The Constitution Was a Coup | Hacker News Reader

The Constitution Was a Coup

lucasvance.github.io

13 pointssirponm6 comments

The Federalist Constitution (as we now accept it) wasn't accepted until two years later, after the concession to the Anti-Federalists with the Bill of Rights.

(Ironically, the Bill of Rights is what Americans today cherish most.)

Point is, our system of government today was negotiated by the people and the States and can't reasonably be called a "coup."

and the idea being that the bill of rights was only supposed to limit the federal government (i.e. "concession to the anti-federalists") and not the states themselves. It's only incorporation under the 14th amendment that made them applicable to the states and it wasn't particularly clear from the 14th itself that this applied to all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...

This glosses over one very important point: the Constitution was ratified by every State.

It was a change in government to be sure, but a coup is the wrong word. Or at least an extreme exaggeration.

A coup replaces the rulers suddenly; no such event happened.

First, the overwhelming majority (42/55) of the Convention delegates were part of the existing government. Any resistance was on the actual terms of the Constitution not who was taking over. In fact, the first President was elected unanimously.

Second, the Convention plus ratification by three-fourths took over a year.

This narrative omits the strong, repeated and extensively documented disagreements between the colonists and Britain on whether or not to launch expansionist wars of conquest against the neighbouring American Indian polities.

interesting, were the colonists the expansionist ones?

Yes, with strong religious and historically early ethnonationalist motivations, including against denominations of European colonists who weren't English-speaking, while the British opposition was largely motivated by pragmatic diplomatic efforts to avoid large wars, expenses or both. Taylor's book American Revolutions is a great starting point for the period (with depth exceeding the typical ACOUP article) and the bibliography delivers plenty of follow-up material by topic and/or place.

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