He was a professor at the University of Alabama, where, together with Grady McWhiney, he developed the hypothesis that the South had been colonized by "Anglo-Celts," rather than the British Protestant farmers who populated the North.
Other historians supported the class conflict interpretation by noting that the states confiscated great semifeudal landholdings of Loyalists and gave them out in small parcels to ordinary farmers.
The reviewer David M. Potter said: "He has tumbled a very large Humpty Dumpty [Beard's economic interpretation] from a very high wall of history, and American historical literature will never be entirely the same.
"[7] In a New York Times article after his selection, McDonald was quoted as saying that the federal government had "lost its capacity to protect people in life, liberty and property, to provide for the common defense, or to promote the general welfare.
"[9] McDonald's lecture was later described by conservative historian George H. Nash as "a luminous introduction to the intellectual world of the Founding Fathers.
The New York Times pointedly noted that on the same day as McDonald's Jefferson Lecture, US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall gave a speech that criticized "complacent belief" in the perfection of the Constitution because of the stain of slavery.
It had simply not crossed many people's intellectual or moral horizons to question it," and he further commented, "The condition of the French peasants was far worse than that of the American slaves, and that was heaven compared to the Russian serf.
McDonald commented that his "doctoral dissertation, which later got turned into a book called We the People, absolutely demolished the Beard interpretation, and I say that not boastfully---every reviewer agreed that it did."
During the interview, McDonald's description of "Irving Kristol and people like that" as "neos" signified criticism of an early neoconservative political economy, aligned with The Public Interest as well as the ethno-racial contours of the Moynihan Report, prior to The Weekly Standard and "reconciliation with capitalism."
There's as much infighting among them as is on the other end of the political spectrum [e.g., in 2007, Lew Rockwell disclosed that he no longer self-identified as paleolibertarian because of its previous conflation with paleoconservatism].