The Anti-Federalists’ Warning for Today’s Bureaucratic Leviathan

Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

Commentary

In the fractious debates of 1787–1788, as the ink dried on a proposed Constitution, a cadre of skeptics—now dubbed Anti-Federalists—peered through the haze of revolutionary optimism to glimpse a troubling future. These thinkers, often eclipsed by the Federalist triumvirate of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, foresaw a centralized power prone to metastasizing beyond its bounds, birthing a bureaucracy that would dwarf the liberties it promised to protect. Today, in 2025, their prescience haunts us. Through a conservative lens—one rooted in limited government, individual sovereignty, and local accountability—the Anti-Federalists’ warnings illuminate the sprawling administrative state that dominates modern America. Their insights, once dismissed as alarmist, now demand a reckoning: Have we built the very leviathan they feared, and can we still dismantle it?

Voices From the Margins

The Anti-Federalists were no monolith. Patrick Henry thundered against tyranny and George Mason insisted on a Bill of Rights, but lesser-known figures like Brutus, Federal Farmer, and Cato—pseudonyms cloaking men of intellect and principle—offered surgical critiques of centralized power’s trajectory. Brutus, likely New York’s Robert Yates, warned in 1787 that the Constitution’s “necessary and proper” clause was a Pandora’s box, granting Congress latitude to spawn an army of enforcers. Federal Farmer, possibly Richard Henry Lee, envisioned a distant republic reliant on a “numerous train” of officers, eroding the civic intimacy of small-scale governance. Cato, perhaps Gov. George Clinton, foresaw an elite cadre wielding administrative might to entrench their dominance.