FROM DIVISION TO INACTION

 

In continuing with the topic of the last posting, this one further shares Daniel Elazar’s review[1] of the obstacles the founding fathers faced.  That is developing a national governing model that remained true to their collective bias for republican / federalist values.  In short, the obstacles were a vast land mass and a diverse populous.  The history of such efforts seemed to always count on despotic rule to provide effective governance.

          Of any hope, at least as one studied the situation, was to either follow the model of Great Britain which was a single unified polity but that honored the diversity of the governing population or to establish a loose confederation of independent / sovereign states united only for purposes of mutual defense and foreign relations. 

The latter option was looked upon dubiously out a fear that it could degrade from inadequate rule even in terms of foreign relations.  And, as mentioned in the previous posting, the unified option – a la Napoleon and France – was popular among the military.  One of its “sons,” though, Alexander Hamilton would argue for a constitutional monarchy – a la the British model – at the Constitutional Convention.  Instead, the founders first chose the second option, the loose arrangement, by adopting the Articles of Confederation and in a few years determined that that was an unworkable model.

One thing the founders learned was that the “loose” option only led to elite factions undermining the liberties of sizable numbers within the political landscapes of the various states.  Those who represented these factions – one can by implication count Patrick Henry in Virginia – maintained their staunch support of this option.  Later, they will make up the Anti-Federalist contingency during the debate over the ratification of the federal constitution.

So, what was chosen – option one or option two?  Neither.  The founders instead invented yet another option.  They first acknowledged that a single nation had evolved in the years since the first settlers made their way to North America.  Two wars and common challenges cooked up this resulting American people. 

That meant that a sufficient common culture and way of being existed, albeit barely, to create a single polity.  But there was enough distinction among the states to not ignore the diversity that existed.  And their steadfast determination to not cater to those who advised despotism should not be underestimated in understanding what happened.

If the experiences taught them anything, it taught them that “smallness” did not guarantee a protection from despotic tendencies and even its actuality.  Smallness could be despotic just as well as bigness.  And another lesson learned was that democratic majorities can also be despotic.  Pure majorities can and had overrun the rights of individuals and minorities.  Therefore, they set out to establish a qualified majority rule arrangement.  As Elazar puts it,

 

Pure democracies, in particular, were subject to the sway of passion and hence to the promotion of injustice, and even republics were susceptible if faction was allowed to reign unchecked.  As friends of human liberty and popular government, they felt it necessary to create a political system that would protect the people from despotic governments whether they be large or small, democratic or not.[2]

 

The proposed solution was one of countervailing forces; a federalist model provided such an approach. 

How?  By allocating sufficient powers to various levels so that they could then compete in arenas of vying, opposing interests.  In this way no one faction could control what transpires as these conflicting interests work out their differences in local and national arenas.  Among the resulting balances would be the overall limits on governmental excesses and popular passion.  For example, federalism allowed for national governmental entities to compete with regional (state) governmental entities while maintaining a popular governmental model.

          In short, the founders devised a “republican remedy for republican diseases.”  Was it a centralized remedy or decentralized remedy?  It was a non-centralized one.  That is, the devised system has no central body with sole sovereign power.  Instead, an original shared sovereign approach was instituted with the resulting constitutional instrument the founders developed in 1787. 

Yes, one level, when the chips are down, has final say – that being the national government – but an honest respect for the sovereignty of each level was to be maintained – and it has been.  Students of this innovation gave it a name, “checks and balances,”[3] and civics students learn that this attribute is one of the Constitution’s principles.  And given that within each government there were divided powers, the overall polity was to be set up to deny any element within it too much power, but yet with enough power to meet those responsibilities that element was created to meet.

And this separation of power, writ large, extended to other political institutions such as political parties (with national and state organizational structures) that the founders did not even foresee.  The federal model, therefore, became culturized or institutionalized within the various political entities including private ones such as corporations.  The result is the “infiltration” of federalist principles among the diverse array of institutional elements of the civil society. 

