Last week's reading were intended to introduce students to the two key founding document in American history, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We're still playing a little catch up in class, but I plan to read through both early in the week. It's important to understand the argument contained in the former and the structure of the latter.
It's also important to understand that the content of each document is the product of years - centuries - of history. I'll try to point this out as we go through each. The Constitution especially is probably best seen as the product of trial and error rather than a deliberate plan ahead.
This week I've opened up quizzes on the sections covering the principles embedded in the Constitution. We'll be looking at four: republicanism, separated powers, federalism, and individual liberty. I've opened material for the first three. You'll note that each is accompanied by one of the Federalist Papers since these are the documents that best describes why each in important.
Here's a quick look at each:
- Federalist 10 and the Republic. As we've discussed before, the United States is a republic - a democratic republic - and this can be defined in many ways including a government "where ultimate authority and power is derived from the citizens, and the government itself is run through elected officials."
This makes a republic different than a democracy - or at least a direct democracy. The people are the basis of authority and power, but they delegate this power to elected officials that they can then hold accountable in periodic elections. The people do not rule directly. Their preferences are - if you will - sifted through the legislative, executive and judicial institutions. This is the system deliberately designed by the framers in the constitutional convention.
This section tries to explain why they preferred a republic to a democracy. As with other aspects of their thought, the answer is not pretty. It reveals the deep suspicion the framers had about the capabilities of the general public. Even though they knew that a republic had to rest its authority on the general population, they wanted to avoid the fate of previous republics be tempering that influence.
Federalist #10 details both the suspicion and the solution to it. I hope to spend the bulk of class later this week reading through the document and detailing exactly what the framers - James Madison anyway - though Congress was supposed to do. Hint: the contentiousness we see in Congress was expected. While there are nuances to the current level of dispute - there is nothing new with the fact that the two side in office dislike each other. It's how we are hard wired.
- Federalist 51 and the Separation of Powers. A point made in a couple of places already - notably in the section on the Declaration of Independence - is that a key development in governing systems has been the gradual distribution of governing power among different institutions. We'll hit this point in other areas of the class as well, but this section tries to illustrate how central a concept this is to the governing system in the United States. It's even embedded in the opening three articles of the Constitution.
By this time, the point has hopefully been made enough that it needn't be repeated that much more. What does need to be developed is the practical question of (1) how do you separate powers and (2) how do you maintain that separation? That's James Madison's goal in Federalist #15. You'll note when we get to it that - just as with the preservation of the republic - human nature plays a key role in achieving this goal.
Madison's suspicions of human nature are not restricted to the mass public - he has similar misgivings about elites, but with a twist. Elites are ambitious - and there's little that can be done to change that. They will always want more power. The best that can be done is to arrange the powers in such a way that the aggression of each can serve as a check on those of others.
As with the previous section, we'll note that this arrangement almost guarantees conflict - the type of conflict we commonly see in the news. It's common for people to complain that we govern in a manner that the framers of the Constitution would object to. I;m never sure if that's the case.
- Federalist 45 and Federalism. The previous two sections cover principles that the framers of the Constitution assumed necessary to the system's design from the beginning. Federalism is different.
The term refers to the division of power into two basic levels of government: the national and state. More thoroughly it refers to local governments as well: cities, counties, single purpose governments and all that.
It was not an anticipated outcome of the convention. It was instead a compromise. The proper relationship between the national and state governments was perhaps the most contentious topic in the convention and it resulted eventually in an arrangement clouded in ambiguity. This had led to repeated controversies over American history as each generation of Americans wrestles with the proper relationship between national power and state power - especially as the relative roles of each is challenged by the changes in technology and morays.
