Drudge Goes All in With "Secession" Meme as the Republican War on the Constitution Escalates

Continued from previous page

But that's not a description of today's ideological debates. It's a paragraph from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill historian John Semonche's monograph on the issues that divided the delegates to the Grand Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. I replaced “Federalists” – who favored the Constitution, with a central government with direct authority over the citizens of the states – with “progressives,” and “Anti-Federalists” – who opposed the Constitution – with “conservatives.”

As Semonche pointed out, “the opponents of the Constitution were forced on the defensive both in regard to the appellation, Antifederalist, and in regard to the fact that they had no ready alternative to suggest. .. The fact that the Antifederalists lost the battle and the fact that the Constitution quickly became a revered document combined to relegate their cause to the scrap heap of history.”

But they didn't go away. They would rear their heads again in 1861, when secessionists prevailed in the South, and they've returned in the early years of the 21 ^st century, personified by those anti-Constitutionalists on the right who claim their fealty to “constitutional government.”