The Neo-Federalist Papers

The historical introduction and Preamble to the Neo-Federalist Papers are available here as permanent foundations of the project. The numbered papers will appear in serial form, following the example of the original Federalist essays, with each new paper addressing a particular danger, institution, or responsibility of the modern Republic.

Each essay will appear in two versions. The shorter version will present the central argument in a clear and complete form for readers who prefer a concise treatment. The full version will examine the subject in greater depth, including its historical background, supporting evidence, and constitutional significance.

Published papers may be read below in either a concise or full-length version. Additional essays will be published in serial form and added to the collection as they are completed.

Foreword — The Victory That Nearly Failed

The American Revolution did not end at Yorktown, because military victory still had to be converted into an accepted peace and a functioning nation. Franklin, Jay, and Adams secured independence and generous territorial terms, but the Articles of Confederation left Congress unable to tax, regulate commerce, enforce treaties, or hold the states together. Hamilton recognized that the victory would be lost without an effective national government and helped transform the failed Annapolis Convention into the call for the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia.

Preamble — The Neo-Federalist Papers

The Neo-Federalist Papers revive the voice and method of Publius to examine whether the modern American Republic still possesses the wisdom, character, and institutional discipline necessary to preserve itself. They promise to address connected crises—including debt, financial concentration, civic fragmentation, weakened institutions, and strategic danger—with clarity, historical honesty, and constitutional seriousness rather than partisan rhetoric. Their central covenant is to place truth above applause, persuasion above accusation, and the responsibilities of citizenship above temporary political advantage.

Additional essays will be added to the series at a future time.

Number 1 — Essays on the Preservation of the American Republic

The opening serialized essay recalls how Hamilton, Madison, and Jay used the original Federalist Papers to explain constitutional principles to a divided public and save the proposed Constitution from defeat. It argues that the modern Republic now confronts a convergence of dangers: private enrichment through public office, unsustainable debt, financialization, weakened families and communities, congressional decline, and strategic confusion abroad. The series therefore asks whether Americans still possess not merely the institutions of liberty, but the character and determination required to maintain them.

Number 2 — On Faction and the Fracturing of the Republic

Madison believed faction could not be eliminated without eliminating liberty, so the Constitution was designed to prevent any single interest from permanently dominating the Republic. Modern technology, media incentives, economic separation, and partisan identity have intensified faction until political opponents are increasingly regarded as illegitimate enemies rather than fellow citizens. The essay argues that republican government can survive fierce disagreement only if Americans recover respect for elections, peaceful transfers of power, deliberation, compromise, and the common constitutional order.

Number 3 — On Meaning, Community, and the Loneliness of the Republic

A republic depends not only upon laws and institutions, but upon the invisible bonds of family, trust, community, responsibility, and shared purpose. Although modern Americans possess extraordinary comfort and technological connection, many experience loneliness, institutional distrust, social isolation, and a weakening sense of belonging to a common national enterprise. The essay calls for the renewal of families, neighborhoods, civic associations, schools, congregations, and other institutions that form self-governing citizens and give freedom a meaningful purpose.

Number 4 — What the Framers Wanted in a Leader

The Framers admired Washington because he combined courage, judgment, restraint, integrity, self-command, and a willingness to surrender power voluntarily. They sought leaders who possessed prudence, moderation, independence, courage, and disinterestedness—the capacity to place the public good above personal ambition or immediate popularity. Yet they also understood that another Washington could not be expected, so they designed institutions capable of preserving liberty even under leaders of ordinary or defective character.

Number 5 — What the Framers Feared Most for the Republic

The Framers assumed that ambitious, avaricious, and self-interested men would eventually occupy public office and attempt to convert public power into private wealth. Hamilton specifically warned of leaders who might exploit office for personal enrichment, betray national interests to foreign powers, flatter the public as demagogues, or surround themselves with dependent and corrupt associates. The Constitution therefore divides power, provides oversight and impeachment, and treats public office as a trust whose abuse must be exposed and restrained rather than excused by confidence in personal virtue.

