The Federalists and the Anti-federalists

Role Reversal

Beginning in earnest with the presidency of Richard Nixon, a dramatic role reversal has taken place—unnoticed or at least unremarked—within the U.S. political party system. The changes are not along conservative-liberal lines, which are most often cited as being the difference between the two major parties, but are along Federalist, Anti-federalist lines, a much more fundamental division that envisions two very different forms of government. The reasons for the ascendancy of modern Anti-federalism have been obscured in masses of rhetoric calling for budget reform, for "getting government off the backs of people," and the need for strong defense, but the basic thrust of all this action is to change the role of the central government from a Federal republic to a quasi-confederacy of the States. To that purpose a huge Federal deficit has been incurred, a huge trade deficit has been amassed, Federal social service responsibilities are being shifted to the States and the Supreme Court has been "packed" with States righter justices— a synonym for Anti-federalists.

The Unseen Hand of the Magnates

The current success of the Republican Anti-federalists stems in large part from the cooperation they receive from the communications media: newspapers, news magazines, television and radio that are supporting the Anti-federalist cause, without explaining what it is or what its implications are. The control of information is so pervasive that I can only conclude that the magnates of the empire are supporting these changes. (Magnates in the Roman Empire were the large landowners who more or less ran the empire. American magnates own banks and more or less run the country.)

Articles of the Confederation

In the early days of the nation, after the American revolution, the country organized itself under the Articles of Confederation. The Continental Congress adopted the Articles in 1777 and they were ratified by the States in 1781. The Articles called for a loose confederation of sovereign states, with the States retaining control of all their affairs except for defense and foreign relations. This arrangement lasted until 1789. In those few short years, the weaknesses of the confederacy became clear; States vied with one another over trade, engaged in border disputes, refused to pay their share of the war debt and picked and chose what aspects of the central government they would support. It was clear from this experience that without more coordination of the central government, the States would be vulnerable to blandishments or attack from the European powers and the confederacy would soon be rent asunder.

U.S. Constitution

Under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton, in an effort to redress the problems, a Federal convention was proposed to patch up the Articles of Confederation. Like all good committees, the Federal convention that met in Philadelphia in 1787 exceeded its charge and instead of merely repairing the Articles, it seized the moment and fashioned our Constitution. That document, together with the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers, form the sacred script of our nation.

We the People

The Preamble to the original draft of the Constitution began, "We the States of..." and named the thirteen states. Eventually, the preamble emerged from the Committee on Style and Form, under the chairmanship of Gouverneur Morris of New York, and instead of 'We the States of..." it began 'We the People of the United States...." In just those few words, the United States was transformed from a confederacy into a Federal republic. (The power of words.)

In the closing days of the Convention, the manner of ratification of the "changes" to the Articles was discussed and James Madison's view that the Constitution should be ratified by the people of the United States instead of the States was adopted.

Two Views of Government

The Constitution gave rise to two political parties—the Federalists who supported the Constitution and the Federal republic and the Anti-federalists who wished a return to the Articles, and a confederacy. Patrick Henry, ("Give me liberty or give me death."), was passionately opposed to the Federal

Constitution and actively campaigned against it. Thomas Jefferson also opposed the Constitution and recommended that the people should be free to change the government in each generation, i.e. no generation should be able to decide for the next what the government should be.

Champions of the Constitution

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were the staunch Federalists and together they wrote The Federalist Papers, strongly advocating adoption of the Constitution. The Federalist Papers were widely circulated in the newspapers. (The power of the media.) The Federalists won and the conventions ratified the Constitution.

The Borderers

The strongest Anti-federalist feelings were in the Appalachian South which was settled by Borderers—peoples from the border lands of Northern England and Scotland and North Ireland. They thought themselves possessed of "natural liberty." At the very least, they chafed at the idea of authority; at most, they rebelled. They strongly resented government, strong central or any other kind. Andrew Jackson, "Old Hickory," was a borderer and a passionate Anti-federalist. In addition, the slave-owning South felt constrained to go along, even though the Federal Convention was strongly motivated by the Virginia delegation to form a strong central government. As proposed by Edmund Randolph of Virginia there would be a supreme national government with a supreme legislature, a supreme executive, and a supreme judiciary.

These Southern States were later joined by Western States, not so much on philosophical grounds as on the question of land ownership. In those states where the Federal government owned much of the land, resentment against the Federal government and consequently pro-States' rights feeling, ran high. Today, the States' righters have combined forces to become the new Anti-federalists.

