Benjamin David Steele said:
Many ultra-nationalists and imperialists declare my side won, my side gained control of the government in the constitutional crisis, my side defeated the Confederacy. The implication being that, since my side won, I am proven right. But that is simply the cynical pragmatism and utilitarianism of realpolitik or social Darwinism.
Sure, large powerful governments have often won greater power, control and territory. That is how they got so large in the first place. Then again, many small countries have maintained themselves over centuries. It's just the small countries don't dominate public debate on the global stage, as they don't attempt to control the world. Yet these small countries are the majority, even if a largely silenced majority.
I guess you weren't reading my comments then. The American colonies had already been effectively self-governing for most of the colonial era. Other smaller city-states and nation-states have effectively self-governed throughout history. In fact, most countries today still are small. You are surrounded by alternatives and don't have the eyes to see.
It was the alternatives that inspired the American revolutionaries. The Basque republic, the oldest European population, maintained their sovereignty for millennia. That is longer than most large nation-states and empires. And its example was key to the argument even Federalists made for why republicanism was possible, despite critics claim that it would fail. The US may have failed as a democracy, but as a republic it is still here. Republicanism was as unimaginable back then as democracy still is now for many
Yet the self-proclaimed ideological realists and pragmatists back then were wrong. Most countries have since then become republics, a once rare form of government that now is the norm. All because some radicals imagined it into existence.
Sure. But what does that prove? The argument can be reversed with equal truth and force:
There is nothing about Federal power that has the Federal government opposing state power in defense of their general citizens and a lot of examples of Federal government opposing state power in order to protect national and imperial tyranny. That is why the Anti-Federalist argument never fundamentally was about the superficial aspects of government such as being limited to an argument merely over size. It was more of an issue about what kind of governance.
That is why Thomas Paine was as much a liberal progressive and social democrat as he was a libertarian. It was about balance, but balance based on hard-fought principle and hard-earned experience. The colonists knew that they had greater freedom under the early colonial self-governance than they had when the British Empire got heavy-handed in its control later on. It wasn't that self-governance was perfect. But when local government failed, the local ruling elite could be held accountable by the local citizenry in a way not possible with a vast nation or empire with a distant government.
That early colonial experience has continued to inform the post-revolutionary American imagination, if not the official interpretation of the Constitution used to justify ever greater corruption. The Federal government has never done the right thing until local populations get restless and sometimes revolt. That is the entirety of American history, progress coming from the ground up.