Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/09/how-to-assess-the-federalist-p.html
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It’s difficult if not impossible to imagine a group of the most prominent politicians in the country writing at this level today with the goal of swaying public opinion.
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This level of analysis and anxiety over the founding fathers is really starting to bleed into etymological religious scholarship, and into a kind of legal and political idolatry. Are we trying to decide which ad-hominems or halos to use when dismissing or lauding legal decisions based on the other things we know about the authors? While not a terrible strategy, politically, wouldn’t the more socially responsible path be to just decide which ideas and laws we agree with as a nation, rather than on whether they came from our preferred godhead?
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It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.
(Federalist No. 1)
It looks like the question has been decided; around 200 years after it had been put.
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Spoiler: most of them were by Hamilton.
Work!
It’s turned into that, but as a direct side effect of the country/city divide that’s affected the country since (and before) it shook off British rule. So you have exurbanite “rugged individualists” who venerate the Confederacy (some of them “very fine people”) ending up citing Jeffersonians like Madison to justify their views while urban economic elites are fond of saying that Hamilton is the main man in defining the nation’s core values (or at least those important to them).
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great, so #SecondCivilWar is going to be more like the crusades…
ETA: Thirty Years War might be the more relevant reference…
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Fun fact! One of the original reasons the grep program was created was to search the Federalist Papers!
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Or a contemporaneous religious war.
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Never before has somebody with such proclivity to lie been able to pass through all the hurdles required to actually get on the ticked an run. Its been enabled by the influence of money on elections. Period.
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and now it’s mostly used to parse NSA databases created w/o a warrant 
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A nondualist might say that the entirety of the history of humanity has been an ongoing dialogue between these two nodal points.
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