Federalist Principles

I. Federalist Values

Federalist values emerge from America’s experience, a synthesis of its Western moral and cultural heritages, its British colonial formation and the circumstances of its independence and constitutional government. This is best summarized in the document that affirmed the new American nation, the Declaration of Independence. It begins with the values of the old religious tradition: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Creator, of course, was the Jewish foundation for God the Father in the Christian creed. And life, liberty, and happiness summarized the values English philosopher John Locke said were granted by Him to all people as individual rights that governments must respect. If governments did not limit themselves in this manner, the people had a moral right to resist or even rebel. The remainder of the Declaration was a practical spelling out of grievances that Americans held against the King in a commonsensical attempt to win over the “opinion of mankind” to the justness of their new order of limited government based on individuals with moral responsibilities.

The Constitution explicitly followed in that tradition by seeing human nature not as simplistically good or evil but as a balance between angelic and troublesome tendencies, as documented in its justifying work, The Federalist Papers. According to the “father of the Constitution” James Madison, differences, divisions, factions, and even conflict are innate to social life. The only way to eliminate these and other differences, he argued in Federalist 10, would be for government to extinguish liberty or force people all to think the same. Both require the improper and imprudent use of force by government. Suppressing liberty would be like eliminating air because it feeds fire and fire can be dangerous. Liberty is essential to healthy social life, even if it can be abused. Likewise, if people are free, it is impossible for all to have the same views. Rather, differences in views and about property must be protected as the “first object” of government. The only way to respect liberty and protect property and religious differences is to create an independent secular government that is limited in the powers that it can exercise over them. In that way, both secular and religious freedom can be guaranteed.

“A dependence upon the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government,” Madison summarized, “but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” These further “precautions” were governmental institutions that were popularly based but also had some independence from popular passion to act on their own for the public good. The new government’s national scope meant that the larger the geographical area covered, the less likely popular prejudice in one region could adversely affect the whole. But the major precaution was to divide power between different institutions—between state and national levels and among legislative, executive, and judicial national institutions.

This separation of powers was the central underlying principle of the whole new government. These check and balance powers between separate institutions would allow government action when required and for limiting power when laws might endanger individual rights. Natural human ambition would check ambition in different power institutions so that no one institution—even the most democratic one—could dominate the rest and threaten liberty. The Constitution’s job was primarily to define the institutions of this check-and-balance government where neither executive, legislative, judicial, states nor people are supreme. As Article I, Section 8, made clear, the national government was supposed to act only in seventeen or so well-defined circumstances and the division of power made it difficult to accomplish even these few.

With only a score of powers or so directly granted to the national government, how could the people obtain the things they needed for a decent social life? The French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville performed the most systematic and influential investigation of what made the new American democracy tick. When he looked for evidence of the effect of the new national government around the country, he found it quite absent. Almost everything was accomplished outside of national government, which primarily handled national defense and limited inter-state commerce matters. Yet, he concluded, while the institutions of central power were missing, the people carried the nation in their hearts. Paradoxically, this made Americans more patriotic than Europeans, whose national governments were visible and present everywhere. The American government, being less intrusive in people’s lives, could be loved that much more.

The only effective government de Tocqueville discovered in America was local government. Indeed, the overwhelming amount of government activity was local until the early 20th century in the United States. Even more work was performed by voluntary associations. These and local government performed much more than state and national government combined. To him, wide participation in formal and informal associations was democracy in action—direct civic action was much more important than was mere voting participation. With no hereditary nobility and a wide franchise, there was a certain equality between citizens that made them feel part of the community and willing to act voluntarily to support it. It was not the national government, as in France, nor a socially-conscious aristocracy, as in Britain, that accomplished great works in America, de Tocqueville concluded. It was local people with the freedom to solve their own problems that encouraged them to act in the community—and act more effectively than national government or aristocracy ever could.

The unique insight of the U.S. Constitution was to divide power and have no single, ultimate source for it. All of the institutions would check each other to restrain abuses by the other. It was based upon a complex understanding of human nature recognizing both its negative and positive aspects if controlled and its positive possibilities under freedom to accomplish great things. This was so radical that Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 9 called it a “new science of politics”—the idea that a people could disperse power, over a large expanse of territory, into a divided legislature, an independent court, a restricted executive, and sovereign states, with a free people, and still have a successful government. This new and very complex way of thinking gives new insight into how peoples and leaders must cooperate if society is to operate successfully.

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