Posted on 07/31/2010 5:25:15 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
As Philadelphians know, the second most significant event in human history occurred right here in 1787. That was when the Founding Fathers gathered in Independence Hall (and the City Tavern, among other watering holes) to write the United States Constitution.
One day, as the Convention was finishing its work, the story goes that a woman stopped old Ben Franklin in the street. “Well, Dr. Franklin,” she supposedly asked, “what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
“A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”
Franklin’s choice of words was deliberate. The Founders emphatically did not want to create a democracy. Democracies, they believed from their study of ancient Athens and Rome, didn’t last long because the people – the demos – could be swayed, by bribes, by corrupt morals or by popular passion. Ultimately, they elected a tyrant. Tyranny ended in monarchy.
They didn’t know it yet, but the Founders’ fears were about to be confirmed by the French Revolution. Better, James Madison and the rest thought, to design a representative democracy.
It would be, one wrote, “a machine that would go of itself.” Checks and balances. No centralized national government controlling all. Instead, three independent branches in a federal system wherein a national government with limited powers shared sovereignty with the states.
No direct, popular election of presidents. Instead, an Electoral College.
No direct election of senators. Senators would be chosen by the state legislatures. Furthermore, there would be staggered, six-year terms for Senators, to counterbalance the popularly elected House of Representatives. The Senate, said another Founder, would be the saucer into which the heated passions of the popularly-elected House could be cooled.
Popular revolution would be almost impossible.
At the state level, where the right to vote was determined, the franchise was limited. No women, no African Americans or Indians. No one who could not meet a property test. The majority of Americans could not vote at all.
To erect a fence around Liberty (and to win ratification of the Constitution in the first place), the Founders and the First Congress added a Bill of Rights. Certain rights, deemed to be based in natural law (i.e., proceeding from God, not man) which pre-dated the Constitution. Only a super-majority of Congress and the States could sweep them away.
There had never been anything like it before. There still hasn’t.
The Founders’ world has long since passed away. However, with a little time granted them to understand changes in modern technology, I think they would see some recognizable patterns in our politics today. I’m sure Ben Franklin and James Madison would have no trouble at all.
First, of course, the conflict between elites and the demos. How else to explain the battle between the Tea Party Movement, on the one hand, and the Obama administration and its allies, on the other? I believe we have witnessed in the last year something like the Rising of the North after the Confederates’ firing on Fort Sumter in 1861. The federal court’s striking down of parts of the Arizona immigration law last week will only further inflame our public mood.
Whether that popular movement will hold together until November and result in vote totals on election day which will sweep away large parts of the Liberal Project which has taken power in this country since 1965 is not yet known. Either way, it is certain – as the Founders intended – to be a slow counter-revolution.
Second, a corrupt media. The Founders all felt the sting of what Mary Lincoln later called “the vampire press.” More than a few of them – Thomas Jefferson comes to mind immediately – had their own media machine and used it to electoral advantage. Both Washington and John Adams suffered greatly from a politicized press.
The Journolist scandal will only further the perception that large parts of our national media are now the arm of one of our two great political parties. For all the well-deserved criticism of NBC, CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times, it remains a fact that it’s Fox News which employs not one, not two but three likely candidates for the American presidency: Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee. Not to mention Dick Morris.
Let us not be fooled.
Third, corruption of electoral politics by wealth. In the first half of the 19th century, American politics at the national level was driven by what Lincoln and others called the Slave Power. After the Civil War came the Gilded Age. Now, in the wake of the economic meltdown of 2008, we confront Finance.
Finally, there is the tendency of the on-going revolution in electronic media, social networking and the rest to bring about direct democracy. The Sherrod scandal, and the other episodes involving Breitbart.com, are the most obvious examples of this. Yet, our republican institutions are not designed for, and do not easily accommodate, the vox populi.
There is, of course, a corrective for this. It may even be that, in the scheme of things, the Obama administration and this Democratic Congress are providing just such an antidote to a moment of temporary insanity on the part of the electorate of 2008. Every now and then, H. L. Mencken believed, the American people should get just what they want – good and hard.
Boy, are we.
August is usually the Silly Season of American politics. Come Labor Day, maybe things will start making more sense. In the meantime, all is whirl.
*****
Jim Wiles is a Philadelphia lawyer and can be reached at jwiles@thebulletin.us
I hope that we are NEVER a “Democracy.” Our rights are NOT subject to the whims of the sheeple.
You’re right. Democracy isn’t any better than any other form of tyranny.
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