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January 31, 2008
THE FEDERALIST
My teacher said the best process for working on my upcoming thesis is just to sit down and start writing, so I figured what better place to do that than my little corner of the internet (last YO LA TENGO reference, I swear). My teacher, I hope, is also not reading this, so he won’t learn about the remarkable degree of procrastination in which I’m current engaging – instead of reading secondary information about THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, I’ve been engaging in message board goofery on the AV Club (I’m “The Three Guys”).
But in the midst of all this Obama/Clinton muckfest, the need for the Federalist and a project like it, and its sublime seemingly disinterested passion for a working government, has been a godsend. Instead of hearing Obama and Clinton throwing kairotic muck at each other, I can see two guys who may not have necessarily loved each other, come together to make a case for prudence, security, and a degree of prosperity in which we could all share. As Political Theory, The Federalist Papers is many things, and most probably a mess of 18th Century Historical Inaccuracies, Early 18th Century Philosophy, and then-“hip” thinkers like Montesquieu. When we read it today, it seems like staunch conservatism or, as Robert Ferguson notes, “conventional wisdom.” But we forget what a radical project the constitution was for the people reading these every day in the newspaper, and how much it reeked of the type of despotism they’d rid themselves of only eleven years before.
The Anti-Federalists sure seemed to think so. In their first response to Alexander Hamilton and John Jay’s opening letters (which argued, specifically, that their loose confederation would be doomed in the face of foreign attack or civil strife), “Brutus” cried out “Their menacing cry is for a RIGID government, it matters little to them of what kind, provided it answers THAT description.” The A.F.s grouped federalism and the proposed, ratifying constitution as “a dangerous plan of benefit only to the ‘Aristocratick Combination.’” In other words, to quote the Deuteronomist, the foot will fall in due time. If you lose one shoe, you might as well lose the other.
If the zealous, vehemently rhetorical Anti-Federalist Papers are an idea of the opposition they faced, it makes the document Hamilton, Jay, and Madison produced that much more of an achievement. The opposition is scarcely referred to . . . it’s replaced by the concern for a less-than-stable future that destroys the glory of the revolution and the vision for which it contended. Jay just wants the Anti-Federalists to explain how a bunch of independent sovereigns are going to come together when Europe comes around again, and Madison wants to show everybody he thinks liberty is a super concept too, and is all the more reason for inviting he and his Federalist buddies to the party.
In re-reading the Papers, I’m always glad when I come upon a Madison paper, because Jay’s style is flowery and ornate while Hamilton can be tedious and repetitive. Madison, on the other hand, is the best stylist of any political theorist I’ve ever read – he’s almost poetic, but never in a way that’s cloying, sentimental, or manipulative. But occasionally, Hamilton surprises me, like in #23 when he tells us,
“This is one of those truths which, to a correct and unprejudiced mind, carries its own evidence along with it; and may be obscured, but cannot be made plainer by argument or reasoning. It rests upon axioms as simple as they are universal; the means ought to be proportioned to the end; the persons, from whose agency the attainment of any end is expected, ought to possess the means by which it is to be attained.”
Bringing things back to my opening point, regarding this Clinton/Obama shit-slinging contest, something about a passage like this makes me teary-eyed. Here was Hamilton, involved in the most important political moment of our history, and he’s pointing out the problem of democratic rhetoric – it obscures what it ought to make plain; it complicates its glorious axioms with sophistry.
The people ought to “possess the means,” Hamilton tells us, and right now we’re so bloody focused on the end that we have no idea what the hell anyone is saying, why they’re saying it, other than somebody wants to get elected and special interests need to be served (which, by the by, is another topic H & M anticipated, contemplated, and offers solutions for, because the Anti-Feds thought this was the central problem of federalism, and they were right).
I am blessed that I chose this project in the middle of an election year. Every day I open up my Yahoo! Page to read about the latest shifting loyalty and meaningless sound-bite . . . it reminds me of games of RISK I started and didn’t finish (in other words, all of them). And in the midst of that, the angel on my shoulder is James Madison, telling me liberty is to faction what air is to fire, and that there is a golden mean of government between anarchy and despotism, and that at one point somebody had it right.
| By Andytown | 02:57 PM
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