Number 6 — America Is Mistaking the Stock Market for the Economy

The essay argues that Americans increasingly treat rising financial markets as proof of national prosperity, even though market valuations may be detached from productive economic reality. Automatic retirement contributions, index funds, algorithms, and other systematic investment mechanisms now move enormous quantities of capital without traditional judgments about price or value, reinforcing the largest companies and elevating asset prices. True national wealth, the essay maintains, lies in production, labor, invention, education, energy, and useful enterprise—not merely in securities prices displayed on a screen.

Number 7 — On Power, Appetite, and the Limits of Liberty

Using Standard Oil as its principal example, the essay argues that ambition and enterprise can produce enormous benefits while also hardening into concentrated and unaccountable power. Antitrust law was therefore not an attack upon business or success, but a republican effort to preserve competition, prevent domination, and ensure that private economic power remained subject to law. The enduring lesson is that liberty requires restraint not only upon political authority, but also upon corporations and institutions capable of controlling markets, opportunities, information, and the terms of economic life.

Number 8 — On Consolidation and the New Political Economy

Decades of deregulation, technological change, financial power, and permissive merger policy have concentrated major American industries into the hands of increasingly dominant institutions. As competition weakens, businesses can shift from asking what price efficient production requires to asking the highest price each consumer can be made to tolerate, using data and algorithms to refine that extraction. The essay argues that capitalism remains compatible with liberty only when markets remain genuinely competitive, newcomers can challenge incumbents, consumers retain meaningful choices, and economic success cannot be converted into political dominion.

Number 9 — The Price at the Pump: Why Americans Pay a Foreign Premium for a Domestic Barrel

Although most oil refined in the United States comes from domestic or Canadian sources, American gasoline is priced according to global benchmarks influenced by distant wars, foreign cartels, shipping risks, and geopolitical instability. The result is that American motorists pay a global risk premium even when the physical oil in their tanks never passed through the threatened regions responsible for the price increase. The essay argues that citizens should understand this mechanism, recognize how geopolitical crises generate extraordinary corporate profits, and demand greater public scrutiny of policies affecting domestic production, exports, reserves, and fuel prices.

Number 10 — Epaminondas and the Discipline of War

The Theban general Epaminondas achieved victory by defining a specific political objective, concentrating force at the decisive point, and refusing to confuse military activity with strategic success. Modern America, by contrast, has repeatedly entered wars without clear definitions of victory, durable political objectives, or an adequate understanding of the costs and consequences of permanent mobilization. His later failure to create institutions capable of preserving Theban power after his death also demonstrates that strategic clarity must be embedded in durable institutions rather than entrusted to a single exceptional leader.

Number 11 —On the Weaponization of Political Division

Political division in the connected world can now be deliberately manufactured, inflamed, and directed through repetition, fear, and the isolation of citizens within separate realities. Once political belief becomes part of personal identity, contrary evidence is treated not as information, but as an attack. The ultimate danger is not merely deception, but the destruction of the common judgment upon which self-government depends.

Number 12 — The Supreme Court and the Growth of Presidential Power

The Supreme Court was created to interpret the Constitution and restrain unlawful government action, not to govern the country. Over time, however, five Justices have gained the power to reshape national rights, presidential authority, and the structure of government—often through majorities produced by the chance timing of judicial vacancies. The central danger is that judicial independence may become judicial supremacy, allowing constitutional balance to depend upon whichever philosophy political fortune places in command.

Number 13 —presidential power and the modern administrative state

This paper examines the growing struggle between presidential power and the modern administrative state, asking how democratic accountability can be restored without concentrating too much authority in a single office. Drawing on Hamilton, Madison, recent Supreme Court decisions, and modern constitutional scholarship, it argues that the enduring answer is the one the Framers trusted most: divide power so that no branch can become its master.