Originally posted by The Vagabond
If after the political row over Iraq settles, Republican voters are still willing and able to put in an administration that takes a hard line on Iran
or Syria, then what?
Then I'll be proven wrong, of course! But I don't believe that will happen. We can watch the Congressional elections next year for an
indicator.
Fair enough, but I see the constitution, when properly interpreted, as a possible guide for limitations which will prevent the government from
serving unjust interests at excessive detriment to the citizenry.
Well the problem is in that "when properly interpreted" business. If the document is so readily misinterpreted (in your view), doesn't that imply
that it is open to various interpretations?
There's a tendency in this country to regard the Constitution as if it were Holy Writ. It's not, it's just the law of the land, and exploring the
historical process by which it came to be can serve to de-mystify it.
Who drafted the Constitution? The main shapers were Madison and Hamilton. The Convention, consisting of delegates from the states, approved the
final version. Almost all of these delegates, and certainly both of the main shapers, were defenders of privilege and wealth.
Why was a new Constitution seen as needed? Because the government of the Articles of Confederation was unable to provide governing functions that
were seen as needed. Some of those "needed" functions included the protection of the privilege of the wealthy against movements to democratize
wealth, which were on at that time. Others included the ability of the U.S. to present a unified foreign policy and to reliably defend the borders,
so overall I'd agree a new government was needed, but with the rich and privileged driving the process, we should expect the product to serve their
interests before any others.
And that's also the context of the ratification debate. Most everyone involved in the debate on both sides agreed that some changes were needed,
that the old system wasn't working. But the anti-federalists were suspicious about the new document because of who was pushing it, and because of
suspicions that they were to be subjected to the rule of an American aristocracy just as bad as the British one they had recently gotten rid of -- or
even worse, because the home-grown aristocrats were here, not over there.
There was a lot of class antagonism involved in the American Revolution. Four groups were involved: the titled British nobility that controlled the
British government, the American commercial magnates concentrated mainly in the northern colonies, the American slaveowning planters concentrated
mainly in the south, and the rest of America's free population. Plus the Indians, of course. What made the Revolution possible is that all of those
American groups became sufficiently united against the British elite that a bare majority of Americans came to want independence. But that doesn't
mean they had common interests overall. And once independence had been achieved, the fractures began to show.
Where I'm going with this is that the Constitution, being designed in part to protect privilege, can't be relied upon as a protection
against
privilege, no matter how it's interpreted.
Granted, but given that no government to my knowledge has ever gone long without sometimes doing wrong things and not right ones, it still seems
important to limit that ability to the extent that it does not deprive the government of the ability to do right things that the citizens could not
accomplish without government.
I would agree that government is a potential threat to liberty. I would agree that safeguards are necessary to prevent the potential from becoming
actual. But I would not agree that we should think of this in terms of limiting the scope or power of government, weakening it as much as practical
given the needs we see for its services.
Rather, I see the dangers as specific
types of action, not the
scale of the action, and the safeguards as of three kinds: division of
power, with checks and balances to prevent any one person or group of people within the government from gaining too much power; public accountability,
with all government officials subject to democratic approval; and specific constitutional guarantees of rights in the form of actions the state is
forbidden to take.
At present, all three of these have become somewhat eroded. Our post-WWII imperial stance has enhanced the presidency at the expense of Congress.
Our system of campaign financing, amounting to legalized bribery, together with corporate control of the news media, have compromised public
accountability. And in the post-9/11 hysteria, civil liberties were legally compromised. That last, I believe, is passing and will be corrected in
short order, but the other two need serious action.
I already believe that force or the threat of force basically governs all human affairs, but in anarchy that force is almost unfailingly violent and
arbitrary. If we went back to a hunting/foraging economy some tyrant would just club his neighbors on the head for possession of a slain deer- that's
about as tyrannical as it gets.
That's actually not how it worked, but I see where we're cross-wiring here. You're defining government in terms of force or the threat of force.
I'm defining it in a more formal way, as an organized, official authority over society.
Foraging/hunting bands did have a lot of internal violence but they also tended to share food and other basic goods communally. They had to in order
to survive. Private capital property is an invention of civilization. So is formal government. They were small enough that a formal structure of
law and government wasn't required. The whole band could make decisions together. No tyrant could rule the band by force and threats, because no
one individual could survive without the cooperation of the rest. Even today, a tyrant has to have a part of the population follow him willingly, or
he has no power at all.
This way of living is "natural" to us, in that it's how our ancestors lived when we first evolved as a species, and the way humans lived for
between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand years. By comparison, civilized life has been brief. There's a tendency to yearn for a return
to such a life, with everything shared in common, no government, no organized religion. The Garden of Eden represents this. It was behind the
idealism not only of Thoreau but even of Marx, whose conception of the ultimate stage of history (true communism) incorporates elements of it. The
environmental movement is partially driven by it (although it's also driven by science and common sense).
But we can't return to the Garden. From the moment the first furrow was plowed, that way of life was doomed.
