Federalist And Anti Federalist

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The Role of Federalist and Antifederalist Thought During the New Deal Era The legacy of dissention between Federalists and Antifederalists has long played a role in American history. In the creation of government programs and waves of thought such as the New Deal, Great Society, and New Nationalism, both either combined or claimed pieces from the arguments of our founding fathers. William A. Schambra, in his essay “The Roots of the American Public Philosophy,” discusses the convergence of these two bifurcating ideologies - the unity of both Federalist and Anti-federalist thought, a feat which had only first occurred in the 1930s, well over a hundred years after the Constitutional Convention. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program – his answer to the Great Depression – and Lyndon B. Johnson’s more contemporary Great Society plan were two examples of governmental action which invoked both federalist and anti-federalist values. The Federalist cause, championed by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, was one which valued diversity, property, and even to some degree inequality. The primary enemy of any Federalist man was the existence of factions. Factions, according to Federalism, were groups who terrorized the rights of people. Both Madison and Hamilton believed that an emphasis on gaining property and money would quell any factional outburst: “And a modern commercial nation, organized for the acquisition of property and thus characterized by the division of labor, would be fragmented into such a diversity or ‘multiplicity’ of interests that the great, fatal struggle of rich and poor would be averted”(37). Although Federalists acknowledged that a government which places high importance on the acquisition of wealth would cause inequality, it was this exact inequality “followed inevitably from the freedom that the large commercial republic made possible:

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