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Compare And Contrast Federalist And Anti Federalists

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Tyqueze Walker
September 15, 2015
Federalist Vs Anti-Federalist

Mr. Storing makes a sequence of valuable points about why we should take note to what the Anti-Federalists had to say, both for reasons of historical understanding, and, perchance surprisingly, because of the continued relevance of their arguments. If federalism is understood to highlight the divided nature of power inside a nation, between states on the one hand and a central authority on the other, then it was the Anti-Federalists who preferred such a division. They were more the defenders of the power of the states. The Federalists advocated the concentration of greater power in the hands of a central government even at the expense of the states. Thus, when we hear people who favor states’ rights today refer to themselves as Federalists and suggest that they are merely returning to the original understanding of the Founders, they are right and wrong, right in that they are small "f" federalists, but wrong about the federalist position prevailing in the Constitution. The absurdity is that when the Federalists won, the harsh results was that federalism had lost. …show more content…

Storing makes the fact that it is the very nature of a political process like the one that fashioned the Constitution for reasoning and compromising to occur. The Anti-Federalists may not have "prevailed" in the debate, but the ideas and beliefs the shared would still have played an important role in shaping the final document. In much the way, a negotiation between a Corporation and its unions may be "accomplished" by one side, but it would still not have received everything it started out demanding for. Were you to look only at the final agreement and only through the lens of one side having "won", you could deceive yourself into believing that the agreement was solely their product. This is obviously false but it is somewhat the approach that has traditionally been taken to the

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