From the Campaign Trail
By BRYAN WEYNAND
October 2008
Imagine James Madison and Patrick Henry, reunited after 250 years, sitting in The Daily Grind to discuss again the merits and demerits of the Constitution they helped to create, and consider which political, oratorical and intellectual giant would prevail: the revered Madison, foremost defender of the Constitution, the man who led the Bill of Rights to passage and who was eventually elected president, or Henry, the rigid Anti-Federalist and opponent of Madison who is remembered by few for anything other than his immortal, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
What a debate that would be! It would be one quite different, even opposed in nature to the political discourse most frequently heard today. Madison would note the strength of the federal government in preserving the effectiveness and cohesiveness of our Union, while at the same time fervently touting its limit and restraint in protecting the rights and freedom of the states and of individuals. Henry, of course, would again decry Madison’s safeguards as insufficient and warn of the gradual usurpation of power by the federal government, and the subsequent disappearance of individual and state rights. In actuality, it would likely be met with the same incredulity and perplexity that is directed at a Ron Paul speech. The oddity of politicians framing their conversation within the context of the Constitution would be passed off as radical, and the highly egregious foul of discussing rights without mention of free healthcare would render both not worth taking seriously. And already we have a winner!
For those of you who forgot to notice the affront to our Constitution which is our modern political culture, you are the 250 years of evidence that Mr. Henry now has in his favor. James Madison was wrong.
He was wrong not with respect to the system of government that he helped create that, when followed, protects individual freedom as no other system of government in the history of the world does; he was wrong in trusting that it would be followed, and in not foreseeing that it would be replaced in importance by a culture that says the government, limitless in scope, should crusade to solve all of society’s struggles.
That culture is the point at which Barack Obama and John McCain enter the debate. It doesn’t take long to realize that something doesn’t make sense; there is a disconnect between the two ages that is much more than simply the passage of time: McCain and Obama, both of whom have built their campaigns on this new culture that demands of them answers to problems previously outside the sphere of the government, have committed exactly what Madison and Henry sought to prevent.
Months of recorded debate during the state and national conventions held to edit and then adopt the Constitution show that the discussion was almost exclusively on that question which was central to both Madison and Henry: how to ensure that the federal government would not become too strong, excessively tax citizens, and trample on the sovereignty of the individual and the state. This struggle led to such critical amendments as the Ninth, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” and the Tenth, “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
Rights were of supreme importance to this generation of politicians, and to them political rights had a much simpler definition than the extravagant one lavished on them today: the insurance that the government will stay out of our way so that we can live with the free will we were given at creation.
It need not be asked whether anyone has noticed the remarkable infrequency with which our two presidential candidates talk about these same kinds of rights; unless you are one of those “crazy” Ron Paul supporters you probably haven’t.
But let’s settle a point here clearly: a nationalized healthcare system, federal involvement in education and a whole host of other platform planks for both candidates were not only missing from the Founding Fathers’ vision for their country – they are directly counter to it. It is fairly obvious that at this point in our history we are ok with that; perhaps our values have changed with the times, and our government has had to adapt.
But let us at least acknowledge the implications of this shift. Obama for one shouldn’t proclaim his desire to make the Democratic Party the “Party of Jefferson.” Thomas Jefferson would be offended by the scope of government espoused by both parties. Really, we should probably stop teaching students the Bill of Rights in civics class as if it is the foundational truth by which our government operates, when it’s not.
Trivial examples aside, it mandates noting that there has been a dramatic paradigm shift in American politics that seems to have finally culminated after a couple of centuries in the replacement of political principle with a pragmatism that says the government is an instrument of providing solutions, not of protecting the private sphere’s ability to do it more effectively. This shift, among many other negative consequences discussed throughout this magazine’s most recent issues, has brought about nothing less than the end of the constitutional era of politics in the United States.
Sure, the Supreme Court still exists, but most of its decisions are based on case law from previous corrupted judgment. More importantly, the American people do not answer to the defense of the Constitution in forming their political values; they answer to the ideology that asserts most directly that it will fix their struggles. A recent TIME magazine poll showed that eight in 10 Americans currently expect the government to lift us from our current economic recession. Hoards of voters are siding with Obama’s pledge to work for them once elected, and even the Republican McCain is having to, in some respects, deviate from his party’s principle of limited government to even have a chance with the people he has to persuade.
It used to be that the government only did what it had to do: protect the good from the evil. The good then took care of the rest of society’s needs. Hopefully the merits of this approach will be shown at some point during the next eight years. Another less recent, and less publicized, TIME poll showed that charitable giving tends to respond negatively to increased government action.
Until then, I’ll settle for a little historical awareness; right now I’m left to wonder why we still revere our Founding Fathers when we didn’t even like their brand of freedom enough to keep it.