5. Ant-Federalist though that we should not have a strong national (U.S.) government. Why is that a bad idea
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These lawyers and men of learning, and moneyed men that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us, poor illiterate people, swallow down the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves; they expect to be the managers of this Constitution, and get all the power and all the money into their own hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folks, like the great Leviathan…yes, just as the whale swallowed up Jonah.
— Amos Singletary, delegate from Worcester County at the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, January 25, 1788
In October 1787, only a month after the Constitutional Convention ended its deliberations and sent the finished Constitution to the states for ratification, Robert Yates, a judge from upstate New York, penned a prescient essay arguing against ratifying the Constitution. Yates worried the proposed constitution would create a government unaccountable to the people and that those in power would use it for the “purposes of gratifying their own interest and ambition.” “It is scarcely possible,” Yates wrote, “in a very large republic, to call them to account for their misconduct, or to prevent their abuse of power.”
Yates was an Anti‐Federalist, the name given to opponents of ratifying the Constitution. History is written by the winners, the saying goes, so nowadays the Anti‐Federalists are taught as a footnote in junior high American history class. Given our national reverence for the Constitution, they’re remembered as opponents to progress, as enemies to a government ordained and established by the people. At worst they’re considered knuckle‐dragging philistines who allowed their parochial concerns about states’ powers to trump the good of the nation. They’re the Pharisees of our political religion.
But the Anti‐Federalists are always with us, if in spirit rather than name, and we ignore them at our own peril. Country judges who complain about the highfalutin ways “back East,” populist governors who rail against the temerity of an overweening federal government, and the millions of people who just want to be left alone by Washington are all examples of the Anti‐Federalist impulse. Sometimes that political impulse sits in the background of the American political conversation, and sometimes it becomes the most popular show in town.