This is Part Two of a special four-part series by Jeffery Wernick for ScheerPost: How We Got Here.
Episode 2: The Anti-Federalists Were Right
► Part 1: James Madison
► Part 2: The Anti-Federalists
► Part 3: Paine, Spooner & Money
► Part 4: What It Means Today
How We Got Here is a ScheerPost series examining the relationship between constitutional power, monetary authority, and the evolution of the modern American state.
How We Got Here — Episode 2
The Anti-Federalists Were Right
A Cleaned and Edited Transcript of Jeffery Wernick’s ScheerPost Series
Editor’s Note:
The transcript below has been lightly edited for readability, grammar, punctuation, and formatting while preserving Jeffery Wernick’s original words, arguments, and intent. No substantive content has been altered. Repetitions, transcription artifacts, and minor speech irregularities common to automated transcription have been removed to create a cleaner reading experience.
This is Part Two of How We Got Here, a special four-part series by Jeffery Wernick for ScheerPost.
Episode 2: The Anti-Federalists Were Right
In the last episode, I talked about James Madison and the design he built to constrain power. I closed by saying that there were people at the time of ratification who looked at the same design Madison was defending and concluded it would not hold.
They read the same human nature, the same constitutional text, and the same political situation Madison read. They reached a different conclusion.
They were called the Anti-Federalists.
They lost the ratification fight, and I told you they have been proven right by what came after.
This episode is about them.
I want to walk through who they were, what they actually said, what specifically they predicted, and what has happened in the centuries since.
The reason this matters is not to settle a 240-year-old argument. The reason it matters is that the Anti-Federalist position is the one piece of American political tradition that most reliably described what was going to happen.
If you want to understand the country you live in now, you have to understand the people who told the founding generation in 1787 and 1788 what would tend to happen under the document Madison was defending.
They were dismissed as alarmists. They were treated as parochial obstructionists who could not see the necessity of a stronger union.
Their predictions have, in substantial measure, been vindicated.
The Federalists won ratification.
The Anti-Federalists won the argument that mattered — the argument about what would tend to happen under the structure they were ratifying.
Who Were the Anti-Federalists?
Let me start by clearing up what the Anti-Federalists were not.
They were not against union. Most agreed that some stronger federal structure than the Articles of Confederation was needed.
Their objection was to this Constitution specifically and to the reading of human nature and political incentives on which Madison’s defense of it rested.
They thought Madison was reading the situation wrongly.
The Anti-Federalists were also not a unified movement with a single doctrine.
They were a coalition of writers, politicians, farmers, lawyers, and merchants who disagreed with each other about many things.
What united them was a shared skepticism that the proposed Constitution contained sufficient structural protections against the abuse of the powers it conferred.
Some wanted minor amendments.
Others wanted fundamental restructuring.
Still others believed the entire project of a strong central government was incompatible with self-government as it had been understood in the American colonies.
The label “Anti-Federalist” itself was a political invention.
The pro-ratification side captured the word “Federalist” first, even though the Anti-Federalists were actually the defenders of the older federal arrangement of dispersed authority among the states.
The centralizers got to call themselves Federalists.
The actual federalists got stuck with a negative prefix.
It was effective political marketing.
It also obscured what the Anti-Federalists actually stood for: a more dispersed and locally accountable form of republican government than the Constitution proposed.
Among the most important Anti-Federalist figures were Patrick Henry, George Mason, Brutus, the Federal Farmer, Sentinel, and Mercy Otis Warren.
What matters is not simply who they were.
What matters is what they predicted.
And many of those predictions proved remarkably accurate.
Four Predictions
The Anti-Federalists made specific structural arguments about how particular provisions of the Constitution would be interpreted and used.
Their warnings centered on four major areas:
- The Federal Judiciary
- Standing Armies
- The Necessary and Proper Clause and General Welfare Clause
- Monetary Authority
The arguments were precise.
The historical record is striking.
The Federal Judiciary
Brutus offered one of the most prescient critiques of the Constitution ever written.
He argued that the Supreme Court would eventually become one of the most powerful branches of government.
His reasoning was straightforward:
- Federal judges would have life tenure.
