"City on the Hill"

Culturally, the United States was founded by European immigrants seeking religious, political, or economic freedom. These settlers longed for an opportunity to construct a new Europe without the traditional constraints of the old Europe (Isaak 4).

The settlers embraced not only the idea of religious freedom but also certain conceptions they wanted as part of their governmental ideals:

The immigrants arrived full of optimism and strong beliefs and had the good fortune to have a brilliant group of Founding Fathers emerge to establish a democratic creed and constitution worthy of their progressive yet conservative faith (Isaak 4).

The U.S. Constitution was constructed as a series of compromises between the two major factions involved in its writing, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. The framers of the Constitution feared the potential "mischiefs" of faction and designed a governmental system that would balance competing interests and prevent the ascension of any one faction. A given faction might gain control of one of the br

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he same interests (also an impracticable solution as well as an unwise one). Madison says that there will always be different opinions and different passions among the citizenry, so clearly the cause of faction can never be removed and factions will continue to be part of the landscape as a matter of course. One of the reasons why the Constitution has survived is that Madison and the Framers developed ways of mitigating or controlling the "mischief" that could be done by factions. Madison states that the way to prevent the mischief of factions is either to prevent the same passion or interest in a majority so it will not be adopted, or to prevent the majority from carrying out this passion or interest. The primary means taken by the Framers to prevent this was to avoid direct democracy and to create a republican form of government, a government in which the scheme of representation is involved. Each individual representative would be chosen by a larger number of citizens and so would find it more difficult to succeed if they were unworthy. A republican form of government made it possible to bring more territory into the fold, with the result that more parties and factions would be produced and would have to compromise with
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Approximate Word count = 1238
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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