Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 77

Put yourself in the founders’ shoes. Imagine that you get to construct a new government from scratch. You can create all the rules and arrange all the institutions just to your liking. The only hitch is that you have other delegates to work with. Delegate A, for instance, is a merchant with a lot of property. He has big plans for a strong government that can ensure secure conditions for conducting business and can adequately protect property. Delegate B, however, is a planter. In Delegate B’s experience, big government is dangerous. Big government is removed from the people, and it is easy for corruption to take root when people can’t keep a close eye on what their officials are doing. People like Delegate B think that they will do better if power is decentralized (broken up and localized) and there is no strong central government. In fact, Delegate B would prefer a government like that provided by the Articles of Confederation. How do you reconcile these two very different agendas?

The solution adopted under the Articles of Confederation basically favored Delegate B’s position. The new Constitution, given the profiles of the delegates in attendance, was moving strongly in favor of Delegate A’s position. Naturally, the agreement of all those who followed Delegate B would be important in ratifying, or getting approval for, the final Constitution, so their concerns could not be ignored. The compromise chosen by the founders at the Constitutional Convention is called federalism. Unlike a confederation, in which the states retain the ultimate power over the whole, federalism gives the central government its own source of power, in this case the Constitution of the people of the United States. But unlike a unitary system, which we discuss in Chapter 3, federalism also gives independent power to the states.

federalism a political system in which power is divided between the central and regional units

Compared to how they fared under the Articles of Confederation, the advocates of states’ rights were losers under the new Constitution, but they were better off than they might have been. The states could have had all their power stripped away. The economic elite, people like Delegate A, were clear winners under the new rules. This proved to be one of the central issues during the ratification debates. Those who sided with the federalism alternative, who mostly resembled Delegate A, came to be known as Federalists. The people like Delegate B, who continued to hold on to the strong-state, weak-central-government option, were called Anti-Federalists. We return to them shortly.

Federalists supporters of the Constitution who favored a strong central government

Anti-Federalists advocates of states’ rights who opposed the Constitution