Reviving the
'vigilant and manly spirit' of American republicanism.
In what might have appeared to be a minor political event a few
weeks back,
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called congressman Tom Marino (R-PA) “insignificant” and
“inconsequential” in a debate on the House floor. Why would the former House
Speaker insult a colleague in such a manner?
She didn’t count her way to this assessment;
Democrats do not hold a majority of the House. Nor did she reason her way to
this position, as there was nothing in Rep. Marino’s argument on the
immigration issue that raised empirical red flags. Perhaps it was a momentary
lapse in judgment in the midst of the partisan give-and-take on an important
political issue. But what if Pelosi was simply saying what she believed to be
true and acknowledging what ruling class Americans think about their non-ruling
class counterparts? Namely, that there are people like Pelosi, the
highest-ranking female politician in American history, who get it, and people
like Marino, merely a second-term congressman from “gun- and religion-clinging”
northeastern Pennsylvania, who don’t.
What is the “it” they don’t get? The
Progressive dogmas that Pelosi has internalized and Marino rejects. A hundred
years ago, the first group of progressives concluded that this country needed
to change in a big way. They argued explicitly for a refounding of the United
States on the grounds that the only absolute in political life is that
absolutes are material and economic rather than moral in nature.
Translating theory into practice, those
thinkers and political storm troopers on the Right Side of History have
increased the power of the state so as to produce the greatest amount of
material pleasure and moral-ideational relief for society–to leave the
populace, as Machiavelli put it, both “satisfied” and “stupefied.”
Convincing the American people to abandon (or
at least qualify) their deep, longstanding regard for the founders was no easy
task for the Progressives. It required making them over in far less heroic
terms: to frame the Founding as a grand enticement, if not quite a crime, and
the founders as crafty oligarchs, if not quite criminals.
No thinker advanced this thesis with greater
confidence than Columbia economist Charles Beard, who wrote of the founders in
his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913):
If we examine carefully the delicate
instrument by which the framers sought to check certain kinds of positive
action that might be advocated to the detriment of established and acquired
rights, we cannot help marvelling at their skill. Their leading idea was to
break up the attacking forces at the starting point: the source of political
authority for the several branches of the government. This disintegration of
positive action at the source was further facilitated by the differentiation in
the terms given to the respective departments of the government. And the
crowning counterweight to “an interested and over-bearing majority,” as Madison
phrased it, was secured in the peculiar position assigned to the judiciary, and
the use of the sanctity and mystery of the law as a foil to democratic attacks.
In Beard’s formulation, the framers’ emphasis
on the rule of law, checks and balances, federalism, and “equal rights for all,
special privileges for none,” was simply patriotic cover for a system that
would prove impenetrable to the forces of economic and material progress. To
accomplish their task, the founders had to artfully construct a noble lie in
which our love for republican norms (embodied in the Declaration of
Independence and institutionalized in the Constitution) would be greater than
our disgust at the injustice of natural and circumstantial inequality.
Beard’s charge was not, in fact, wholly new.
Even in their own day, the founders had been accused of hiding an oligarchy
beneath republican robes. When Anti-Federalists first leveled the charge, James
Madison reacted, in Federalist 57, with righteous indignation, challenging the
critics to show just how the Constitution favored the few at the expense of the
many:
Who are to be the electors of the federal
representatives? Not the rich, more than the poor; not the learned, more than
the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names, more than the
humble sons of obscure and unpropitious fortune. ….
Who are to be the objects of popular choice?
Every citizen whose merit may recommend him to the esteem and confidence of his
country.
This, of course, does not mean that everyone
who can vote today could vote in 1789 or that James Madison expected women, for
example, to serve in the House. However, there has been no change in the formal
qualifications for voters–at any point in our history–that required changing
the Constitution. There has been no de facto expansion of the pool of
candidates for office that has encountered the least constitutional resistance.
Publius argues throughout The Federalist that
the original Constitution is strictly republican. But, as Publius also argues
throughout The Federalist, this is no guarantee that the people at large will
enjoy the blessings of republican liberty and equality before the law or that
their leaders will pursue the common good, rather than the advantage of the
well-connected.
All founders, in essence, take up an
impossible task. As Madison put it:
The aim of every political constitution is,
or ought to be, first, to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to
discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the
next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous,
whilst they continue to hold their public trust.
Better forms of regime better contribute to
these purposes, but there is no form of regime that intrinsically achieves
them. In a republic, the “elective mode of obtaining rulers” is the
“characteristic policy”–and limited terms “the most effectual” among “numerous
and various” means “for preventing their degeneracy.”
Plainly Madison understood that even if
broadly popular elections are the best means of attaining good legislators and
ongoing electoral accountability the best means of keeping them honest, these
are imperfect instruments.
As a result, Progressives, from the beginning
of the last century down to the present day, have never lacked for
opportunities to reconstruct the American regime by craftily employing a
language of democratic populism.
The result, intentional or not, has been the
creation of the very oligarchic state Progressives claimed to oppose. By arguing
and governing as if politics is principally about the distribution of wealth
(“who gets what, when, and how,” as leading Progressive political scientist
Harold Lasswell put it), they managed to assemble, in the federal government,
all the means necessary to control that distribution. As a result, controlling
the state means controlling wealth.
In such circumstances, the rich will
certainly have good reason to seek–and, no doubt, find some success in
achieving–political power. But, more importantly, political power has become an
essential (if not the exclusive) means to acquiring wealth. Rather than an
oligarchy of market winners, we get an oligarchy of the well-connected–and,
with the rise of the permanent administrative state, one that is largely immune
to any meaningful popular accountability.
The convergence of intentional (mostly
Democratic) and accidental (mostly Republican) progressives and the happy peace
between the bohemian cultural left and financial elites has deepened and
institutionalized the difference between the “ins” and the “outs.” The move
from Occupy Wall Street-type community organizer to Martha’s Vineyard celebrity
has proven to be unexpectedly easy, at least for President Obama. A few true
believers aside, at the end of the day most progressive elites have come to
accept that Chappaqua mansions are built on welfare state mudsills and
willingly assumed their place in the new oligarchy.
The best moral and political response to
self-serving progressive cynicism is summarized by Madison near the end of
Federalist 57:
If it be asked, what is to restrain the House
of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and
a particular class of the society? I answer: the genius of the whole system;
the nature of just and constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant and
manly spirit which actuates the people of America — a spirit which nourishes
freedom, and in return is nourished by it.
See how plainly and powerfully Madison
asserts the fundamentally moral character of the American founding.
Discriminatory laws violate the “genius” of our republic, its constitutional
principles, and the natural rules of justice. That these ideals are not
self-enforcing requires the introduction of the most important check on privilege:
the people, guided by a “vigilant and manly spirit” nourishing and nourished by
freedom.
The political challenge of our day is the
revival of that spirit among the American people–and those who champion this
task, like those they champion, are anything but “insignificant.”
David Corbin is a Professor of Politics and
Matthew Parks an Assistant Professor of Politics at The King’s College, New
York City. They are co-authors of “Keeping Our Republic: Principles for a
Political Reformation” (2011).
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