But now, at a moment when so many of the Constitution's vaunted democratic safeguards seem to be breaking down, the Anti-Federalists' legacy may be due for a more respectful reassessment. As a matter of fact, the Anti-Federalists deserve credit for seeing the future quite clearly, and for perceiving, long before the rest of us could, some of the Constitution's most dangerous latent defects. So what did the Anti-Federalists believe? And what led them to oppose the Constitution's ratification?
Anti-Federalist thinking was complex, and Anti-Federalists disagreed with one another on many specific policy questions. Indeed, their fractiousness explains, in part, why they failed to defeat the Constitution. But at the core of Anti-Federalism was a coherent set of beliefs about human nature, the promise and peril of democracy, and how to design democratic institutions. The late, great political theorist Wilson Carey McWilliams summed up the Anti-Federalists' fundamental beliefs this way:
"The Anti-Federalists began with the conviction, axiomatic in traditional political science, that the measure of a republic is the public spirit of its citizens. The grounds for this view are simple and probably unanswerable: a republic is self-governing only to the extent that laws are enforced by citizens as well as made by them. Self-rule includes rule over the self. Members of a society are not fully autonomous if they are compelled by others to obey the law. Republican excellence [that is, small "r" republican excellence], therefore, requires strong assent, a commitment to abide by the law, and submitting one's conduct to a common rule."
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