The Anti-Federalists were the faction that opposed ratification of the U.S. Constitution drafted at the Philadelphia convention. On The Bob Zadek Show the term is used both historically — for the men who fought the Constitution in the ratifying conventions — and as a label for a set of warnings about federal power that guests treat as having been borne out. The show returns to the Anti-Federalists as the losing side of 1787–88 whose predictions, in the words of one guest, “all happened.”
The ratification battle
Carol Berkin describes how the Constitution’s framers, having finished the convention, discovered that opposition to their work “hit them like a piano on their head from a window.” The men who opposed the Constitution, she says, wanted all power to remain in the states, and they went to the ratifying conventions arguing that the framers were plotting a tyrannical government because they did not want to protect the rights and liberties of the people. Berkin adds that the framers were nationalists who wanted to take considerable power away from the states and to create a nation rather than a league of friendship among thirteen states; the powers they understood they would need included the power to tax, the power to regulate commerce, and the power to mint money. The opponents, she says, understood that goal completely, which is why Patrick Henry fought tooth and nail at the Virginia ratifying convention to defeat the Constitution, arguing that these powers would weaken the authority of the state governments. Carol Berkin on The Bill of Rights No One Wanted (2016)
Bob Zadek frames the same conflict from the other direction, arguing that the Constitution contains no reference to the rights of the people and that the framers believed they were building only an infrastructure — the mechanics of government — while the locus of government would remain in the states. He cites Berkin’s book for the point that Patrick Henry to his dying day considered his country to be Virginia. Berkin responds that the federal government of the period was a small thing that had to fight for obedience: when it passed its first tax, an excise law on distilled alcohol, people in Virginia, western Pennsylvania and South Carolina told it to go away and said they would not obey its laws. She urges readers to put their minds back in the eighteenth century, when the framers never pictured their government having anything to do with civil rights. Carol Berkin on The Bill of Rights No One Wanted (2016)
William Watkins Jr. supplies the show’s account of how the convention came about. He says the founders used the unrest, especially Shays’ Rebellion — a rebellion of debtors against creditors and of agrarian against moneyed interests — which scared everybody by demonstrating a weakness under the Articles of Confederation. When they met in Philadelphia in 1787, the ostensible purpose was to fix the Articles, but Madison arrived with the outlines of the Virginia Plan for a new government starting from scratch, ran the show, and the Articles were basically discarded; the delegates then spent five months designing the Constitution. [[episodes/crossroads_for_liberty__with_william_watkins_jr|Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017)]]
Zadek describes the ratification fight itself as, under the hood, a nasty affair in which the books were cooked, people were denied access to information, and Anti-Federalist articles were not allowed to be printed. He notes that the Constitution was ratified by the requisite nine states, ultimately twelve, and that the citizen under the Articles had very little relationship with the federal government — only with the states, which in turn had the relationship with the newly formed United States. [[episodes/crossroads_for_liberty__with_william_watkins_jr|Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017)]]
The Bill of Rights as the Anti-Federalists’ achievement
Berkin recounts that when George Mason said the convention should have a Bill of Rights, seven states already began their constitutions with a statement of the people’s rights, but the delegates had no sense that the federal government needed to replicate what the states had already ensured; they also believed that because the preamble said “We the People,” the people were sovereign and therefore already protected. Carol Berkin on The Bill of Rights No One Wanted (2016)
Zadek makes the Bill of Rights the Anti-Federalists’ practical victory. He notes that the Constitution lacked a Bill of Rights, that many states agreed to ratify only with its addition, and that Madison honored his promise in the first meeting of the House of Representatives by introducing the first ten amendments. His proof of the Bill of Rights’ importance is that when rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of worship and freedom of assembly are under attack, those who defend them in court cite the Bill of Rights rather than the Constitution as the source of protection — which, he says, tells us that without it we would have had no protections whatsoever. He calls it the wisdom of the anti-federalists who forced the new government to adopt it. Capitalism and Morality: Twin Pillars of the West (2017)
Berkin pushes back on the anachronism she sees in Zadek’s claim that the unamended Constitution would have resulted in tyranny. She says he conflates several hundred years of development: at the time of the debate, all those powers belonged to state governments that were not inferior to the federal government, and in many ways remained superior in authority to it. The federal government then was a government of perhaps a hundred people trying to create a nation, without the massive bureaucracy, law enforcement branch, or Supreme Court that later became the fundamental interpreter of the law. Carol Berkin on The Bill of Rights No One Wanted (2016)
Prediction and vindication