Ordered Liberty and the Golden Rule

The Federalists, on the other hand, were mostly northerners, and Mid-westerners, although James Madison of Virginia was among the most ardent of them, as were many other Southerners. Hamilton a New Yorker, (albeit he was born in the West Indies), was a leading exponent of the Constitution and one of its greatest interpreters. The Northerners' concepts of liberty were tempered by two great migrations; first, that of the Pilgrims to New England, and second, that of the Quakers to the Delaware River valley. The Pilgrims were Calvinists and advocates of ordered liberty. The Quakers professed the Golden Rule, and out of the Golden Rule came their stand on slavery— if you don't want to be a slave, then don't make anyone else a slave.

Civil War

With time, the animosities between the Federalists and the Anti-federalists increased until, inevitably, a civil rupture occurred. The Civil War is popularly treated as a war to free the slaves. Although that certainly was an outcome, it was not the prime reason for the war. In the industrial North business was flourishing. The need for stable currency, a stable banking system, and a judicial system that was favorable to business and industry were the main interests of the day. The U.S. banking system had been dominated by the London banks and the British gold standard. The Northern banks were seeking independence from the British banking system and wanted the Federal government to provide the means for so doing. The agrarian South wanted to hang onto slavery, which was being assaulted from all sides, especially the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which regulated whether States entering the Union would be slave or free.

The War of the Bankers

The war between the States was really the war between the Eastern United States bankers and the British bankers with the South serving as the surrogates of the British. It was obviously to the benefit of the British bankers that the government of the United States be weak and dispersed, as opposed to central and strong.

The war was won by the North under the leadership of President Abraham Lincoln and the newly formed Republican party. We see in Abraham Lincoln the emergence of a strongly Federal Republican party and a strong Federal government. It was the Republican party of that day, in Congress, that imposed the peace with its reconstruction. Predictably, Southern politicians viewed the Republican party as anathema. When politics were normalized in the South, the South emerged as a one-party (Democratic) region — the "Solid South".

Strong Federal Government

Coming out of the Civil War, the Republican party was the strong Federalist party, the inheritor of the Hamiltonian tradition and a strong supporter of the central government as the nurturer of business and prosperity. The Republican Congress passed the early civil rights legislation and got the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution that guaranteed civil rights for freed slaves and all the rest of us. The Republican party provided Presidents for the next forty years.

The New Deal

Republican President Herbert Hoover was defeated by Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1932, when Roosevelt was able to put together a coalition of Southern Democrats, labor, and the poor. He repaid his supporters by successfully introducing the most comprehensive social legislation in our history to that time. The Republican party represented business, the railroads, banks, Midwest farmers and the rising middle class.

The Breakaway South

An undercurrent of discontent in the Democratic party broke to the surface in the 1946 Convention, when Southern Democrats walked out of the Convention to protest the civil rights plank of the party platform offered by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. In the South, the States' Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrats) was formed, consisting of persons who strongly opposed President Harry Truman's civil rights program. The Dixiecrats selected J. Strom Thurmond, the present ranking (Republican) member of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, as their candidate for President.

The War on Poverty

The most significant event of the post-Roosevelt era as regards our constitutional government was the War on Poverty (The Equal Opportunity Act of 1964, The Civil Rights Act of 1964, and The Voting Rights Act of 1965). President Johnson had been born and raised in rural Texas. He was well acquainted with the underside of life in rural America and was determined to provide opportunity to the millions of Americans who were not as fortunate as he was in rising from poverty. The War on Poverty seemed to be a harbinger of the rising expectations of the American public that could only be satisfied by increases in taxes, greater access to the political system and greater use of the judicial system. The War on Poverty seemed to trigger a reaction from the magnates of the empire. To kill the War on Poverty it was necessary to obtain and hold the Presidency. President Johnson's obsession with the Vietnam War did what no politician could do, it ruined his presidency and destroyed the chances of Hubert Humphrey to succeed him.

A Government of Men

Richard Nixon's presidency marks the transition of the Republican Party from Federalist to Anti-federalist. Richard Nixon transformed the Bureau of the Budget to the Office of Management and Budget to give the President greater direct control of the Federal budget and direct hands on control of the executive departments. He attempted to reduce Federal spending by impounding funds and refusing to spend them. The Courts reversed him on this. He appointed William Rehnquist a young Assistant U.S. Attorney General, in his forties, and a known States' righter to the Supreme Court. He asked Congress for a Senior Executive Service but the Congress wouldn't give it to him. Each of these moves while seemingly trivial in itself had the effect of beginning the transformation of the Federal government from a government of laws to a government of men.

