the legacy of the federalist papers

30 Sep, 2026

My conversations with friends often revolve around politics, which should not be surprising given that I am me, and we often come to a point where someone asks “why is it so hard to push leftist projects forward?” or “Why are they always so half-assed when the (Far-)Right can ruin lives so easily?” You can make the argument that destruction is significantly simpler than creation, but I don’t think that is the only explanation. In situations like that, I’m having a hard time holding back the knee-jerk response of “Just read the Federalist Papers!” because it isn’t immediately clear why the Federalist Papers would explain anything— especially since they were written to promote a constitution that isn’t ours. However, every political revolution in the West—their body of thought spreading to the Global South through colonialism—was directly or indirectly inspired by the American one¹ and its ideals, which means that understanding the muse may shed light on the final work. I’m writing this mostly for future reference once the issue comes up again, though I hope this is of use to others out there.

The Federalist Papers were written to support a constitution that protects private property—seen as the foundation upon which civilization is built—, civil liberties through the rule of law, and some public accountability to an electorate. Who composed the public and what public control this constitution affords the public is beyond the scope of this blog post. Going forward, I want to focus on private property instead.

Since the so-called Glorious Revolutions in 17th century Britain, the idea of defining freedom through ownership of the self began dominating the public discourse around reimagining the social contract. The idea was that a slave was unfree, owned by someone else, and could buy themselves out of slavery, hence freedom meant that whoever was free owned themselves. The demand for ownership of the self and freedom were radical for feudal Britain because they demanded a rewriting of the social contract and the economy. It was an affront to their lords’ claim on them and the land they lived on as property.² So they “reached”—through force—a compromise: the people owned themselves, but the economic relationship between the feudal lord (later the capitalist) and his laborers would persist. While the lord cannot force his laborers to work for him, their economic disadvantage changed little of their day-to-day life. They still needed their lord’s permission to work on the land he never stepped foot on to survive.

This “compromise” traveled across the Atlantic with the settlers and was beloved by their elites by the time of the so-called American Revolution. A core tenant of the American constitution championed by three members of the American elite—Hamilton, Jay, and Madison—was private property and by extension the accumulation of wealth through rent. If wealth begets wealth, then one person can more easily acquire more than one property—consequently creating a class of owners and a class of renters through the scarcity of land to be owned—, and if one person can own more than they squat in, then the state needs to ensure the property relation through laws and their enforcers. Since private property and its guarantee were seen as the foundation for civilization (an idea popularized in part by social contract philosopher and political abomination Thomas Hobbes), any danger to it by the majority of the population comprising the working class, who were way further left on the political spectrum than the constitution’s authors, needed to be neutralized. Their fear was that if the propertyless could vote and they outnumber the propertied, they’d favor what we call today socialist politics. The fear that an egalitarian system would empower the poor to redistribute wealth is the source of the authors’ fear of the Tyranny of the Majority. Therefore, they had to implement “checks and balances,” comprised of layers upon layers of institutions that can stand in the way of an unfavorable change, to ensure largely nothing changes.³

What this produced was a system made by reactionary conservatives (only slightly further left from British royalty at the time) made to conserve itself from any meaningfully left-wing and democratic politics. The Federalist Papers’ authors were honest about this as well, at least Madison was: The United States of America was to be a republic⁴ modeled after the Roman Republic of old, in which the propertyless were just as disempowered. They even made holding property a requirement for voting for a very long time, and excluded women and racialized minorities from the vote! The populace would receive only an illusion of choice because all candidates would have to abide by a constitution that economically disempowers them in a system engineered to produce as little change from George Washington’s status quo as possible. And if it does, it’s incremental and slow so as to grind plenty of the disadvantaged under its gears before it stops. Reversing any progress is easy because ruthlessly cracking down on resistance in this system protects wealth and wealth affords one the power to lobby for preserving this wealth against popular support otherwise. This is why any candidate or party promising a democratic socialism or even a watered-down, more “realist” version of it will always be fighting an uphill battle in these systems.

For future European governments, this experiment’s trickery of faking freedom was like a lottery win. They could feign freedom and self-determination for the masses while preserving their social standing as beneficiaries from feudalism—or later its cousin capitalism—under the guise of democracy. Representative democracy, of course; entrusting the masses with even the choice of candidates or parties was risky enough already. Many European countries may have proportional voting systems producing a multiparty system, but again, the choice is an illusion. Literally, every party sitting in the German and Austrian parliaments (five each) is capitalist. They cannot endanger core tenets of their constitutions like private property or they’ll be banned from standing in elections more swiftly than the AfD (let alone the FPÖ) for being a neo-Nazi party.

So why are progressive politics so tiring? At the risk of sounding like a broken record (Can’t you hear me through the screen?): It’s because we live in systems engineered to be this way. They were rulesets put in place to proclaim justice while enacting injustice, leaving out the fact that they were built and sustained on injustice itself (colonialism and slavery). While not every hurdle standing in the way of progressive politics can be traced back to the Federalist Papers, knowing of the body of thought that led to them and what their influence on future constitutions meant is essential to understanding why representative democracy is failing in the face of a polycrisis, responding with the reactionary politics of segmentation and scapegoating instead.