Treacherous Politics

Anyone who has read Founding Brothers, or any other great read about the men who founded this country, can't help but be blown away by how different politics were back then.  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the Federalists and anti-Federalists, were locked in an epic ideological struggle, the result of which has shaped the entire development of this nation.  At the end of the day, neither Adams nor Jefferson wanted to surrender the rights that the Americans had fought so bravely to secure.  Jefferson believed that the largest threat to these freedoms was a strong national government, and Adams believed that both external and internal threats, combined with the weakness of the early nation, could inevitably lead to the fall of the United States, dissolving the American dream in cataclysm.  Somewhere along the road, the debate became more defined as the tension between liberal interpretation (loose, spirit of the law, pragmatic) and the conservative interpretation (strict, cautionary, individualistic) of the Constitution of the United States.  The Federalists believed that the best way to secure liberty was to ensure strength, security, and prosperity for the people of the United States.  Problems and threats were to be treated pragmatically in order to form a more perfect union.  The anti-Federalists feared the construction of a dragon that would devour itself, a strong centralized government that would replace the King with a bureaucracy and special interests.  Trading big government for security and prosperity was not a risk the anti-Federalists were willing to take.

I could write about how neither the modern Democrats nor the modern Republicans fit the liberal nor conservative label.  After all, it is the "Conservative" party that would like to define marriage, revise the 14th amendment, mandate English as the official language of the United States, and even change the way senators are elected.  Perhaps the most glaring departure from strict interpretation would be the method that congress has used to wage war without a declaration of war by congress, and this is made even more striking when wars are waged preemptively.  On the other hand, proponents of gay marriage are very happy that our founding fathers didn't define marriage in our founding documents.

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