Zadek asks Watkins directly who history shows understood the long-term effects of the Constitution better, the Federalists who supported it or the Anti-Federalists who opposed it. Watkins answers that if you read the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the promises the Federalists made about how certain clauses would confer no new powers, and then tally the Anti-Federalists’ predictions against what those provisions actually did, it is clear the Anti-Federalists were correct. He names the clauses they warned about: the General Welfare clause at the beginning of Congress’s enumerated powers, the Necessary and Proper clause at the end, the Commerce clause, which he says has become a sort of universal jurisdiction for the national government, and the treaty power, which they predicted could be used to undermine the rights of the people and the states. [[episodes/crossroads_for_liberty__with_william_watkins_jr|Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017)]]
Watkins describes the Anti-Federalists as Republicans with a small “r” who believed in a true form of republicanism, dedicated to government at the local level — what Jefferson called his ward republics — a different vision of government and republicanism than the one we have today. [[episodes/crossroads_for_liberty__with_william_watkins_jr|Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017)]]
Zadek extends the point: the Anti-Federalists saw something the Federalists either knew was there and did not care about, or did not see. He invites listeners to read The Anti-Federalist Papers and says their dire predictions — about the king-like power of the president and the reach of the federal government into everyday life — came true to a T, while the promises made by the founders turned out not to be so. He puts the question of whether Madison, Hamilton, Jay and Washington knew they were selling something other than what was promised, or simply did not understand what they were doing as well as the Anti-Federalists did. [[episodes/crossroads_for_liberty__with_william_watkins_jr|Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017)]]
Ilan Wurman gives the most specific version of the vindication argument. He says the Anti-Federalists thought the judiciary would slowly accrete power to itself through precedents and judicial review, and that Hamilton had responded that the courts have only the power of judgment, not will or force, and hold neither the purse nor the sword; the Anti-Federalists, Wurman says, were in some respects prescient, and the Supreme Court now has an outsized role in modern American politics. They also feared the executive, and Wurman — describing himself as an executive power scholar — argues they were prescient about the risks of an imperial presidency and about Congress aggrandizing power to itself vis-à-vis the states. He adds that it took 150 years for the Anti-Federalists to start becoming right and 200 years to become right, mostly, in his view, because of failings as a people and the habit of letting politics trump constitutional principle. The Conservative Constitution (2021)
The enumeration of powers
Wurman offers a structural argument about Article I, Section 8 that he says most audiences do not know. The founders, he says, took a list of the royal prerogative powers exercised by the king — the list in Blackstone — and assigned most of them to Congress, so that the enumeration was the only way to assign the historically royal powers over war and peace, commerce, immigration, and the raising and regulating of troops to the legislature. On this account Congress was supposed to have far more say in foreign affairs than the modern imperial presidency allows. The Conservative Constitution (2021)
He adds that the Constitutional Convention rejected a resolution to enumerate power — Resolution 6 — in favor of language giving Congress all legislative powers over matters on which the separate states were independent or incompetent, and that the Committee of Detail enumerated the power anyway, ignoring the convention’s instructions. He credits William Crosskey, whom he places as a Chicago professor in the 1930s, with first making this argument, and notes that over half the powers in Article I, Section 8 are taken directly from Blackstone’s chapter on the royal prerogatives. Wurman still calls the enumeration a good thing that limits the national government’s power; his point is about its origins. The Conservative Constitution (2021)
Across episodes: the Anti-Federalists as a standing argument
The topic recurs across five episodes, and what changes is the use to which the Anti-Federalists are put. Berkin, in the earliest excerpt, treats them as 18th-century actors whose objections the framers misjudged tactically, and she resists reading modern federal power back into their moment. Watkins and Zadek, in the 2017 discussion, convert them into prophets whose scoreboard against the Federalist Papers can be tallied clause by clause. Zadek’s 2017 Bill of Rights segment treats the Anti-Federalists as the authors of the amendments themselves. Wurman, in 2021, adds a scholarly mechanism — the royal prerogative origins of Article I, Section 8 — to explain why the Anti-Federalists’ structural fears were reasonable rather than merely lucky. No excerpt shows the earlier treatment being revised by a later one; the later guests extend the vindication thesis rather than dispute it.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not identify individual Anti-Federalist writers beyond Patrick Henry and George Mason, and they do not describe the authorship or contents of The Anti-Federalist Papers beyond calling them a collection of essays by opponents of the Constitution. They give no account of the ratification votes state by state, and Zadek’s remark that South Carolina ratified last is offered tentatively and is not corroborated elsewhere in the excerpts. The excerpts also do not state what any court held in the cases alluded to, or which amendments the Bill of Rights comprises beyond the first ten.