The Genius of America (2 page)

As this original compromise over slavery, America's original sin to some, was finally collapsing, Abraham Lincoln reviewed the history and refused to disown the framers: “We had slavery among us. We could not get our Constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more; And having by necessity submitted to that much, it does not destroy the principle that is the charter of our liberties. Let that charter stand as our standard.”

As we look back across all 220 years of our history since the Constitution, it is easy to agree with Lincoln that the overall success, the overall good, is far greater than even the horrifying failings. The constitutional system has lasted longer than any other republic in history. But it has not just survived. It turns out that the framers' insight—that the self-interest of people had to be the basis around which government was designed—had another larger implication.

Until the American Revolution, the general wisdom was that democracies needed to be limited in size. This was because they relied on each citizen to recognize a shared interest with his fellow citizens and sacrifice some of his own desires to that larger good. Just thirty years before the American Revolution, Montesquieu, the French political philosopher whom all the framers looked up to, had contended that republics needed to be small to survive.

But by creating a government that encouraged the pursuit of self-interests, the framers unshackled their new nation from this philosophical restraint. They made America, to use a phrase from our time to describe their invention, scalable. If the clash of ideas and interests would produce better results, they reasoned, then more ideas and more interests would produce even better results. The old need was to limit the size of a democracy to ensure its smooth functioning. They turned the argument on its head to encourage expansion and growth.

Expansion and growth, of course, are just what happened. Americans pursued their interests, and by pursuing their interests they built the nation. As they did this, alternative approaches to government came and went around the world, stared down, in fact, by America with its energy and power. One of the fundamental differences between those other approaches and the American constitutional system goes all the way back to that sweltering room in Philadelphia.

The communists, the fascists and the national socialists all put first the goal of a new and, in their view, better society. Government's purpose was to enact that better society on behalf of the people.

The end was more important than the means. But to the framers, the better world, which they believed would come, was a byproduct of their government, not its purpose. The citizens would decide in common what that better life entailed. Government's role, under the Constitution, was to channel society's conflicts and struggles into a field of battle with rules that protected the liberties of individuals and encouraged compromise. They elevated process over result. The most venerated artifact in all of American history is, remarkably, a document laying out governmental process, “this Constitution for The United States of America.”

While the document is quite short ( just over seven thousand words, including the twenty-seven amendments), the process it creates is complicated. Woodrow Wilson, a professor of government before becoming a president, saw it “as too complex to be understood.” But the complexity was no accident. It was designed that way to make change difficult without consideration and consensus. A simple majority should not get its way, itself a point of departure from most democracies. James Madison was passionate on the point that majority rule was not an adequate test of what was right or wrong for the country.

Despite the role the framers built for government as an obstacle to rash or speedy change, the American government has, as designed, incrementally allowed much change. Over time, that change has been extraordinary. Since the Great Depression, a forty-year consensus among Americans thrust government from a small participant in their lives to a central player. That consensus produced, for example, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and an expansion of civil rights, voting rights and environmental protections. It also sharply increased the expectation among the people that government could solve problems.

But in the last decades of the twentieth century, that consensus unraveled, leaving intact only expanded expectations that government can solve our problems. The country became divided into a multitude of different interests, each demanding that its own policies be enacted into law. Discord now demarks the political landscape, fueled by political “leaders” who reason that they can secure their own position by promising to support one interest against another.

As the clamor rises, the government cannot accommodate all these competing demands. Indeed, it was designed to frustrate them. So, naturally, there is great frustration and anger among many of these groups whose demands and expectations have been unsatisfied.

None of this would have surprised or upset the writers of the Constitution. They believed action without consensus was far more dangerous than stasis while searching for consensus. But what might have worried them is how the political frustrations have turned into attacks on the process itself. The values that compose our Constitutional Conscience are meant to reinforce each other. We accept compromise because we feel we are represented in the decision. But many Americans no longer feel well represented. This is due in part to dysfunctions in the Congress that need to be fixed. But, even more, it is also due to our increasing unwillingness or inability to appreciate a central principle of the Constitution: American government was not established to satisfy our specific wants, but to sort out all our desires and demands and find some common good.

What have you given us? Benjamin Franklin was asked as he left the Constitutional Convention. “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

Quoting Franklin's warning in this context may seem alarmist. Certainly, we have never been richer or more powerful as a nation. Yet within we harbor deep doubts and divisions that undercut our unity. A key element of this has been a tendency to blame the process of government, the one the framers gave us, for our problems. This attitude is corrosive and threatening for the reason Learned Hand, the great jurist, once explained: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there . . . no constitution, no law, no court [can] save it . . . A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.” Our Constitutional Conscience, what we believe in our hearts and minds, is more central even than the document itself and all the rulings of the Supreme Court. Certainly, it is not dead in us. But we do believe it is ailing.

In Part Three, we trace back to the late 1970s the rise of an unhappy attitude toward government and recall how Ronald Reagan crystallized it in his first inaugural address in 1981.

