Happy Anniversary, Federalist No. 1!

[Valin]

Hot Air:

Tina Korbe
10/28/11

These days, especially among Tea Partiers, it’s a marker of immense credibility to be called a “constitutional conservative.” But, as with any label, the term is easily coopted, applied as a veneer atop entrenched pro-growth-of-government ideas. Fortunately, we have in The Federalist an eloquent exposition of the intent of the Framers and a sure interpretation of the Constitution.

As it happens, Alexander Hamilton penned the first of the Federalist papers 224 years ago today. Surely that anniversary is worth commemorating, especially as Hamilton’s first-paragraph encapsulation of just what was at stake in the American experiment remains one of the briefest illuminations of the import of that experiment in history and around the world.

First, let’s recall that first paragraph:

t seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

David Azerrad explains the significance for us today:

At stake in the debate to ratify the Constitution was more than “your liberty, your dignity, and your happiness”—important as they were and remain: Americans were embarking on an experiment in self-government that would, if successful, vindicate man before all the princes, kings, and assorted thinkers who had firmly denied that men could govern themselves.

At the heart of the Founding, as James Madison would later explain in Federalist No. 39, was “that honorable determination, which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all of our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”

(Snip)