My ideology right or left

 Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians — a framing that has the virtue of bringing the debate back to the beginnings of American history but also confines a much wider phenomenon to an American context. Hamiltonians, in essence, want to centralize power, they want to build up institutions that can serve the public good and at the same time act, in John Kenneth Galbraith’s phrase, as “countervailing power” to private special interests, trusts, corporations, et al. The Jeffersonian impulse is suspicious of power in toto and wants power to devolve back to the people, in a pastoral vision. The problem with the Jeffersonian impulse is that it never actually works — power is a fact and it tends to centralize, and no amount of wishing that away will create a new pastoral utopia of self-reliant yeoman farmers — but it does have a certain effectiveness in gumming up the works for people who are actually are trying to make power function.