Dispatch 008: The Articles of Confederation are Superior to the Constitution
My debate with Dr. Daniel Walker Howe in 2010 at FreedomFest in Las Vegas...
The Anti-Federalists were right.
One of the reasons I do this podcast and these occasional dispatches is that my thoughts don’t die with me when I assume room temperature. I just so happen to have found a memory-holed audio file of the debate and thought I would share.
I was contacted by the folks at Freedom Fest in 2010 because they could find no one to debate the Constitution. They reached out to me because I have been a rather obscure but known Constitutional skeptic on the ‘net. I published my jeremiad against the Constitution in September 2009 at LewRockwell shortly before my excommunication from Mr. Rockwell’s site.
His site and his rules and he still commands my greatest respect.
I was one of the few people in America I suspect to have read all the Anti-Federalist Papers in Herbert Storing’s collection and the three volumes of The Emerging Nation: a Documentary History of the Foreign Relations of the United States Under the Articles of the Confederation by Mary A. Giunta et al.
I accepted the invitation and Dr. Daniel Walker Howe took up the defense of the Constitution against my defense of the Articles of Confederation.
Dr. Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus, Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize, and the Silver Medal of the California Book Awards, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of The Political Culture of the American Whigs and Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. He lives in Los Angeles.
I suspect since he saw I was uncredentialed and merely possessed a BA in Political Economy from CalPoly Humboldt [I would earn my MA later in 2013 in Asymmetrical Warfare while deployed to Afghanistan], he thought it would be a walk-on with no real robust case needing to be made.
I do think I defeated him because after the debate a poll was taken in the room on who was now a champion of the AoC versus the Constitution and I won overwhelmingly.
I am not smarter than Dr. Howe, I think he underestimated the power of the uncredentialed historian.
Let me know what you think and I am increasingly convinced that Alexander Hamilton crafted the architecture for the largest and most expensive statist system in human history.
And remember Buppert’s Corollary to Acton’s Axiom: “Power attracts the corruptible and absolute power attracts even worse.”
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