Page 53 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions
Information and Distance
The problem of situating more power in a government remote from
the local problems of the states was a central objection to the Con-
stitution proposed in 1787. This objection appears throughout Anti-
Federalist thought, and it presented an important strategic concern for
Publius in the battle over ratification. As a body of political claims, Anti-
Federalist writing is far better for illuminating the nature of popular
political rhetoric in the founding period than for establishing a coherent
theory. Anti-Federalist authors were many in number, some of whose
identities remain unknown, and unlike Publius, they were not engaged
in a project of coordinated analysis. Their articles are far less analytic
than rhetorical, and do not shy from personal attacks. Samuel Bryan,
for instance, writing as “Centinel” in January of 1788, labels Publius
“deranged” and calls him a fear-monger. In a derisive passage that might
unfortunately strike a chord with many college students first confronting
Madison, Bryan chastises him for his “accumulated myriads of unmean-
ing sentences” and wishes Publius “might have spared his readers the
fatigue of wading through his long-winded disquisitions.” 5
In their arguments about distance and the remoteness of the pro-
posed government from the problems of the people, Bryan and other
Anti-Federalists posited an information problem. They observed that
democratic policy making requires thorough information. Specifically,
it requires a government to assemble a coherent body of knowledge com-
prising all information about local conditions and issues across a polity.
They conceived of national public interest as the sum of local political
interests across all citizens, and therefore believed national-scale political
information should entail the sum of all local information.
These conceptions contributed for the Anti-Federalists to limits on
how large a democracy could be. The size problem is generally recog-
nized as their chief defense of state governments, and is understood to
encompass several issues, including uniformity of administration, the
fostering of a sense of citizenship, and accountability of government to
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the people. Running throughout their objections to the large republic
is a strong concern with information and communication that has gen-
erally gone unrecognized by scholars. Anti-Federalists feared that as the
scale of a republic grows, political information eventually becomes too

5
John D. Lewis, Anti-Federalists versus Federalists: Selected Documents (San Francisco:
Chandler Publishing, 1967), p. 150.
6
For an overview, see Joseph M. Bessette, ed., Toward a More Perfect Union: Writings of
HerbertJ.Storing (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1995).
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