The American republic was not born with strong democratic norms. In fact, its early years were a textbook case of politics without guardrails. As we have seen, norms of mutual toleration were at best embryonic in the 1780s and 1790s: Far from accepting one another as legitimate rivals, Federalists and Republicans initially suspected each other of treason. This climate of partisan hostility and distrust encouraged what we would today call constitutional hardball. In 1798, the Federalists passed the Sedition Act, which, though purportedly criminalizing
