Jay says that the people developed a federal form of government from an early time and have tended toward that form, and presumably the new Constitution should be structured around this approach.

Rogers M. Smith notes the two streams of political though as to the degree to which Americans can be thought of as alike, with the one being the liberal democratic society in which most people share in a free and equal society, and the alternative which recognizes "the inegalitarian ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy that defined the political status of racial and ethnic minorities through most of U.S. history" (Smith 549). Smith refers to the society that has developed as embodying multiple traditions. He challenges the thesis of Alexis de Tocqueville that America has been shaped primarily by free and egalitarian ideas and the beneficial material conditions that obtained at the birth of the nation. Still, Smith sets out to challenge de Tocqueville's thesis "by showing that its adherents fail to give due weight to inegalitarian ideologies and conditions that have shaped the participants and the

Even the Constitution was not as egalitarian as we might like to think. Many provisions did not apply to women, for instance, and slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation. Property owners were given greater power and more rights than those who did not own property. Charles A. Beard refers to the economic substructure of the Constitution and says that the way to understand the nature of the Constitution is not to examine the document itself but the arguments and correspondence of the period, including the arguments at the Convention and The Federalist Papers. Beard sees the Constitution as having been shaped to protect dominant interests in the society of the time, and he refers to The Federalist as "an economic interpretation of the Constitution by the men best fitted, through an intimate knowledge of the ideals of the framers, to expound the political science of the new government" (Beard 24).

Hofstadter, Richard. "The Founding Fathers: An Age of Realism." In American Politics: Classic & Contemporary Readings. Ed. Allan J. Cigler and Burdett A. Loomis. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1992. 30-34.

Actually, the early nation was not as egalitarian as de Tocqueville assumed, and the earlier Articles of Confederation showed this by developing a system less centralized than under the Constitution later and more based around the idea of giving more power to certain states and certain classes.