It had been a long journey for Reagan—actor, Roosevelt Democrat, union leader, corporate spokesman, Barry Goldwater advocate, conservative governor of California. Through a lifetime of experience he had honed his view that government needed to be limited. Now he looked out on a nation in turmoil. At home, inflation had sapped the country's economic will, and the rift of Watergate was still raw. Abroad, for all its power, the nation had been humiliated by an Iranian cleric who after 444 days was just at that moment releasing the hostages he had held in the American embassy in Tehran. Reagan, speaking for the first time as president, went beyond just the idea that government was too big.

In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time, we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? . . . We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected . . .”we the people,” this breed called Americans.

It was an important moment at the outset of what became one of the most important presidencies of the twentieth century. Reagan's of a united American people, blocked from the realization of their dreams by an entrenched political system, signaled the start of what became known as the Reagan Revolution. One of the themes of this book is the striking extent to which much of our political debate can be traced back to either Tom Paine's idealistic vision or James Madison's cold-eyed pragmatism. We are not America without both.

Reagan strongly echoed Paine 205 years earlier. In times of crisis, times that try men's souls, turn to the People, that breed called Americans, who unfettered by government will have the wisdom to govern themselves on that blank slate called America. It is a cry raised repeatedly through American history, by reformers and radicals and just plain restless folk seeking to foment change. Its revival is a constant through our history. Particularly in times of turmoil, we fall back on the ultimate source of the nation's authority, the people.

Talk of the people strikes a chord in each American because it connects to the story of the American Revolution as we receive it in school. But the call to the people leaves out half the history of the Revolution. When Reagan set the people as the antithesis of the government, he was returning to the spirit of 1776. But the story of 1776 is incomplete without the story of 1787 and the writing of the Constitution, which rescued the heroism of 1776 from the dustbin of history. Whereas 1776 was the triumph of liberty, 1787 was the triumph of a new wisdom that to preserve liberty there must be a process for making choices and taking action. That process is laid out in the Constitution. The Constitution's writers drew their government's authority from the people, and from nowhere else. But they also rejected, quite clearly, the notion that the people could, mystically, solve the nation's problems without a process of government to bring them together. Their own experience had violently disabused them of that notion.

As Reagan spoke, the men behind him represented the majority leadership of the House of Representatives and the Senate. So his words about rule by an elite group might have been understood as a bit of political hyperbole meant to suggest that the problem was the specific people or the Democratic Party, which had been in control of the government just then. But this would be to miss the much larger antigovernment sentiment gathering strength in those years among Democrats and Republicans, left and right, a force that carries forward to this day.

Two years before Reagan was elected president, the voters of California adopted a proposition, number 13 on that year's ballot, to limit the spending authority of their legislature. This reinvigorated a process, initiative and referendum, that allowed Americans to vote directly on issues and circumvent their state legislatures (or even the Congress under a version now being pushed by former U.S. senator Mike Gravel). That is, philosophically, exactly the opposite of the view of the framers, who gave process a central role in their vision of democracy.

This historical context would not have occurred consciously to many of the spokesmen for the gathering effort to take power from government. Reagan believed profoundly in America, and one of his important contributions was a revival of what he called “informed patriotism” steeped in an understanding of our history. Certainly, Reagan would not have accepted the idea that he was arguing across the years with the writers of the Constitution.

But there were those who explicitly acknowledged that they wanted to undo what the framers had invented. A few months before Reagan took office, in the frustrating final days of Jimmy Carter's presidency, Carter's counsel, Lloyd Cutler, a consummate Democrat, called for the scrapping of the essential elements of the process created by the Constitution. “Whatever its merits in 1793, American Government has become a structure that almost guarantees stalemate.” He proposed a Parliament whose members would be more responsive to the president.

We can see from the perspective of twenty-five years later that Reagan's analysis of government as the problem and Cutler's call for the abolition of the independent Congress were just the beginnings of a period of stalemate in America and consequent frustration.

It is an irony of our age that one of America's greatest triumphs, one of Reagan's greatest triumphs, the collapse of the Soviet Union, coincided with a growing disillusionment at home with the American process of government, the very process which has proven so much more resilient and lasting than any of its competitor systems.

To maintain the essential legitimacy of democracy, government must
ultimately
respond to the demands of its people. But America's government is designed to slow such response, to resist, as Hamilton put it, “an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse.” This inevitably creates tension between the people and their government. This tension has intensified as the country's politics have fractured. We are living through “the growth of a politics based upon narrow concerns, rooted in the exploitative division of class, cash, gender, region, ethnicity, morality and ideology—a give no quarter and take no prisoners activism that demands satisfaction and accepts no compromise.” In other words, a period of strife and disunity much like the early days of America out of which the framers invented the process of government in the Constitution.

Faced with the growing divisions of our age, Congress has done less, just as the framers designed it to do. The result is ever-growing criticism of the government as an obstacle to change. People of all ideological and political stripes, frustrated by government's incapacity to provide what they want, have found common ground in blaming the design of the government for their failure to get their way.