In March, Justin Raimondo wrote an essay, Rand Paul, Revisited, in which he quoted Garet Garrett:
“There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, ‘Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don’t watch out.’ These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when ‘one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state.’”
Garrett was here writing of the New Deal but he might just as well have been describing our post-9/11 world. Yes, we still have a Constitution, which is hauled out and dusted off on special occasions—such as the need to start an unnecessary war—but for all intents and purposes it has been hollowed out.
Raimondo in his essay, and Garrett in the quoted passage from his essay, were dealing with the particular problem of Americans thinking that pieces of paper and promises from politicians, even from those known to be crooks to some lesser or greater extent, would protect them. Vigilance becomes unnecessary and Americans could get the best of two worlds, gaining the benefits of being citizens of a republic without the sacrifices in time and energy which have always been necessary in healthy republics.
As I see it, the Constitution was probably unworkable as written; I should perhaps rather say, consistent with the general message of Garrett and Raimondo, that any written constitution is no better than the moral character and public habits and behaviors of the citizens, as individuals and as communities. Americans like to point to the Constitution and claim our rights; more generally do we claim that each and every one one us is equal to wealthy men, to prominent college professors or influential editors and commentators, to men who pull the levers in the political machines, to leaders of powerful or wealthy institutions such as religious communities and grant-giving foundations. In fact, powerful and wealthy men are…powerful and wealthy. If they are not given public recognition, they will work behind closed doors and in meetings in the shadows. They will conspire. Some of them will even collaborate on criminal or immoral acts and they will all cooperate on long-term projects such the creation of a regulatory agency or a national medical insurance program which can restrict entry of new competitors.
Powerful and wealthy men will do what they think necessary to at least hold on to what they have, but, given their desires and the nature of a dynamic world, they will likely be determined to increase their wealth and power as well as to have control over how it is passed on to future generations.
Anyone knowing even a little about history, the Bible, and science should have expected the United States to have decayed into a sham republic. New England shoemakers and classically educated southern philosophers of law created a Constitution for a country in which citizens were to be equal and no more than equal and those who were piling up fortunes in land or by way of merchandising profits refused such a great gift, as did such men even in the later Roman Republic with its body of rugged lovers of their sort of limited but true freedom. The Romans remained virtuous republicans so long as they had to work hard to feed and cloth and shelter all those on their estates or in their villages. Once they had hoards of surplus wealth, the game was up; in their case, that surplus wealth had been gathered from their wars which had seemed at first to be wars of defense though often defense of borders which had been pushed far beyond Central Italy. The United States doesn’t seem to have had more than a generation, if that, of status as a serious republic because there are not and are not many citizens with more than a complacent acceptance of the fruits of a republic earned for us by the struggles and sacrifices of a unique band of men—the Founding Fathers.
Most Americans are realistic enough to realize that most politicians have their prices, political power or money, but those Americans live in some sort of fairy-tale land where each citizen is as powerful as any other on Election Day and we don’t bother to so much as contemplate the reality of our republic which has reached a truly degraded state. But the system did work remarkably well in the manner assumed by the citizenry. It produced much in the way of material goods, many of which were shared with the middle-class though it exercised little in the way of true political power. For a good two centuries, we Americans pretended to be free men and held out our hands to accept the gifts of our masters but this period of comfort at the expense of moral character seems to be coming to an end, an end which might prove very bitter for many over the 21st century and maybe far beyond. This is to say that the United States has much going for it but there is no reason to believe American citizens will suddenly show the moral character necessary to investigate the world and to make good judgments on the reality which lies behind appearances nor any reason to believe they will suddenly develop the moral courage necessary to act upon a good understanding of this sometime nasty world.
