“The state of the public mind in North Carolina is a mystery to us,” declared a perplexed President Thomas Jefferson. Like observers today, Jefferson saw a state whose public life was hard to parse and harder to pigeonhole into the prescribed categories of ideology and faction that define American politics. William Richardson Davie, one of the most remarkable if deeply flawed men in early North Carolina, was a devoted Federalist. Yet his state was a Jeffersonian stronghold, and would remain dedicated to Jefferson’s principles of limited government for another century after the Founding, often to the detriment of the state.

Today, with ideological divisions in the state so sharply drawn, the battle between Federalists loyal to Alexander Hamilton and Jeffersonian Republicans feels as relevant as it has for centuries. North Carolina Republicans (their party not derived from Jefferson’s, though it bears his name) dominate state government and have spent a decade imposing reductions on the size of government in the name of their own–or perhaps Art Pope’s–concept of liberty. On the other side of the partisan divide, Democrats yearn to restore a Hamiltonian vision of economic development that fosters progressive industries through a partnership between business and the public sector. The roots of our partisan divide run deep.

In general, it’s fair to say that Phil Berger’s Republicans owe their ideological vintage to the Jeffersonians. When he was elected president, Thomas Jefferson declared a “Revolution of 1800.” Jefferson’s agenda was not dissimilar to that of Berger’s own “Conservative Revolution”–except it was far more ambitious. The Democratic-Republicans under President Jefferson cut the federal budget by an astounding 50%. They all but destroyed the U.S. Navy–certainly not something of which today’s Republicans would approve, but crucial to reducing the size of government in the Early Republic–and discarded Hamilton’s vision of an active federal government promoting industry and finance. Jefferson’s championing of rural life would resonate with North Carolina Republicans who resent urban centers as arrogant and elitist. And the Jeffersonians, like the Bergerites, were deeply committed to white supremacy.

The Democratic Party takes its cues on economic policy from Alexander Hamilton. Since the days of Jim Hunt, North Carolina Democrats have sought a symbiotic loop between public investment and private enterprise. Hunt created the North Carolina Biotechnology Center and the North Carolina Microelectronics Center. Under Governors Easley and Perdue, Democrats established a Biofuels Center and a Green Business Fund to foster the growth of what Hamilton would have called “infant industries,” in this case residing in the cleantech space. The right-wing Jeffersonians cut or eliminated all these institutions.

But the correspondence between factions historical and contemporary is not complete. For all their racism and hypocrisy, the Jeffersonian Republicans stood for America’s democratic aspirations. Democratic-Republican clubs were some of the first grassroots political advocacy groups in the world. Jeffersonians advocated a rural economy not due to the traditionalism of rural life but because of its radical potential. They wanted not the stratified world that Jefferson himself inhabited, but a land of economic and social equality uncorrupted by high finance or a militaristic state. In fact, Democratic-Republican James Madison made the case for economic equality as essential to political democracy. This is not something plutocrats like Art Pope or autocrats like Phil Berger would readily claim.

As for me, I’ll take the Founders a la carte. In the early 20th century when America was undergoing another economic revolution, progressive intellectual Herbert Croly wrote a book with the stirring title The Promise of American Life. In this text, Croly called for a government of Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends. Government would regulate big business and invest in the common good to create the economic prerequisites for political equality. We need both Jefferson and Hamilton as we proceed through this challenging period in our history, but we don’t need the racist hypocrisy that makes an uncritical reverence for the Jeffersonians no long tenable in an age of racial reckoning.