Federalists and anti-federalists

Just how far could the right take nullification of federal law?

From the first day under the Philadelphia constitution right up to the start of the 20^th Century, there have been in American politics a nationalist party standing for an omnicompetent central government assigning the states a weak and strictly subordinate role opposed to an anti-nationalist party standing for weak central government and strong state governments.

The Philadelphia constitution itself represents a compromise between nationalists who wanted a much more centralized national government, the states left a distinctly subordinate role if not abolished altogether, and the anti-nationalists many of whom would have preferred the Union continue under the Articles of Confederation and some of whom even refused to sign the new constitution they helped to write.

At the beginning of the life of the new republic, the nationalist party was the Federalists and the anti-nationalist party was the Jeffersonian Republicans, renamed the Democrats in the early 19^th Century.

By the end of the Civil War the party system had altered and Jefferson’s Republicans had survived as the Democrats while the Federalists had disappeared, replaced by a new nationalist party, the Republicans.

Both parties have continued into our time, but at the turn of the 18^th to the 19^th Centuries, with the rise of progressivism, they began to swap roles, with the Democrats favoring strong national government fostering the progressive agenda and the Republicans moving into opposition to defend laissez-faire – a process much accelerated by the Great Depression and the four term presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

After the Second World War they continued the process of swapping post-Civil War constituencies during the civil rights struggle, the Democrats becoming the party of choice for American blacks and other non-whites and the Republicans become more predominantly a white party.

And at the same time they swapped regional bases, the South being the stronghold today of the Republicans and the rest of the country being divided between crossover states and others more or less dominated by the Democrats.

Of all this history, Ann Coulter in Mugged sees only that from the Civil War to the height of the civil rights clashes of the mid-20^th Century the Democrats were the party of white supremacy, segregation, and Jim Crow while the Republicans had crushed slavery and struggled mightily during the Reconstruction decades for legal and social equality for American blacks.

In truth, the principal opposition to the civil rights revolution came from the Democrats of the southern states, while the movement was relatively firmly supported by the Republicans and rather less so by liberal Democrats, though by the 1960's Lyndon Johnson, previously a defender of segregation, had become a supporter of civil rights.

Here we are barely into the second decade of the 21st Century and the Republicans are revisiting the positions of the pre-Civil War Jeffersonians.

Why the big exchange of positions, by the way?

Before 1900 strong national power was a tool for the rich and business interests against ordinary folk, at the time yeoman farmers.

After that strong national power was a tool for for the ordinary people of America, in ever larger part employees of others, against the rich and business interests of the country.

It took Herbert Croly about 600 pages to trumpet that change, in 1909.

American blacks being overwhelmingly not among the rich, it has behooved them to remain in the Democratic fold long after the battles over segregation and Jim Crow were fought and won by them and their allies.

With few exceptions, the same has been true of other minorities and notably so of Hispanics.