One can look at the arrangements by which the public school system of the nation – that is, the fifty different public-school systems – and how educational policy is issued and implemented.  This does not preclude problems arising from this structure, but that it exists no one can doubt, and no one can ascribe a despotic control over the American educational system.

And the balance sought – one that Americans have frequently asked since – was between bestowing sufficient power, while at the same time ensuring that those with power seek and secure sufficient consent from the various corners of interests regarding proposed policies.  To get something big done, one needs significant consensus among the various factions that make up the American political scene. 

Currently, that is being judged as a challenge in that various problems – e.g., environmental problems – go untreated.  Unfortunately, one can at least suspect that various politicians today do not fully appreciate what is at stake, but perhaps a sufficient number of voters might resolve this inaction.  And again, the prevalence of the natural rights view seems to be an obstacle of no small consequence.

While it often, as the current headlines of today demonstrate, draws criticisms for inaction, it, the federalist arrangement, has protected the American public from a government running roughshod over the nation.  If anything, it is not majorities that seem to have undermined this federalism, but the power of a minority with excessive moneyed assets that seem to have provided a despotic character – not just today but since the development of first a national economy and now a global one.

The model that was devised, though, took significant strides toward ascribing respectful and meaningful allocation of power to the individual factions that existed at the time and since there have been meaningful accommodations to meet the growth of the economy – for example, instituting national programs that attempt to retain more local elements such as Social Security. 

This blogger sees the main threat comes more from cultural elements.  The nation no longer looks to federalist thought in its political calculations, it now looks to the transactional based view of natural rights instead.  Hence, one has the indecisive reaction one sees in how Americans react to the various political challenges of the day.

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[1] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution? Thoroughly,” in a booklet of readings, Readings for Classes Taught by Professor Elazar, prepared for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute (conducted in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 1994), 1-30.

[2] Ibid., 21.

[3] This blogger has been instructed that the term “balance” did not refer to a weighing scale, but to the mechanism of clocks of those times that slowed down the operations within those clocks to allow for accurate measures of time.  The analogy was just that, to slow down governmental reactions to increase the probabilities of devising prudent policies.

A POLITICAL ARCHITECH’S CHALLENGE

As this blog proceeds and tracks the development of political thought among Americans in the colonial years – especially with the years leading up to the formation of the nation’s governmental framework – it would be wise to review the governing challenges that the founding fathers faced in the late 1700s.  To remind the reader what is motivating this review, is the challenge to demonstrate the dominance of the federalist view as the founders proceeded in their labors. 

To point out a further qualifier, this review in this posting already assumes that those early Americans, some begrudgingly, were convinced that their future demanded the colonies and then states had to join in some form of unity.  How this became accepted will be outlined in future postings.  It is not a small part of the story, but the goal here is to give the reader an end vision of what the founders were seeking to accomplish.

In this overview, the insights of Daniel Elazar will be utilized.[1]  And he begins by addressing the notion that somehow what eventually happened was, given the conditions before the founders, preordained – it was simply the inevitable solution to what the founders faced and what they knew as being possible.  Elazar rejects that notion and credits the founders with an original idea not at all obvious to them or to the people they represented.  Yes, one can argue it was logical, given the role federalism played in the development of the individual colonies, but not obvious.

That is, they entered the challenge with a bias toward federalism.  They, through the colonial experience, were already disposed to believe that a system needed to sustain, so as to be viable, popular governance and a system that would reflect civil justice and morality.  In that, they sought a good commonwealth which in turn demanded a balance among various sought-after attributes. 

This reflected their short history in organizing their colonies when they needed to find the right mix of human liberty, functional authority, and sufficient governmental vibrancy.  If hit upon, the result, it was believed, would be strong, sustainable, democratic, and just.  And this not only needed to work in terms of the relationships among the colonies/states, but also among the various interests (factions) that made up a national polity.

