Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [73]
Not only aristocrats but “lowly farmers” as well were terrified by Shays’ Rebellion and driven to support a national government that would have the power to protect their rights against the mob. In his introduction to the Federalist Papers, Isaac Kramnick cites an “obscure farmer,” Jonathan Smith, arguing in favor of the Constitution purely as a response to Shays’ Rebellion:
People I say took up arms, and then, if you went to speak to them, you had the musket of death presented to your breast. They would rob you of your property; Threaten to burn your houses; oblige you to be on your guard day and night … poor persons were set in the front, to be killed by their own friends. How dreadful. How distressing was this. Our distress was so great that we should have been glad to snatch at anything that looked like a government. Had any person that was able to protect us, come up and set up his standard, we should all have flocked to it, even if it had been a monarch, and that monarch might have proved a tyrant. So that you see that anarchy leads to tyranny, and better have one tyrant than so many at once. But the new Constitution is our cure.35
The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to make the case for a national Constitution, are brimming with warnings against mobs. In Federalist 9, Alexander Hamilton cites with contempt the “tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage” that periodically swept through Greece and Italy. Even in peaceful times, he said, one feels regret over the certainty that “the pleasing scenes before us are soon to be overwhelmed” with angry mobs.36
Hamilton assured Americans that their new Constitution would incorporate “wholly new discoveries” in the science of government able “to suppress faction and to guard the internal tranquility of States.” He denounced the flimsy Articles of Confederacy precisely because they created “tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord.”37 By creating “an assemblage of societies,” the Constitution would calm the unruly crowds. Under the Constitution, should “a popular insurrection happen in one of the confederate states,” Hamilton said, “the others are able to quell it.”38
Clearly, the framers recognized how bad mobs were and created a government designed to squelch them. James Madison dedicated Federalist 10 to explaining how the Constitution would cure the “dangerous vice” of factions, or what we might call “special interests.” Democracies were threatened, he said, by groups of people “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion,” opposed “to the rights of other citizens” or the “interests of the community.” Madison complained of the propensity of democracies to become “spectacles of turbulence and contention,” unable to safeguard either property rights or personal security.
Because democracies were generally unable to control mobs—or factions, as Madison called them—they have been “as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Pure democracy, even in the hands of “enlightened statesmen,” was no good because, as Madison said in Federalist 55, even if every Athenian had been a Socrates, “the Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”39
According to Madison, there were only two methods “of curing the mischiefs of faction”: Eliminate the causes or eliminate the effects. The principal advantage of a “well constructed union,” he said, would be to control the effects of violent mobs by diffusing them and supplying “opposite and rival interests” to counteract one another.40
The French chose the other path: They resolved to remove the cause of faction by always exercising the “general will.” There would be no disagreement because everyone would always