The Lovers' Quarrel: The Two Foundings and American Political Development PDF
Preview The Lovers' Quarrel: The Two Foundings and American Political Development
The Lovers’ Quarrel The Lovers’ Quarrel The Two Foundings and American Political Development ELVIN T. LIM 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the LOC Lim, Elvin T., The lovers’ quarrel : the two foundlings and american political development / Elvin T. Lim. 9780199812189 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To my friends CONTENTS Preface IX Acknowledgments XVII 1. The Lovers’ Quarrel: A Tale of Two Foundings CHAPTER 1 2. Federalists, Republicans, & the Revolution of 1800 CHAPTER 34 3. Anti-Federalism & the Howls of Jacksonian CHAPTER Democracy 60 4. The Civil War & Publius Redux CHAPTER 80 5. Anti-Federalism & the Progressive Creative CHAPTER Destruction 110 6. The New Deal & the Nationalized Rhetoric of the CHAPTER Small Republic 132 7. Anti-Federalism & the Reagan Revolution CHAPTER 153 8. Epilogue: The Tea Party, Obama, & Beyond CHAPTER 180 Appendix I: A Defense of APD Defined as Durable Shifts in Federal Authority 211 Appendix II: The Federalist Legacy 220 Appendix III: The Anti-Federalist Legacy 223 Notes 227 Index 283 PREFACE This is a work of synthesis, out of which a theory of American political develop- ment (APD) and American political thought (APT) emerges. It offers a story of America that I believe is best told by the heuristic of a distinctly American Lovers’ Quarrel. The United States operates on a two-party system not just be- cause of its single-member district, winner-take-all electoral system. Political scientists tell us that single-member districts incentivize “out” parties to band together to defeat the “in” and over time, this logic compresses a multiplicity of voices into a two-party framework. This may be, but the institutional ex- planation alone does not explain why the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists settled on the system of representation and governance that they did in the first place, with one half of the Constitution blithely promulgating powers and the other half jealously guarding rights.1 Ideological explanations do a little better to explain the nature of our politics. Yet our political debates are not fully captured by the European imports from Hayek or Marx, or even from Locke or Machiavelli. Even if they were, the question is, why have we selected thinkers to perpetuate our perennial quarrel about diversity versus unity, Plu- ribus or Unum? Philosophers don’t pick us; we pick them. I propose that above all, the nature of APD derives from the historically contingent fact that America is unique in the world for having democratically enacted two constitutions in the brief span of seven years. When the Federal- ists asked Americans in the various states to ratify their proposed Constitu- tion, they were also asking them to invalidate the Articles of Confederation and the extant conception of union—confederalism, or a league of friend- ship between fully sovereign states—and to replace it with a more consoli- dated union whereby the states parted with some of their sovereignty to form a central government. These questions were answered in the affirmative in 1787–1789, but not for all time. As soon as the new Congress convened, the Anti-Federalists secured a piece of the First Founding in the new Constitution, ix
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