“The vigour of government,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the very first of the Federalist papers, “is essential to the security of liberty.” The goal, he put it later on, is “a happy mean” which combines “the energy of government with the security of private rights.” Constitution precisely because, so thought the anti-Federalists, it arrogated too much power to a central authority at the expense of the states.īut just this, the Founders argued, was the price of creating and maintaining that “more perfect union” of which the Constitution speaks.
The Federalist Papers, after all, took aim at the abundant anti-Federalist commentary that opposed the proposed U.S. It is worth acknowledging that the Founders, although deeply concerned with limiting the sphere of government power, were also concerned with forging a strong and efficient federal government. Those powers, he said, were “numerous and indefinite,” extending to “all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” Is that still the case? He did, however, have a lot to say about the powers delegated to the individual states. Somehow, neither climate change nor transgender bathrooms nor “unlawful acts of hate”-the latest wheeze from the executive branch-made the cut when Madison was enumerating the powers of the federal government. In Federalist 45, Madison noted that the powers delegated by the Constitution to the federal government were “few and defined.” Those powers, he said, pertained mostly to “external objects” like war, peace, and foreign commerce. But is that dispensation still alive? Or is it, like virtue according to Falstaff, mere “air,” words without a corresponding reality? We still give lip service to the dispensation they described and helped to devise. Perhaps their descriptions of the structure of the governing apparatus were accurate when they wrote at the end of the eighteenth century. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison said a lot of lofty things about the nature of the proposed Constitution of the United States. This can happen, in fact it usually does happen, even when a soothing political rhetoric assures the public that everything is just fine, that the canons of our forefathers are just as operative today as they were in the past.Įxamples are not far to seek. One way is when its governing apparatus becomes detached from or is at odds with the laws and mores that define it. There are several ways in which a regime can declare its illegitimacy. In such situations, conservatism degenerates into a largely rhetorical exercise. It mouths the same pieties that once rallied the troops, but it does so nervously, either without conviction or with that brittle belligerence that substitutes for conviction in decadent times.
In so far as its habits, rituals, and formalities persist, they contract into increasingly antiquarian gestures, detached from the vital pulse of lived experience. Conservatism, in any normal understanding of the word, depends upon a generally acknowledged and widely shared sense of legitimacy if it is to survive.Ībsent the authority of legitimacy, conservatism has nothing to conserve.
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