The Federalists didn't have a Monopoly on Wisdom

I would like to give you some excerpts from a great article which I hope you will read in its entirety.

The Antis are the men—and women, I add, not as a p.c. genuflection but in recognition of the Bay State’s Mercy Otis Warren, playwright and historian and among the most literary Anti-Federalists—who considered what the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had wrought in that sweltering Philadelphia summer of 1787 and said No. They included dissenting delegates to that convention, like George Mason of Virginia; patriots still afire with the spirit of ’76, like Patrick Henry; and backcountry farmers and cobblers and libertarian editors and malcontent layabouts. They were “not simply blockheads standing in the way of progress,” wrote Robert Rutland in The Ordeal of the Constitution, “but . . . serious, oftentimes brilliant, citizens who viewed the Constitution in 1787–88 with something less than awe.”

We liked them well enough when they were for independence, but we forget that they viewed the Constitution with deep suspicion.

They often made wild predictions about where this all would lead. For instance, George Clinton—not the funky parliamentarian but the New York Anti-Federalist—prophesied that the federal city created by the Constitution, later known as Washington, D.C., “would be the asylum of the base, idle, avaricious and ambitious.” Gee, thank God that never happened.

No comment necessary!

While the Federalists admired the finely wrought constitutional machinery, with its balance of powers, its cunning methods of nullifying the harmful effects of faction, of cupidity, of powerlust, the Anti-Federalists struck at the root. “For the Anti-Federalists,” wrote the historian Herbert J. Storing, “government is seen as itself the major problem.”

They objected to almost every feature of the Constitution. Anti-Federalists wanted annual elections. A larger House of Representatives whose members were paid by the states, not the central government, so that they did not forget on which side their bread was buttered. Rotation in office, or term limits. A Bill of Rights. Limitations on standing armies. No “general welfare” clause, which, as the Biddeford, Massachusetts, Anti-Federalist Silas Lee predicted, would “be construed to extend to every matter of legislation."

The Anti-Federalists stood for decentralism, local democracy, antimilitarism, and a deep suspicion of central governments. And they stood on what they stood for. Local attachments. Local knowledge. While the Pennsylvania Federalist Gouverneur Morris “flattered himself he came here in some degree as a Representative of the whole human race,” Anti-Federalists understood that one cannot love an abstraction such as “the whole human race.” One loves particular flesh-and-blood members of that race. “My love must be discriminate / or fail to bear its weight,” in the words of a modern Anti-Federalist, the Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry. He who loves the whole human race seldom has much time for individual members thereof.

Contra the court historians, the Antis were cautious, prudent, grounded, attached. They were not the party of vainglory in 1787–88. “Under no circumstances did Antifederalists think of themselves as immortals winning undying fame for themselves,” wrote Michael Lienesch. “In fact, they were at their rhetorical best in scoffing at the pretentions [sic] of those Federalists who pictured themselves in the role of classical legislators.”

They were plain people whose homely dreams ran not to national greatness. What to men of station was the periphery was to them the heart. Massachusetts Anti Amos Singletary of Worcester County told the state’s ratifying convention that “These lawyers and men of learning, and moneyed men that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us, poor illiterate people, swallow down the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves; they expect to be the managers of this Constitution, and get all the power and all the money into their own hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folks . . . just as the whale swallowed up Jonah.”

Things were spiralling out of control. The scale was getting too big. Anti-Federalist Samuel Chase of Maryland (whose path we will cross again) objected that “the distance between the people and their Representatives will be so very great that there is no probability of a Farmer or Planter being chosen. Mechanics of every Branch will be excluded by a general voice from a Seat. Only the Gentry, the Rich & well born will be elected.”

This seems to me incontrovertibly true, and never more so than today. In smaller polities representatives are, in some sense, representative. My town council includes an electrician, a housewife, a custodian, and my lovely wife, whose academic training was in philosophy. This, I daresay, is a far more representative body than the U.S. Congress, and the town council’s nearness to its constituency endows it with legitimacy. I may not always agree with its acts but I can remonstrate, face to face, with those who make the local laws. I cannot do so at the national level. And our town council, whatever mistakes it might make, does not have blood dripping from its claws.

Does this sound like a familiar debate? Maybe there is something buried deep in the psyche of good American citizens that still recognizes the truth known to the Anti.-Federalists.

Read the rest of the article by Bill Kaufman, it really is about Luther Martin.