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Federalists Argumentative Analysis

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Federalists Argumentative Analysis
The arguments between the Anti-Federalists and Federalists led to the creation of a document that has stood the test of time and new governments have repeatedly modeled their governmental structure off of the Constitution. Despite the overwhelming majority of the Anti-Federalists’ concerns over many of the Constitution’s provisions being unfounded, their apprehensions regarding disproportionate amount of influence men of property could have on government officials have since become a scary reality, ironically due to their own insistence on implementing a Bill of Rights. Since the Supreme Court deemed that the United States government had no right to limit money spent on elections in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, wealthy donors, including corporations, have contributed millions upon millions of dollars into elections at all different levels of …show more content…
The folk behind the Federalist movement included farmers on the frontier, businessmen near navigable water or involved in interstate trade, minorities whose rights were unprotected by the states, and slaveholders who realized the benefits of the Three Fifths Clause. Furthermore, many of the important faces of the American Revolution, including George Washington and Ben Franklin, were Federalists and helped sway a public that held them up to be godly figures of early republic. Madison’s anonymous papers such as Federalist 10 helped the party to dominate a Federalist-friendly press and have their ideas spread throughout the country. In Federalist 10, Madison turns a what Antifederalists view as negative aspect of the Constitution, a consolidated government over an immense land, and turns it into a remarkable bonus that avoids any faction getting an upper hand. Madison considers that men of a majority will oppress the minority if “the impulse and opportunity coincide” and that “neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control” to these urges. Therefore, a government that is divided up into many factions can have no one ruling majority and in turn, no group will predominantly sway to oppress a minority. Madison then continues on to say how a “pure democracy” of a small number of citizens can “admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction” because on such a small scale, nearly everyone, besides the minority, will belong to the same faction and in turn, the majority. To combat the problems of a strong majority, Madison argues that the elected officials will “discern the true interest of their country” and will avoid the temptation to succumb to the needs of “temporary or partial considerations.” Madison worked to find a balance in the number of representatives

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