jefferson, which has been replayed in a $100 million mini-series on HBO called John Adams. Unsurprisingly, Adams emerges as the hero of the HBO story (which is based on David McCullough’s bestselling biography from 2001), but only because this is revisionist history. It’s Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, that most Americans would count among their true national heroes. That’s why presidential candidates don’t often try to remind people of John Adams, but they are invariably delighted to be associated with Thomas Jefferson.

This year, it’s Obama who went out of his way to wrap himself in Jefferson’s mantle. Like Jefferson, he has made much of his faith in the ability of the American people to take their destiny into their own hands – hence his slightly bizarre catchphrase to his adoring supporters: ‘You’re the change you’ve been waiting for’. Obama has also tried to echo Jefferson’s claim, at a time of deep partisan rancour in American politics, that he somehow stood above party. “We have called by different names brethren of the same principle: we are all republicans – we are all federalists,” Jefferson said in his first inaugural address of 1801. “There is not a liberal America or a conservative America, there is a United States of America,” Obama said in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, deliberately copying Jefferson.

But there is a problem for any aspiring president who wants to be a second Thomas Jefferson. For many people, both then and now, Jefferson was really the most appalling hypocrite. There are many sides to Jefferson’s hypocrisy. One relates to the toxic question of slavery. The author of the Declaration of Independence, who declared liberty to be an “inalienable right”, was also a slave-owner and, what is more, was widely suspected of having regular sexual relationships with some of his slaves. Unsurprisingly, Obama doesn’t want to go anywhere near this issue, given that he would like to present himself to the American public as being somehow above race as well.

But Jefferson was also widely suspected of being a hypocrite when it came to his status as a man of the people. This is something that the Harvard-educated, super-smart, foreign-sounding Barack Hussein Obama can’t avoid, because it’s his problem too. Jefferson’s contemporaries thought it was pretty rich for him to talk up his democratic credentials, given his personal attitudes and demeanour were so far removed from so many Americans’. He was widely denounced as a “libertine”, a “foreigner”, an “atheist”, and was accused of being in the pay of the French. Subsequently, historians have also wondered about the startling mismatch between Jefferson’s fine talk about popular rights and his high-handed, autocratic and occasionally unconstitutional behaviour when in the White House. It is not hard to portray Jefferson as a bogus democrat – a tyrant and a snob who simply hid behind a mask of popular rhetoric.

Obama has attempted (in his book The Audacity of Hope) to defend Jefferson’s record in office by pointing out that what looks like hypocrisy is in fact evidence of admirable pragmatism. So when Jefferson, who had once claimed that a taste for executive power was the true mark of a ‘rogue’, used his executive power to do a secret deal to secure the Louisiana Purchase, it just showed that he was willing to compromise his principles when the national interest was at stake. Jefferson himself, however, adopted a more familiar line of defence when his opponents accused him of hypocrisy. He went on the attack and accused them of being far worse hypocrites in return. The person who really suffered was John Adams. In the 1800 presidential election, which saw the incumbent Adams defeated by Jefferson after an astonishingly acrimonious campaign, Jefferson’s supporters accused their rival of being “a gross hypocrite”, who had revealed during his own time in office that he had no interest in popular government. Adams was said to have been corrupted by his time in England, and was widely suspected of wanting to make himself king.

Adams certainly gave his enemies plenty of ammunition in their attempt to portray him as an enemy of the revolution. As president, Adams had introduced the Alien and Sedition Acts, which allowed him to deport foreigners and imprison anyone who published “false, scandalous or malicious writing” against the government. Earlier, Adams had made it clear that he wanted the US Senate to be more like the British House of Lords, with a place reserved for the landed and moneyed elite. He had even argued, briefly, that the head of the new American republic should be known not as ‘Mr President’ but as ‘His Majesty’. As a result, Jefferson, the intellectual, managed to paint Adams as something much worse: an aristocrat who believed he was entitled to power.

It is not hard to see the parallels between 1800 and 2008. Obama, like Jefferson, is easy to caricature as an elitist trying to pass himself off as a Democrat, but he managed to portray Hillary Clinton as something worse: a power-crazed monster who thinks her family is entitled to rule. But if these are the parallels, what are the lessons of Adams vs. Jefferson for Clinton vs. Obama? I think there are four. First, the election of 1800 reminds us not to despair that politics is descending into the gutter at an unprecedented rate in the age of You Tube and wall-to-wall blogging. The election of 1800, conducted in the age of the horse-drawn carriage and the occasional news sheet, was far worse.

