Revolution and Counterrevolution: The People vs. the Federalists
A blog post by Ben Price of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund published on July 3rd, 2019.
Fourth of July celebrations commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, not the U.S. Constitution of 1789. We should be thankful for that. The wealthy Federalists who overturned the first Constitution – the Articles of Confederation – replaced it with the rules that govern us to this day.
The Articles of Confederation and the political society it was created to protect had many grave flaws. But the Federalists did not aim to remedy forms of racial, gender and economic oppression perpetuated in the Articles. Instead, their priorities were in re-asserting and institutionalizing an elite status quo that was momentarily threatened by the Revolution’s upheaval. The new U.S. Constitution created a privatized government of sorts, which constitutionalized legislation that perpetuated legal advantages for the wealthy white elite, including through the Commerce Clause, the Fugitive Labor Clause, the Three-Fifths Clause, the Contract Clause, and others.
The Federalists’ new constitution was drafted in secret. In it, the Federalists took the right of self-government away from communities and centralized power in a government far-removed from the people. Instead of the egalitarian, non-hierarchical direct democracy Thomas Paine and his militant revolutionaries advocated for, the Federalists proposed a government that would quietly replace the King with a wealthy home-grown American aristocracy.
Democratic Ideals
The Declaration of Independence wasn’t the original work of Thomas Jefferson. He borrowed such phrases as “consent of the governed,” and ideas like “the people are the source of governing authority,” from peasants who demanded control over the British House of Commons. A century later, these were ideas that resonated with colonists in North America.
(Read the rest of Ben Price’s article HERE.)