Why on earth would a President give permission for and condone a break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters? Is there any answer except that he desperately wanted to win a second term? Whatever Richard Nixon was doing as President he wanted very badly to continue doing it. This overwhelming desire, coupled with the conspiratorial atmosphere he generated among his inner circle cronies, led to the bugging of the phones in the Democratic head quarters and the use of CIA types to do it. I only hypothesize that the Federal government had to be reconfigured so the War on Poverty would not rise again.

A Stroke of Luck

Jimmy Carter's election was a stroke of luck for the Anti-federalists. He ran against the Federal government and won. He claimed he wanted to make the Federal government as good as the people and instituted reforms he thought would accomplish this. He instituted a widespread deregulation of American industry. Banks were deregulated, as were airlines, the trucking industry etc. The theory was that deregulation would spur healthy new competition. He underestimated the power of greed that deregulation set loose in the land. Instead of spurring new enterprise, deregulation set loose cutthroat competition, with all the hallmarks of monopolistic business practice. Initially new airlines were formed but they soon succumbed to vicious competition, which eliminated them along with some old standard lines that under regulation had been sturdy and productive. We all know about the fiasco of the failure of the Savings and Loan banks and the tremendous cost that poses to tax payers.

Ironically, President Carter succeeded where President Nixon did not. He persuaded the Congress to give him a Senior Executive Service. The independent Civil Service Commission was abolished and in its place the political Office of Personnel Management was established. The Civil Service which had long been free of political pressure was now squarely in the middle of politics.

Carter's Failure

Eventually, President Carter failed his greatest trial. He knew that if he let the Shah of Iran into the United States for medical treatment, the Iranians would seize the American Embassy in Teheran and that they probably would take the embassy personnel hostage. He said as much to Henry Kissinger when Kissinger pleaded for the Shah's admittance to the country.

The long ordeal of the hostages was the cause celebre of the time. The event was in the newspapers daily and it soon became obvious that the fate of the hostages would also determine the outcome of the 1980 election. If President Carter obtained the release of the hostages or if he rescued them he would win; if he failed, Ronald Reagan would win. The ill-fated Desert One operation sealed Carter's doom. Even as President Ronald Reagan was delivering his inaugural address, the hostages were winging home as he spoke.

The Teflon Presidency

The magnates were not well enough organized to save President Nixon after Watergate but by the time of Ronald Reagan, they were very well organized and they produced what was popularly called the "teflon presidency."

Try to imagine the unfolding of events if Watergate had happened in Ronald Reagan's term of office. Do you imagine the Washington Post would have assigned investigative reporters and dug and dug till they got to the root of the problem? It is more likely that the Water gate break-in, if it had happened in the Reagan presidency, would have been reported as a local crime, appearing somewhere near the want ads in the unlikely event that it were reported at all. As a case in point, Barbara Honnegar, a former Whitehouse employee in the Reagan administration, alleged among other things that Vice Presidential nominee George Bush and Republican campaign manager William Casey went to Paris and obtained agreement from the Iranians to hold the hostages in the American embassy until after the election in exchange for weapons. Her account was printed in the Journal of Personal and Planetary Health. If the story is true why such desperate measures to get the office of the presidency?

The Archetype

President Reagan is the archetype Anti-federalist of our time. We have to go back all the way to Andrew Jackson to find his equal. He campaigned on a slogan of getting the government off the backs of people. He strongly attacked the Federal social welfare programs. He made a great deal about reducing government spending, while at the same time the spending levels were increased enormously. The Reagan code words, "reduce government spending," referred only to the social welfare and domestic side of the Federal budget. Military spending was increased manyfold and at the same tune income taxes were reduced from a high nominal rate of 70% to 28% for wealthy American and 33% for the middle class. The result of reducing taxes and increasing spending was to balloon the Federal deficit, which now stands at over three trillion dollars ($3,000,000,000,000.00). Candidate Reagan called attention to the national debt under Carter— about 590 billion dollars—by saying that if you had a stack of $100 dollar bills equal to the national debt it would reach 60 miles into the air. How high would the stack be for the debt of three trillion — the achievement of President Reagan?

Of course Reagan did not accomplish all this alone. He had help from the Democratic Congress that dutifully passed the legislation he asked for. And the programs Ronald Reagan asked for had the effect of reducing the effectiveness of the Federal government. Getting government off the backs of people meant getting rid of the Federal government.

