The Counter-Revolution of 1787

[Fife]

Who else is fascinated with how the period of the Articles of Confederation got squashed?

Check out the podcast youtube below, and let's discuss. Does anyone else have good content on the topic?

Here's a good podcast interview with Sheldon Richman, discussing his book America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited

This book challenges the assumption that the Constitution was a landmark in the struggle for liberty. Instead, Sheldon Richman argues, it was the product of a counter-revolution, a setback for the radicalism represented by America’s break with the British empire. Drawing on careful, credible historical scholarship and contemporary political analysis, Richman suggests that this counter-revolution was the work of conservatives who sought a nation of “power, consequence, and grandeur.” America’s Counter-Revolution makes a persuasive case that the Constitution was a victory not for liberty but for the agendas and interests of a militaristic, aristocratic, privilege-seeking ruling class.

Some other reading:

How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America

He is the star of a hit Broadway musical, the face on the ten dollar bill, and a central figure among the founding fathers. But do you really know Alexander Hamilton?

Rather than lionize Hamilton, Americans should carefully consider his most significant and ultimately detrimental contribution to modern society: the shredding of the United States Constitution.

Connecting the dots between Hamilton’s invention of implied powers in 1791 to transgender bathrooms and same-sex marriage two centuries later, Brion McClanahan shows the origins of our modern federal leviathan.

Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Martin Luther

The Anti-Federalist Luther Martin of Maryland is known to us—if he is known at all—as the wild man of the Constitutional Convention: a verbose, frequently drunken radical who annoyed the hell out of James Madison, George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, and the other giants responsible for the creation of the Constitution in Philadelphia that summer of 1787. In Bill Kauffman’s rollicking account of his turbulent life and times, Martin is still something of a fitfully charming reprobate, but he is also a prophetic voice, warning his heedless contemporaries and his amnesiac posterity that the Constitution, whatever its devisers’ intentions, would come to be used as a blueprint for centralized government and a militaristic foreign policy.

The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution

"The Framers' Coup is the first comprehensive account of the entire struggle for the United States Constitution, from the inception of the amalgamating impulse in the early 1780s all the way through to the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791. A lot of us who write books about the Constitution are about to see our royalties trail off, because Michael Klarman, in a brisk narrative, deftly summarizes all the major interpretations in developing his own provocative and persuasive take. I for one will take my lumps, because this book is a beaut."-Woody Holton, Bancroft Prize winner and author of Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution

[brewster]

Listened to the podcast. Favorite part of the talk was the repudiation of Scalian Originalism as ridiculous. What bothers me about a lot of the anti Hamiltonian positions is they rarely go into what the alternative history would look like. I asked here a while back what the US 19th century would have looked like had Jeffersonians been successful in rolling back Federalism. Got criticism of Hamilton but no speculation.

My take is Jeffersonian Agrarianism was an obsolete idea. when it's time to railroad, people start railroading. It was time for manufacturing, and that took capital, which meant sophisticated banking and trade structures. All of which was baked into the Constitution. Yes, it was modeled on Britain, which was the most sophisticated trading nation. But it didn't mean the Hamiltonians wanted a king.

[Speaker to Animals]

The weird thing about it is how effective the propaganda is even though the argument behind it is so weak. If you ask somebody why we needed to go from the confederation to the federation, they say the Articles of Confederation were too weak. It's like one of the original slogan memes from two centuries ago. Nobody can explain how that was so or whether it was fixed. They just repeat the phrase as if that should be sufficient.

[brewster]

The weird thing about it is how effective the propaganda is even though the argument behind it is so weak. If you ask somebody why we needed to go from the confederation to the federation, they say the Articles of Confederation were too weak. It's like one of the original slogan memes from two centuries ago. Nobody can explain how that was so or whether it was fixed. They just repeat the phrase as if that should be sufficient.

Most Americans can't tell you if the earth goes around the sun and how long it takes, so I can't argue with your generalization. But many of us do know.

Here's my favorites:
6. The central government couldn’t collect taxes to fund its operations. The Confederation relied on the voluntary efforts of the states to send tax money to the central government. Lacking funds, the central government couldn’t maintain an effective military or back its own paper currency.

7. States were able to conduct their own foreign policies. Technically, that role fell to the central government, but the Confederation government didn’t have the physical ability to enforce that power, since it lacked domestic and international powers and standing.

8. States had their own money systems. There wasn’t a common currency in the Confederation era. The central government and the states each had separate money, which made trade between the states, and other countries, extremely difficult.

9. The Confederation government couldn’t help settle Revolutionary War-era debts. The central government and the states owed huge debts to European countries and investors. Without the power to tax, and with no power to make trade between the states and other countries viable, the United States was in an economic mess by 1787.

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/10- ... ion-failed

They left off that the states could each set their own tariff structures, making an incoherent mess, encouraging trade wars and smuggling between states since a state with high tariffs would try and interdict good imported into a low tariff state from being brought uncustomed into theirs.

If you want more, here it is from the horse's mouth. That being Madison, no friend of Hamilton.
http://americainclass.org/sources/makin ... nvices.pdf

[Speaker to Animals]

Are those supposed to be detracting examples of the confederation??

[C-Mag]

Whiskey Rebellion !

[TheReal_ND]

Quick rundown

[brewster]

Are those supposed to be detracting examples of the confederation??

Once more, it's easy to say what you didn't like about it. But what would have happened had it not been ratified? What would your glorious Libertarian paradise have looked like, 10, 20 50, 100 years later? Would VA & PA have had a war over the Ohio valley? Would all of the continent but New England be slaveholding? Or would England have reconquered the colonies, seeing a disorganized and broke mess with no ability anymore to borrow for war since they repudiated their previous debts and had no banking structure? What?

[TheReal_ND]

Retroactive justification the post.

"Because we have this shit hole of Weimarica to be thankful for it's totally justified!"

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

I don't think that is the point.

It is easy enough to imagine a counterfactual history where Jeffersonian style, agrarian democracy won the day, and we were all freer for it.

But when you compare an ideal to reality, reality is always going to get the short shrift.