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And who among us would have guessed that the answer to problems caused by the EU and a single currency is concentrating yet more power in the central government

And who among us would have guessed that the answer to problems caused by the EU and a single currency is concentrating yet more power in the central government? It is instructive to go back and read the arguments the anti-federalists made during the constitutional debate. As near as I can tell, they were correct across the board. And yet, in the state school I attended, I never read them. Strange, that. Here are some: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/ratification/timeline-federalfarmer/ http://teachingamericanhistory.org/ratification/timeline-fed...

lisa_henderson 12y ago
"they were correct across the board" That's impossible. The "Anti-Federalists" were a diverse set of groups with no unifying themes other than opposition to the newly proposed Constitution. Southern racists and Northern working class movements made anti-federalist arguments for wildly different reasons. It's impossible for anti-federalists to be "correct across the board" because some of the arguments they made were contradictory. More so, it is trivially easy to find anti-federaist arguments that turned out to be wrong. Several people who identified as anti-federalist predicted that the new constitution would lead to tyranny, and yet, 227 years later, the government retains most of the nominal forms of a liberal polity: a mostly independent judiciary, freedom of media, public criticism, habeus corpus in all but the most extreme cases, etc.
rhino369 12y ago
The constitution has stood for over 200 years and even when a sort of anti-federalist civil war occurred, the anti-federalist side adopted it nearly word or word. The failure of the EU proves the anti-federalists wrong. A weak centralized government isn't stable. A US under the articles of confederation wouldn't be recognizable. We would have been picked apart by the British and French.
emodendroket 12y ago
> And who among us would have guessed that the answer to problems caused by the EU and a single currency is concentrating yet more power in the central government? The problem is not "caused" by a single currency, exactly -- it's caused by the combination of a single currency and a weak governing body. Disparate currencies, each with their own government -- yes. One currency, controlled by one entity -- yes. A combination of the two? Not so good.
xnull6guest 12y ago
Can you say some more about the arguments linked here and the evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) that supports the thesis that they were right? I say this having briefly browsed the links contained and the summaries provided by the front page. It is a lot of prose, and fairly prosiac if for its age. Could you help to unpack the strongest of their arguments which have been most strongly vindicated by history?

lisa_henderson 12y ago

"they were correct across the board" That's impossible. The "Anti-Federalists" were a diverse set of groups with no unifying themes other than opposition to the newly proposed Constitution. Southern racists and Northern working class movements made anti-federalist arguments for wildly different reasons. It's impossible for anti-federalists to be "correct across the board" because some of the arguments they made were contradictory. More so, it is trivially easy to find anti-federaist arguments that turned out to be wrong. Several people who identified as anti-federalist predicted that the new constitution would lead to tyranny, and yet, 227 years later, the government retains most of the nominal forms of a liberal polity: a mostly independent judiciary, freedom of media, public criticism, habeus corpus in all but the most extreme cases, etc.

rhino369 12y ago

The constitution has stood for over 200 years and even when a sort of anti-federalist civil war occurred, the anti-federalist side adopted it nearly word or word. The failure of the EU proves the anti-federalists wrong. A weak centralized government isn't stable. A US under the articles of confederation wouldn't be recognizable. We would have been picked apart by the British and French.

emodendroket 12y ago

> And who among us would have guessed that the answer to problems caused by the EU and a single currency is concentrating yet more power in the central government? The problem is not "caused" by a single currency, exactly -- it's caused by the combination of a single currency and a weak governing body. Disparate currencies, each with their own government -- yes. One currency, controlled by one entity -- yes. A combination of the two? Not so good.

xnull6guest 12y ago

Can you say some more about the arguments linked here and the evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) that supports the thesis that they were right? I say this having briefly browsed the links contained and the summaries provided by the front page. It is a lot of prose, and fairly prosiac if for its age. Could you help to unpack the strongest of their arguments which have been most strongly vindicated by history?