The Southern Strategy

Lee Atwater's so called "Southern Strategy" came into full bloom with Ronald Reagan. It was now acceptable for southerners to be Republicans. The stigma of the Republican reconstruction was over, but more importantly the Republican party was now advocating the very philosophical position that the Southern Anti-federalists had held since the time of Patrick Henry, States' rights — a reduced Federal government. Edwin Meese III, Ronald Reagan's Attorney General often stated that the role of the Federal government was primarily foreign relations and defense. The rest could be done by the States. This is the position that Patrick Henry advocated and which was so strongly resisted by Hamilton, Madison and Jay.

Lack of Discipline

When the Southern conservatives were in the Democratic party they were disciplined by the Democratic positions on race and social justice held by Northern and Midwestern Democrats. In the new Anti-federalist Republican party, there is no such discipline. David Duke, the Louisiana Klu Klux Klanner, is no fluke. David Duke is carrying on the tradition of the Tennessee Borderers who started the Klan to counteract the effect of the Civil War on civil rights in the South.

The Klan in the 1920's may have had as many as 20 million members. The Klan, after the Civil War, in guerilla fashion took up the cause of the Anti-federalists. What we see in Louisiana today is the nascent Republican party emerging as Anti-federalists and providing the philosophical context for the re-emergence of the Klan as a respectable political position.

The Reagan majority of Anti-federalists Republican justices on the Supreme Court have been busy unraveling the skein of social justice, woven by the Warren Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, a Federalist Republican Chief Justice, and they also have attacked civil rights legislation that was won at the cost of the Civil War. Candidate George Bush, in his pursuit of the presidency ran a blatantly racist campaign. President George Bush vetoed a Civil Rights bill that was intended to redress the changes in the law made by the Reagan majority of Anti-federalist justices.

Two Very Different Forms of Government

The Republican party which came into being to provide a favorable climate for business and industry and to redress civil and social evils of a slave holding nation and whose greatest hero, Abraham Lincoln, took the country into civil war rather than see the Union dismembered by the Anti-federalist South, has transformed itself from the Federalist to the Anti-federalist party, while the Democratic party which started out as the Anti-federalist party has transformed it self into what was the Republican Federalist Party. I do not believe that Abraham Lincoln would be comfortable in the present day Republican Party but I can easily imagine that John Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and Roger Taney would be quite at home in it. On the other-hand, Robert A. Taft and Nelson Rockefeller would not be at home in today's Republican Party and might not even be welcome in it.

The differences between the two parties do not represent honest differences of opinion about similar concepts of government; they represent two very different kinds of government—a confederacy on the part of the Republican Anti-federalists with a weak Federal government, contrasted on the other hand with a strong Federal Republic. The differences are as great as were those that led to calling the Federal Convention or fighting the Civil War. The Lincoln Republicans advocated a strong Federal Republic to foster banking, business, and industry—which it did. In the hands of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson the strong Federal Republic also fostered civil rights and social welfare and took the nation to its peak of prosperity. The dollar had it's greatest buying power.

The Policy is Non-Policy

The Anti-federalist Republicans are opposed to social welfare and especially to the empowerment of the poor which was begun under the War on Poverty, (i.e. a strong Federal Republic). They have abandoned business and industry (except big banks) to the Japanese and they have abandoned the poor to their own devices in the pursuit of a weak confederacy that does not support social welfare or business and industry. If We the People are at a loss as to why President Bush seems so strong on foreign affairs and so vacillating on the domestic front, this sorting out of terms and their meaning should help clarify the situation. The political truth that has been staring us in the face ever since Ronald Reagan's first election is that the seeming absence of a domestic policy (industrial or social) is, in fact, the policy. And far from being weak or vacillating, it is strong and blatant. It is non-policy, and that is exactly what it is intended to be and it masks a hidden agenda to revert our strong Federal Government to a weak confederacy of the States.

The Thumb Suckers

As for the Federalist Democrats, they don't seem to know yet who they are. They represent strong Federal Government that was established first by Lincoln to foster business and industry (the General welfare) and then used by Roosevelt to foster the rising expectation of the American people (social welfare) but don't seem to know it. They need to get the Federalist Papers and read them. It is no secret that Congressional democrats get their PAC support from business. While the Federalist Democrats try to figure out who they are, the Anti-federalist Republicans will continue to win presidential elections with inflammatory issues such as race, gun control, crime in the streets, drugs, patriotism, and the death penalty, and will continue to convert our strong Federal Constitutional government to a weak confederacy of the States.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1991
Institute for domestic Tranquility