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My Thoughts on The Federalist Papers

29 May

Life is largely about trade-offs. Take the metal shop I work in, for example: Sure it’s heavy, dirty, sweaty manual labor without air conditioning (and my coworkers tell me that I haven’t even experienced a truly hot day there yet), but on the flipside, I can listen to my MP3 player all day. This means I listen to a lot of music, of course, but even moreso that I can seriously crank through some audiobooks during my workdays. My reading tastes are pretty eclectic, but mostly these days I’m leaning toward a lot of old public domain books these days– some merely for my own enjoyment (pulp sci-fi and gothic horror like Uller Uprising and Carmilla, children’s fantasy like The Princess and The Goblin and Pinocchio, and sweeping literary epics like David Copperfield), but some that I feel like I should read simply because they’re good for me, regardless of whether or not I find them entertaining. While running a saw, I’m a pretty captive audience, and have managed over the past several months to get through several long classics that I may not have had the patience for had I been simply reading them (The Iliad and Dante’s Divine Comedy are a couple of examples). Over the past week or so I’ve been listening to The Federalist Papers, which definitely fall into the latter of these two categories.

If you’re not familiar with The Federalist Papers, they were a series of essays written primarily by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison which provided a logical foundation and defense of the original United States constitution. My feelings while reading these were a little mixed– On one hand I feel like I have at least a little better appreciation for the work America’s founding fathers did to get this nation started up, but on the other hand, let’s be honest, they weren’t exactly a thrill a minute. Loaded with important but boring details on various aspects of taxation, foreign and domestic policy, this was definitely a “eat my vegetables” kind of book. Attempting to come up with a comprehensive review of all the content covered would be difficult, but I would like to share a few of my reactions which, while probably not earth-shattering, are worth mentioning here.

1. The USA is a pretty incredible thing.

As a guy who’s grown up under the red, white, and blue, it’s easy to often take America and our way of doing things as kind of a given. It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t always the case– that in fact, in the scheme of world history, the American experiment is still relatively young. A large portion of The Federalist Papers is spent essentially arguing in this manner (paraphrase) “We have this idea for a thing we’ll call America. Here’s a few reasons people say it won’t work, and here’s why they’re wrong.” The mere idea that the constitution, and, for that matter, the union itself, had such fierce dissenters in the early post-revolution days was surprising to me, and showed me afresh how cool it is that our country was even founded at all.

2. The founding fathers were men of both forethought and gutsy action.

This is related, I suppose, to my first thought, but it’s worth elaborating on here. These essays are full of well-reasoned arguments on all sorts of subjects. The forefathers strike me as both optimists and realists; they expected to see the best from the people of America, but specifically set up systems to guard against the pitfalls of human nature. At the same time, though, they recognized that they were starting something new and that there would inevitably be kinks to work out along the way, but, rather than waiting till everything was perfect (which would be never) they saw value in stepping out boldly. That took courage.

3. In general, people are dumber today (?)

If I’ve not made it clear by this point, The Federalist Papers were not an easy read. I struggled through portions of them, and I like to consider myself pretty astute when it comes to literary matters. However, these essays, initially printed in Newspapers, were initially intended for an audience of average New York farmers. I wonder how well the average U.S. citizen today would do at reading through this material.

4. America has come a long way… but not all necessarily good.

Obviously, this country has grown and evolved since these papers were written. While our constitution remains, our government and population have changed. Some of these changes are great… some not so great. I won’t elaborate too much on this (I’ve already gone on too long and I generally find political debates distasteful), but I do wonder what the founding fathers would think if they were to see the way American government is run today. Would they even recognize it? Sometimes I wonder, and never more than as I read (listened) through their initial plans.

Publias.

 
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Posted by on May 29, 2014 in Blog

 

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