Over the course of the campaign, Adams was described by Jefferson’s supporters as a vain, stupid, insatiable, gluttonous egotist, and they routinely labelled him “insane”. And that was just the other side. Alexander Hamilton, who ostensibly belonged to Adams’s party, wrote a public letter in which he accused Adams of “disgusting egotism”, “great intrinsic defects of character” and “very outrageous behaviour”. Adams’s career didn’t survive this assault, but democratic politics survived, as it always does. Second, the choice between the candidates, then and now, shows us that democratic elections are never really about trying to find the candidate of integrity who stands above and apart from the hypocrisies of everyday politics. They are always, at best, a choice between different kinds of hypocrite, and the claim by any candidate to rise above this is simply its own form of hypocrisy. But third, that doesn’t mean that some candidates aren’t better at playing this game than others. Jefferson outmanoeuvred Adams by flattering the American people into thinking that he was simply the agent of their own better natures. Adams was much more honest with them about the unavoidable moral compromises of political life. Jefferson also made sure that the really nasty business of the campaign was undertaken by his proxies in the press, while he stayed in Monticello and claimed it was nothing to do with him. In this respect at least, Obama is clearly the heir of Thomas Jefferson. Finally, though, the fact that one candidate is able to outmanoeuvre the other in this battle of hypocrisies does not settle the question of which sort of hypocrisy we should ultimately prefer. The fascinating thing about the fight between Adams and Jefferson is that, once both were retired from public life, they returned to it as old men, but this time calmly, respectfully, in a civilised exchange of letters in which they debated the issues. Here, Adams was able to make the case that had eluded him in 1800. He had not been, he argued, a supporter of aristocracy trying to pass himself off as a democrat. Instead, he was a true supporter of democracy, who was trying to rescue it from the hypocrisy of those, like Jefferson, who were intent on obscuring political reality by overlaying it with nice-sounding words.

The reason Adams wanted a fixed place in American political life for the moneyed elite was because he knew that all political societies contained such elites – the undeserving rich – and the important thing was to have them lined up where you could see them. Adams feared that the inescapable aristocratic element in American life – meaning the advantages enjoyed by those blessed with the superficial virtues of wealth, eloquence and good looks – would be concealed beneath the surface of a self-congratulatory democratic rhetoric, where it could do more damage and where it would remain less accountable. He felt it was crucial to bring the dark side of democracy to the surface, so the people could understand what was at stake in the choices that they make. This still looks to me like a good argument. Democratic politics, in its high-minded moments, doesn’t promote genuine virtue so much as provide cover for the real business of politics to shield behind. Hillary Clinton, for all her personal failings – all her inconsistencies, her hypocrisies, her ‘misspeaks’ – is at least being honest with the American public about what politics is: it’s a messy, compromised, power-hungry game in which no one comes out smelling of roses.  To pretend otherwise is merely to give an advantage to the people who have access to the fanciest perfumes.

But though this is a good argument, it is not an easy one to sell. The candidate who reminds the public of what democratic politics is really about does not often get rewarded by the public for telling them the truth. Instead, they get painted as cynical, bitter, stop-at-nothing wreckers who, far from offering a service to democracy, are willing to sacrifice democracy for the sake of personal ambition. In this respect, Hillary Clinton is indeed the John Adams of contemporary American politics, and has suffered accordingly. It probably won’t console her much to be told that in about 200 years there’ll be a miniseries to tell her side of the story. It remains to be seen whether the damage done to Clinton by this line of attack will in the end destroy her public career, as it destroyed Adams’s, or whether she can survive it.

But whatever happens between now and November, and in the years to come, it is hard to imagine that one day Clinton and Obama will make it up and settle down to a serious argument about who was being honest about the role of hypocrisy and sincerity in democratic politics. That is why the argument between Adams and Jefferson is worth revisiting. It reminds us that a sincere faith in the uplifting possibilities of democratic politics can be its own kind of hypocrisy. And that an acceptance of the unavoidable double standards of democratic politics can be its own kind of sincerity. When it comes to elections, people tend to prefer candidates who present democracy in its most favourable light, which is why the message of democratic hopefulness that Obama shares with Jefferson has such a durable appeal. But that doesn’t mean Adams was wrong to warn the American public that there is a fine line between democratic optimism and democratic delusion.  There always needs to be room for a candidate who offers a darker vision of democratic politics, even if, as in Adams’s case, and in Hillary Clinton’s, they tend to be the ones who suffer for it.