Passing the Constitutional Test

In the midst of a battlefield of our darkest, most bitter war against ourselves, Abraham Lincoln stood up to remind us that the Civil War was really at bottom a test of the principles of the Founding Fathers, and that we and they were passing it.  All the current political turmoil has so many dark sides to it that today we need also to remember that at least one of the brighter aspects is that the principles of the founding fathers are once again being tested, and once again standing up to the test.  They talked a lot back then about the equality of all before the law, the pursuit of happiness, no taxation without representation (which also implies taxation with representation), the need for cooperation and compromise by all in the political process, etc., and those principles were built into the framework they constructed, the Constitution.  Today, we are met again on a great battlefield of the war against ourselves, the threat of government shut-down, testing whether those principles remain valid and can endure.

It’s easy to forget sometimes that the American Revolution was a social as well as a political revolution.  All the fuss and feathers about the Stamp Act, Valley Forge, the Boston Massacre, etc., make us forget how much the Revolution was just as much a revolution by a lot of middle class colonists against the tyrannies of the English aristocracy.  We remember the embattled at Concord and Lexington and forget the farmers.  Yet about a third of English settlers in the Maryland and Virginia colonies had been yeomen driven off the land by the Enclosure Movement, when the aristocracy had fenced off the common land in England, forcing yeomen to flee to cities and to the colonies.  A writer vital to American thinking was John Locke, with his emphasis on the labor theory of value – that the value of property was what you and not some servant put into it to cultivate it.  Many of the settlers were lower class religious dissidents protesting the forced adherence to the aristocratic Church of England.  And merchants protesting the tax on tea were protesting a tax that hit them but not the aristocracy.  They all had social grudges to settle which could easily have produced class warfare.  Less than 20 years after our revolution, the French Revolution would set off bloody class struggles setting each person against his neighbor that would consume Europe into the 20^th century.  The Constitutional Convention took place while the events leading up to the overthrow of the French monarchy were occurring. A concern that Madison et al were very sensitive to was the need to enable all to participate while minimizing social conflict.  These were no proto-Marxists.  Tom Paine and Patrick Henry were excluded from framing the Constitution, and even Jefferson was considered to be serving better in Paris than in Philadelphia.

So here we are today, stretching that framework to its limits.  Principles are being sorely tested.  Compromise seems a lost art.  Yet the Constitution requires compromise as the sine qua non for anything to happen at all.  But the situation gives us vision to see that the real villains lie outside the Congress itself and in our society at large.  The two main ones are the gerrymandering process that produces congressional representatives impervious to the need for compromise wired into our political process by the founders, and the growing inequality in all things – income, education, health, freedom to vote, etc. – produced by the excessive concentration of wealth into our new aristocracy, the one percent.  The Founders thoughtfully avoided a real class struggle, but we are creating one of our own.  And real class struggles generally turn out to be bloody. 

We are relearning the hard way, as they did in Lincoln’s time, why the Founders made the choices they did.  A democracy only functions when all accept the obligations it imposes, and compromise is a major one.  The immediate solutions to the problems are available.  The gerrymandered districts that support the no-compromise members could be the first to have their government services shut down by the executive branch, along with their pet projects.  That’s an old budget strategy to deal with proposed cuts.  Congressional leaders could deny perks and committee memberships to recalcitrant members, another old strategy.  Boehner could openly and honestly scrap the current Republican strategy of relying solely on Republican votes, inviting bipartisan compromise.  All that requires courage and would probably cost him his position – but that’s a choice he may be forced to make. Without his action, he is only a witness to the death throes of the Republican Party.  The Constitution will force compromise on government shutdown whether Boehner has courage or not.  That’s what it’s built to do, and it passes the test. 

The real problem is that all the current nonsense forestalls action on the longer term needs of the country.  No action is occurring on immigration reform, infrastructure development, climate change, tax reform and all the other major issues.  All the major areas that need work to ensure that our country does not fly apart are in hold mode.  We haven’t even got to the real compromises on issues that we need desperately to obtain.  Meanwhile the rich get richer and the poor get angrier.

We need to get back to the unstated principle of the founders, participation of all to ensure minimization of social conflict, enabled by compromise.  That’s why promoting the general welfare was a key part of the Constitutional framework.  Unless all can benefit from our political and economic processes, social conflict will be rife.  And social conflict brings down democracies, often in bloody ways.  We’re still in the midst of our current exam, but eventually the bell will ring.  And whether we pass the test remains very much up in the air.