Classic bad nationalism. "American nationalists were headed by ... George Washington, John Adams, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, James Wilson ... They regarded America as one nation characterized by a single political and cultural inheritance..."

Quick-associating from the desire of those founders to bring about a political nationhood to the wrong-end-of-the-telecsope "regard" for supposed shared cultural inheritance takes away from what they actually did, against great oppostion.

telescope

Under the "weak" Articles, "Having no unified executive or judiciary, the only national institution was the Congress ..." This too is a classic total misread. The Articles were very strong. They checked any tendency to define the unity of the states in national terms.

The Congress was the opposite of a national institution. It was literally a congress: a meeting of suppposed sovereigns for purposes, in this case of confederation, united to achieve and defend independence, a literally federal government.

This is what comes of reading the past back through the present. The question-begging approach has it that because we have a nation, there must always have been a nation, whose natural surging "spirit" was stymied, at first, by errors that wise men then corrected.

Where any frank engagement with the record instead shows, unsurprsingly, a series of knockdown, dragout political fights with winners, losers, and partial winners and losers, in pursuit of certain big aims.

Similarly this tendency to call the Articles the first American "constitution," with that term's modern connotations of a nation legal document, is intended to support the circular argument that there was a nation trying to be born.

First a bad, weak constitution, then a better constitution. As if the Articles' authors simply *overlooked*, at first, *all the features necessary to actual nationhood*. And then had to go back and correct that oversight.

Even when this article does get into the political conflicts, it says "Against this nationalist vision...emerged a confederalist vision that was eventually called 'democratic republicanism'—and finally gave its name to the Democratic Republican Party...

... This view, whose greatest spokesmen were Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine..."

I think I get why the article uses "Democratic-Republican Party." It's historical shorthand for avoiding confusing that party with the Republican Party founded later. But defining TJ and TP as anti-nationalists is just goofy.

TJ had a wide range of thoughts on this subject, as on so many others, including some that seem highly confederationist, but he supported the national founding, and it's always a tell when people try to use him as a consistent spokesperson for any one position.

But it's just bonkers to rope Paine into anti-nationalism.

Huh? "Scholars have tended to downplay the extent to which the constitutional convention was orchestrated by what would soon become the Federalist Party."

"The new nationalist Constitution was a restoration of the Anglo-American political inheritance that Washington and many of his supporters and officers had in fact been fighting to preserve during the War of Independence." Wow. None of that follows from what's been said.

OK, I'll stop here. The thing is long, and now I see where it's going.