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So? -- Spit it out wiseguy. -- Two bits you can't make your own case.

The states' rights movement and the constitutionalist impulse has always been collocated with the Southern States and the Southern Democrats, until they left the Party in the Goldwater revolution. They were Antifederalists, Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and Grangers before they were Klukkers -- well, actually, the Grange and the Klan coexisted on the same population base. But they were the people who used States' Rights in the 19th century, as in the Cruikshank case, to free themselves from federal and Freedman's Bureau interference in Southern politics and to impose white supremacy and Jim Crow.

The Hobbesian, omnipotent State which was envisioned as an irresistible force for improvement was precisely what the American Revolution overthrew. American revolutionaries drew up the Articles of Confederation in 1777, and that became the Jeffersonian model: limited government and a free yeomanry.

Hamilton brought back Hobbesian, strong-state government. The federalists had many motives, some altruistic and others very practical (such as owning quantities of federal bonds), but their program was one of replacing the Jeffersonian Articles with a strong-government model that would have substantially amalgamated the States and the Peoples of the States into "we the People", as the Preamble still expresses it.

That phrase was the essence of Hamiltonianism. One people, one government (with the states lingering as glorified departments or geographical subdivisions of the State of United America), and a strong, infrastructure-building government that would defend the dollar, pay its debts, enable commerce, and in all ways make straight the way of the business interests of the big seaboard towns. Except that a funny thing happened on the way to Hamilton's coronation: he got shot down in the Constitutional Convention and had to accept numbers of compromises with the (majority) Antifederalists, in order to secure ratification.

I'll leave it to Jackson Turner Main, author of The Antifederalists, to trace how the ideas that became Whiggery, the American System, Lincolnism, National Greatness Republicanism (McKinleyism), and the Wall Street Wing of the GOP sprang from the tax-and-spend ideas of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. (Madison is harder to account for, since he crossed the aisle in midlife and joined the Jeffersonians.)

But the Hamiltonian Federalists were the party who were compelled by the Antifederalists to accept the Second, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments, which are the very guts of States' Rights.

The Democratic Party stood on the rock of the Bill of Rights and easy money for 140 years, whereas the Whigs and Republicans stood on government activism, infrastructure programs, and hard money. And sucking the continent dry of wealth -- but any business party would have done that, no matter their politics.

The Democrats changed their basic principles in 1928 when the urban ethnics (many of them led by Fabians and liberals) took control of the Democratic Party from the Grange and the Klan. The Klan sent IIRC something like 625 delegates to the 1924 or 1928 Democratic convention. After the change, the Democratic Party became eaten up with liberals, urban Communists and Socialists and their college-educated brats and became a Marxist, anti-American party, in love with State power -- rather like the old yacht-club Republicans, only worse. The old rural Democrats hung on for another generation, clinging to the Democratic Party's lingering identification with the Common Man, even though it was becoming more vanguardist and socialist as time passed, until the civil rights movement (which was really a call on the Party by urban blacks) displaced them and drove them out of the Party.

But in the interim, the old, agrarian, Jeffersonian Democrats continued voting "yaller-dog" tickets for FDR and the new, urban Democrats until the liberals attacked them over civil rights and drove them out of the Party to the GOP instead. They brought their States' Rights principles and agenda with them, which is now carried forward by two Republican-appointed justices, Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Thomas.

So now the Hobbesians are the Democrats and the Yacht Club ("big-government conservatives") Republicans, and the Jeffersonian States'-Righters are crowded into what's left of the conservative, Congressional wing of the GOP.

So there you have it.

GOPcap, guys, check me. I'm done.

tpaine, pay me. Scripsi, scripsi!