Well, Beck and his ilk, anyway. My wife is reading the Federalist Papers in grad school (she is studying to be a high school social studies teacher). She pointed out a passage and I was thunderstruck by how eerily it conjures up today's teabagger crowd. I'll put a quote from it here in the intro, but you should really check out the whole excerpt after the jump:
[A] dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.
In other words, if you're worried about politicians who want to trample on your rights, don't worry about the ones (Democrats, in today's politics) who want to make government an efficient and helpful force; worry about the ones fervently warning that big government is going to take away your rights.
This whole thing just drives home the old adage "plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose" ("the more things change, the more they are just the same thing"). How amazing is it that given all the other things that have changed in the past couple centuries, in some ways politics is just the same?
And yet, however just these sentiments will be allowed to be, we have already sufficient indications that it will happen in this as in all former cases of great national discussion. A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. [As a result of an] over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people [it] will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty[...]
[A] dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.
How ironic that it is exactly those demagogues carrying around "specious masks of zeal for the rights of the people" who go on and on about how they are trying to return the country to the way the Founders intended it!