So, what stood in the way?  According to Elazar, three main obstacles confronted these political architects:  a vast expanse of territory or land even in 1787, a vibrant array of peoples or what current language calls diversity, and the already well-established political norms and biases existing within thirteen different polities that had developed since the early years of the seventeenth century.

To these conditions, Elazar directly criticizes competing views as to what was accomplished.  One is that the founders, who were in their hearts antidemocratic, wanted to dilute the popular will by dividing it in a federalist arrangement.  And further, that a good deal of American history – in antebellum years – was about the people pushing against what the founders established in expanding the democratic character of the American political scene.

The second view Elazar defuncts is that even though the founders might have been democrats (small “d”), they had the practical problem of the lack of communication facility over the vast land mass the states encompassed.  Of course, as technology advanced and communication facility became more sophisticated this became less of an issue.

Therefore, the need to be a federal system became less needed and that, in turn, goes a long way in explaining how American politics had become more centralized especially through such programs as the New Deal and over such concerns as civil rights.  In short, a distribution of power, as provided for under a federalist system, becomes “obsolete.”

One can cite the facts supporting some this, for example, there were thirteen states and as previous postings try to argue, they did generate a federalism within their politics – mostly based on Puritanical beliefs and Enlightenment thinking.  Elazar even points out that there is research that in certain areas of policy, the colonists had de facto federal relationships with the Crown and Parliament. 

But a priori there was no guarantee that the states, after independence, would unite into a single governmental arrangement.  And even if they could or would, that effort could very well be limited to some loose league or confederacy for the sake of foreign affairs issues.  The fact that the colonies united for the sake of addressing their mutual interests vis-à-vis the Seven Years War (the French and Indian War), relations with indigenous tribes, or in fighting the War of Independence proved that the colonies, then the states could unite despite a vast land territory or a diverse population.

And, of course, if one dismisses concerns for democracy, republicanism, liberty, history is full of examples of vast empires – Persian, Roman, Ottoman, Russian[2] – that were able over the centuries to maintain fairly successful political control over vast areas and diverse populations.  Yes, they were, to various degrees autocratic, but most allowed degrees of local autonomy over various governing concerns.  At the time of the founders, the French and the English were establishing world empires.  The French were particularly partial to central control.

Yes, vast land masses could come under a single arrangement, the question was could it do so without counting on some despotic rule.  And as is often the case, an experiment was first tried.  History remembers it as the Articles of Confederation and not only did it not work, but it also gave the founders useful information of what exactly prevented it from working.  The common notion is that the Articles were totally dismissed.  Donald Lutz, this blogger heard him say, points out that much of the Articles survived in the US Constitution.  But the point is, a federal arrangement survived with a more powerful central government.

With the opportunity to abandon a popular government model – George Washington was being advised by his former military subordinates to push for a centralized model – the founders stuck to a federal solution.  This despite the fact that that history provided no example that accomplished what they were trying to initiate – or better stated, preserve.  Elazar points out,

Not only were there no extant examples of the successful government of a large territory except through a strong central government, but there were few small territories governed in a “republican” manner and none offered the example of federalism as Americans later came to know it.  The two nations then existing that had come closest to resolving the problems of national unity without governmental centralization were the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the Swiss Confederation.  Not only were both very small republics indeed … but the failure of the former to solve its constitutional problems and its consequent lapse into government by an incompetent executive and an anti-republican oligarchy was well-known while the latter was hardly more than a protective association of independent states with little national consciousness.  Neither could be an attractive example … [of] republicanism …[3]

But as is known today, this did not deter the founders.  The next posting will continue with this contextual information, i.e., the challenges that founders faced in devising the constitutional model they devised.

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[1] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution? Thoroughly,” in a booklet of readings, Readings for Classes Taught by Professor Elazar, prepared for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute (conducted in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 1994), 1-30.

[2] The Russian empire was larger than the original land mass of America.  According to Elazar, it totaled 888,811 square miles in 1789.

[3] Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution? Thoroughly,” 19.