[or, "Oh no, here he comes again!"]

The Constitutional role of government was unclear before the ink was dry, and has remained so to this day. The Framers themselves, who by and large became the government, argued incessantly over the meaning of their own words - often the argument was anything but ethical. Thus we have inherited a troika, if you will, of mainstream political philosophies:

Federalists, whose heroes are (or should be) John Adams and John Marshall: advocates of a strong central government with broad powers; republicans with a social conscience and a sense of indivual responsibility who are now known as (delicious irony) Democrats.

Anti-Federalists of the Jeffersonian persuasion, who abhor governmental intrusion no matter how beneficial it is represented to be, beleving instead in the innate goodness of mankind and the natural tendency toward Utopian coexistence and prosperity; perpetual gadflies and state's-rights champions whose ranks include (though they may deny it) George Wallace, and who currently, albeit amorphously, call themselves Libertarians.

Hamiltonians, for whom the business of America still is Business, and mind your own. For them, the golden age of this country was the Gilded Age, when Big Government was permissible because they owned it, but social legislation was not (unless they espoused it themselves in a paroxysm of moral rectitude) because it interfered with profit. There being only one grand old party name remaining to apply, through a tragedy of nomenclature they have inherited the mantle of Lincoln without earning it, and are today's Republicans.

* * *
Oversimplified? Of course it is - it's philosophy! Anyone's opinion beside my own? Not a chance... but, I suggest again, read Ellis and McCullough and tell me you don't see our own generations in the faces of our forebears.

E'