- They would be insulated from democratic accountability.
- They would gradually acquire the power to determine the meaning of the Constitution itself.
Most remarkably, Brutus predicted that the courts would expand federal authority through interpretation.
He wrote that judicial power would operate in a “silent and imperceptible manner” to enlarge federal authority and diminish state authority.
That prediction proved remarkably accurate.
From McCulloch v. Maryland to Gibbons v. Ogden, from the post-Civil War constitutional framework to the New Deal era, federal power expanded through judicial interpretation.
The transformation happened not through a single dramatic act but through the accumulation of rulings across generations.
Brutus predicted precisely that.
Standing Armies
The Anti-Federalists also warned about permanent military institutions.
Patrick Henry argued that once a standing army existed, it would create its own constituencies:
- Officers would want commands.
- Soldiers would want employment.
- Contractors would want contracts.
- Politicians would find reasons to continue funding it.
The Constitution required military appropriations to be renewed every two years.
Federalists claimed this would prevent permanent militarization.
Henry disagreed.
He argued the renewal process would become a formality.
History largely vindicated that concern.
The United States today maintains a global military presence, hundreds of overseas installations, and defense spending approaching a trillion dollars annually.
The standing army became permanent.
The two-year review remains.
But it rarely functions as the meaningful restraint Hamilton envisioned.
Necessary and Proper, General Welfare
The Anti-Federalists viewed these clauses as constitutional trap doors.
If interpreted broadly, they warned, federal authority would eventually become unlimited in practice.
Federalists insisted the clauses were merely procedural and tied to enumerated powers.
The Anti-Federalists replied that future generations would interpret the words themselves, not the assurances made during ratification.
They were right.
The Necessary and Proper Clause has supported everything from national banks to federal agencies.
The General Welfare Clause has underpinned the modern federal spending state.
Today, the doctrine of strictly enumerated powers occupies a far smaller role in constitutional practice than Federalists anticipated.
Monetary Authority
The final prediction connects directly to the larger argument of this series.
The Anti-Federalists understood that constitutional limits ultimately depend upon fiscal limits.
A government that can continually expand its financial resources will pressure every constitutional restraint surrounding it.
They worried that centralized monetary authority would eventually be used to finance expansions of federal power beyond what taxation alone would support.
They did not predict the Federal Reserve.
They did not predict the abandonment of the gold standard.
But they did predict the broader tendency:
That monetary authority would expand alongside political authority.
That fiscal capacity would become the engine driving institutional growth.
That future generations would bear the costs.
In that sense, they saw the pattern long before the institutions themselves emerged.
The Anti-Federalists Lost the Vote. Did They Win the Argument?
The Federalists won ratification.
The Anti-Federalists lost.
But over the next 240 years, many of the Anti-Federalists’ structural predictions proved more accurate than those of their opponents.
The judiciary expanded.
The military became permanent.
Federal authority broadened through interpretation.
Monetary power grew alongside political power.
In that sense, they won the longer argument.
They were also responsible for one of the most important achievements in American constitutional history:
The Bill of Rights.
The first ten amendments were adopted largely because Anti-Federalists demanded them.
Freedom of speech.
Freedom of religion.
The right to a jury trial.
Protection against unreasonable searches.
Many of the rights Americans most frequently invoke today are products of Anti-Federalist pressure.
The Constitution Americans actually live under is, in many respects, a Federalist framework constrained by Anti-Federalist amendments.
Conclusion
The Anti-Federalists were not perfect.
Some of their fears were excessive.
Some of their alternatives may not have worked.
And parts of the tradition later became entangled with causes, including slavery, that deserve honest criticism.
But on the central structural questions of power, they saw the future more clearly than the men who defeated them.
A serious constitutionalist in 2026 may, in many respects, be a posthumous Anti-Federalist.
The deeper question is whether the Constitution failed because its safeguards were abandoned — or because those safeguards were never sufficient to restrain power in the first place.
That question leads directly into the next episode.
In Episode 3, we turn to Thomas Paine and Lysander Spooner, who pushed these arguments further and examined the connection between constitutional power, money, and the modern state.
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