The rich and powerful in the United States, even many in political power and acting in the public arena without morally responsible oversight, can exercise control over much, including the political system nominally controlled by the voters. The elite, however defined, have power without responsibility; once upon a time, an FDR committed his crimes knowing he’d pay at least a price in loss of power if the end-result wasn’t favorable for the American people but even that constraint is largely gone. While we ordinary citizens dutifully march into the voting booths and then pretend the government is ours, the politicians and bankers and corporate executives get to work exchanging money and favors and rebalancing power-sharing relationships. Our pretense does nothing but allow this process to take place in back-rooms, maybe private dining-rooms at the local country club with its membership fees of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and maybe a conference room at the NYC headquarters of a major bank and maybe a Senator’s office in Washington. Those sorts of power-sharing relationships will be formed and rebalanced when the elite power-holders feel the need. If we wish these relationships to be in the interests of a larger body of citizens and communities, we should recognize that our individual votes on Election Day don’t give us any power over the government—as currently constituted. I don’t know how to reconstitute the government of the United States or even to know if it be possible though I know the situation can be greatly improved if Americans were to develop the moral characters they claim to already have.
But I can also say that some compromise with the wealthy and the powerful will be necessary. I’ll give one overly simplified narrative to point to the sort of compromises which could work if the wealthy and powerful were allowed more public, above-ground recognition of what they feel to be their well-earned rewards and if the rest of the citizenry were to be willing to challenge those wealthy and powerful men when they go beyond what has been allowed.
England was conquered in 1066 by Normans, Vikings who had learned how to mount large-scale military efforts, not just local looting operations, and also how to practice large-scale politics, organizing and administering larger areas and larger populations. The English and eventually the Welsh and Scots and Irish were under assault by a fresh population of energetic warlords, though warlords perhaps already organized in a ruling class of the sort necessary for a centralized state. Anglo-American political practices and theories emerged from these seemingly unpromising beginnings. The warlords were tamed, often helping to tame each other, by various means including one Americans will reject for falsely idealistic reasons: those warlords were publicly recognized for their high status and sometimes their capability and willingness to protect the ordinary citizens from other violent men; ambitious bankers and merchants and manufacturers greatly desired to join the ranks of those who had accepted meaningful constraints and public responsibility for their failures and crimes in return for public honor, legal recognition of a system such as primogeniture which allows the creation and maintenance of dynasties, and other benefits. Someone can certainly protest that this was exactly what the (leveling) Puritans of New England, and some others, wished to eliminate in forming what was apparently imagined as a great and wealthy republic which would be middle-class from top to bottom. Some acts of imagination can’t be implemented and wise men will often recognize them in time to prevent damaging and expensive efforts to implement the impossible.
England was able to balance the needs and desires of the wealthy and powerful with those of the ordinary citizen up through 1800 or so; such a balancing act was never really considered in the United States because the Founding Fathers, great men but human and sometimes overrated, simply ignored the past behind the trends leading to greater power of the individual. Most of the Founding Fathers, excluding John Adams and perhaps a few others, seemed to assume that the granting of full, formal rights of citizenship, including voting rights, would secure the corresponding power for the individuals and for the masses of ordinary citizens. The victory of equality in the political arena and in court had been won once and for all time. Fat chance.
The English continued on their separate path but reached a point similar to the Americans, granting universal suffrage under circumstances which seemed to relieve the nobility and the other powerful leaders (such as Anglican bishops and a few other clergymen) of responsibility. Soon enough, the British institutions which tied together power and responsibility, and also otherwise moderated excessive concentrations of power, weakened greatly, but the power went to the bankers of the City of London and the owners of great factories and the politicians who learned to swim with the sharks—responsibility became that of elected officials for a while and then faded into the far-away heavens in the manner of a pagan god no longer needed but still remembered in the myths taught to schoolchildren and assumed by the many citizens who craved sophistication without effort.
I have no solutions for the problems of the United States and its citizens and doubt if years of contemplation would lead me to a program of reform in which I’d have any confidence. Any solutions will have to be worked out in that inconvenient realm of reality, but such a process can begin only after a recognition of our true situation: American voters and British voters and any voters in modern liberal societies are largely powerless. If those voters wish to gain any sort of power, any say over their own futures and those of their children, then it will take much energy and courage; there is no signs of such qualities in the peoples of the Liberal West.