HeyJaredThe Federalist Papers: Explained
A plain-English podcast that walks through the Federalist Papers one essay at a time. Each episode explains what the paper argued, why it mattered at the founding, and what it can still teach us today.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 9
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- Sep 3, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 9, 2026
Latest episodes
Federalist No. 25 Explained: Who Should Hold the Army (opens the original)
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Almost everyone agreed the young country would need some soldiers. The real fight was over who should hold them: the national government, or the individual states. In this episode, Hamilton argues that the option most people found comforting, keeping the army close to home under the states, is actually the far more dangerous one. It would dump the whole cost of defense onto a few exposed border states, breed armed jealousy between rival neighbors, and put military power in exactly the hands a fr
Federalist No. 24 Explained: The Army That Scared Everyone (opens the original)
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A standing army in peacetime was the single thing Americans of the founding generation feared most, and the new Constitution did not ban it. In this episode, Hamilton meets that fear head on. First he shows that the outcry is almost dishonest, because the new plan is actually more careful about armies than the state constitutions or the old government ever were, adding a rule that the army must be re-funded by elected representatives every two years. Then he argues that a flat ban would have bee
Federalist No. 23 Explained: Strong Enough to Defend Us (opens the original)
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The tearing-down is over, and the building begins. Having spent twenty-two essays explaining why America's first government failed, Hamilton turns to the new one and starts with its rawest question: how much power should it have? His answer is bold enough to alarm people who had just fought a war against too much power. A government responsible for defending a nation, he argues, must be given strength to match the job, with no limits set in advance, because no one can foresee what dangers will c
Federalist No. 22 Explained: We the People, Not the States (opens the original)
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The diagnosis of America's first government gets its final, devastating chapter. Hamilton piles on the defects that finish off the Articles of Confederation: a government that cannot control trade while the states quietly tax each other into enemies, an army raised by a bidding war for soldiers, a voting rule that lets a handful of tiny states freeze the entire country, a wide-open door to foreign bribery, and no national courts to make the law mean one thing. From the rivers of Germany choked b
Federalist No. 21 Explained: A Government With No Teeth (opens the original)
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For three papers the founders toured a graveyard of foreign confederacies; now Hamilton turns the lamp on America's own government and starts naming, one by one, exactly what was broken in the Articles of Confederation. He lands on three crippling flaws: a government with no power to make anyone obey it, a union with no power to stop one of its own states from being toppled by force, and a money system so unfair it tried to measure a state's wealth by counting its acres. Along the way he points
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