My good friend A.G., prosperous attorney and man about town during the day, is also the caped superhero, Scourge of Left, by night. As soon as the sun sets each day, he quickly finds a Tim Horton’s men’s room and swaps his Armani knock-off for his Conservative superhero costume modeled on Washington’s outfit in the famous full length portrait. Assuring himself that his powdered wig is on straight, he ventures out to do battle with the evil forces of the Left, embodied (yes, embodied) in the lissom bodies of errant young lawyettes who have strayed into socialist fields by listening to the siren songs of socialist Svengalis. We owe him much for his tireless efforts on the behalf of Western civilization!
Ok, enough of that.
It was fascinating to me, A.G., that in your comment on my last post, you drew attention to the U.S. Constitution. The reason is that that post had commenced life as a reflection on the Federalist Papers, a reflection which addressed the very point you make!
Yes, as we both agree, there exists no natural monitor or governor on popular greed or governmental appeasement of that greed. I see this as a terminal problem, but you believe that the U.S. Constitution provides an artificial governor on that appeasement.
My first response to your point is that if there does exist such a monitor, the evidence suggests that it is utterly ineffective, since Obama has jacked up the U.S. national debt to over 10 trillion dollars in feeding the entitlement appetite.
But on a more historical note, I believe that you do have a point. Conservatives who are interested in using the Founding Fathers for political conversions do not usually mention that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were as suspicious of masses as they were of monarchs, and they argued that the Constitution was as designed to defend us against a dictatorship of the mob as it was of a would-be monarch. Of course, the Conservatives inveigh against the East Coast snooty-poos and the Leftoids inveigh against the “right wing extrmists,” but the Founding Fathers were actually worried about both, as well as about leaving the important matters of state to individual citizens.
Which is why the U.S. is a republic and not a direct democracy.
The famous “checks and balances” were supposed to be a bulwark not only against one part of government becoming tyrannical, but also against “the people” becoming tyrannical. And it worked, for a time. What changed?
I think a number of things changed within the electorate that made an end-run around the artificial checks and balances possible.
The electorate of post revolution times consisted of farmers, small merchants, and artisans. All of these were independent minded people quite suspicious of government. That they were also shrewd is evidenced by the way the Federalist Papers appeal to them. The articles are all carefully argued, carefully reasoned efforts to rationally persuade the electorate that their own interests are best served by a unification of the states under a single constitution. This bunch of people would have snorted and spit if someone tried to sell them the snake-oil of “social justice,” and that was because they made their livings with their hands and backs and were not likely to give their money away lightly for a song and a story.
By way of contrast, the U.S. electorate today includes 47% who are parasites, who pay no taxes. If we add to that the percentage of people who work for government and the non-governmental union members, we begin to realize that even if the productive portion of the country still has the values of independence that controlled government vote-buying, that portion is massively outvoted by the remainder that is glued to the government teat.
What this means is that the Constitution can no longer be relied on to control populist appeasement spending.
The rot began with Wilson, was hugely increased under Roosevelt, and the final nail was put in the coffin by L.B.J..
The Founding Fathers never anticipated the electorate we face today, and even as we speak, the Democrat majority is in the process of increasing this dependent underclass by another ten million in a single shot by granting amnesty to the illegals.
The motto of the Democrat party is this: if the poor, illiterate, and stupid don’t exist, we have to either create them or import them or both. They create them by crashing the economy and they import them with a skewed immigration policy that focuses on increasing welfare recipients. Any improvement in the national standard of living is a political problem for the Democrat Party, not a cause of rejoicing.
Simplicius,
ReplyDeleteYou are certainly correct that while the Constitution CAN stop the populist onslaught (or at least that it was designed to) in practice it has failed at this task. You correctly highlight the Wilson administration as the starting point for America's constitutional descent. However, I don't believe it is merely because Wilson increased the role of government during this time; but rather that he fundamentally altered the structure of government institutions
What often goes overlooked is that it was during the Wilson Administration that the US enacted the 17th Amendment, which made US senators directly elected by the people, rather than indirectly elected by a free vote in state legislatures. Progressives believed that the indirectly elected senators had grown corrupt and were in the hands of special interests and needed to be further democratized so they could better respond to the people. Nevermind the fact that a very responsive legislature was the very thing the Founders had sought to avoid. The 17th Amendment was an excellent example of the law of unintended consequences coming into play. Rather than remove special interests from politics, the full democratization of the Senate increased their influence (and also brought populism to the forefront). Naturally, since then, liberals have tried to fix their first mistake by instituting "campaign finance reform", which does little besides empowering government.
With the 17th amendment, senators were no longer illustrious statesman who went to Washington advocating the interests of their state as a whole (and thus cumulatively advocating the National Interest); they were now obscure and transient figures with narrow visions and wholly beholden to moneyed interests in and out of their state. The 19th century produced great men like Calhoun, Clay, Daniel Webster - has the 20th/21st centuries produced anyone comparable? Perhaps Ted Kennedy?!?!? Unlikely!
While democratic-populism enabled the Left to harness the nation's greed in the name of social justice, it had its limits; namely, that in America, populism often produced conservative results. Thus, eventually, a second model was created to supplement the first. Rather than circumvent the original constitution in the name of "mass democracy", why not just reinterpret the Constitution to conform with "progressive" ideology? It's safer, quicker and doesn't depend on a democratic consensus. Thus, we get the "living constitution", created in the mid-20th century. Where the democratic majority enacts conservative, rather than liberal, legislation, simply overturn that legislation as "unconstitutional", i.e.: that said legislation promotes traditional morality/religion, notwithstanding that liberty itself is a byproduct of those traditions. And where the democratic majority passes legislation that takes agency away from individuals and empowers government, those laws should NOT be struck down, as they are consistent with the values of an "evolving society" and a "living constitution" (even if they conflict with the text of the Constitution and fly in the face of what the Constitution was designed to protect against).
Fortunately for the US, they have not yet dabbled in social and economic "rights", meaning a constitutional right to health care, education and housing that is "read in" to the text. Canada has already begun going down this path, and has already recognized,for example, a positive right to "unionization", meaning it is unconstitutional for the government not to have legislation that actively facilitates unionization.
It is perhaps too late to begin reversing these trends, but there is always hope. The Scourge of Left shall not surrender - Many of these Lawyettes can still be made to see the light!!!