[Vaquero]

I have a hard time reading these tomes...my short attention span requires me to get the jist of these things...’I skim, therefore I am...’

That being said....

...some leftist was on Fox this AM saying how the progressive Theodore Roosevelt hated Thomas Jefferson, ‘rightly so’ because Jefferson believed in States rights...

[Excellence]

The Teaching Company sells a lecture on the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate. Parts of it are hair-raising. At this point, I think the Anti-Federalists had the better arguement.

[Publius]

The Republican Party created by Lincoln was a Hamiltonian construct opposed to the predominant Jacksonian flavor of federalism. The Civil War ended the argument about federalism with an approach that was almost consolidationist.

As a Progressive and as a Republican, TR had no room for the states. Thus, what that Leftist said on Fox News was correct. It was the Democratic Party that tried futilely to keep federalism alive after the Civil War -- until Woodrow Wilson pulled the Progressives into the party.

It was not until Barry Goldwater came on the scene in the Fifties that a federalist impulse entered Republican ranks. The Conscience of a Conservative is still a good read, even though it is half a century old. The book changed my life.