Letters from an Ohio Farmer

Justice and Limited Government

To My French Friend:

Thank you, Jean-Luc, for the report on the re-emergence of state run enterprises, or state capitalism, as it is called.  I had thought this phenomenon restricted to China, France, and a few other "backward" places, but now I see that it is widespread, a growing trend in Latin America and parts of Asia even beyond China.  And it is not at all considered backward but the newest way to wealth and happiness.  I discover that it is you and I who are backward, attached as we are to the idea that individual effort and responsibility are best.

To me the report shows that we are not mistaken.  It cites data showing that state controlled companies are much less productive than independent companies, for example.  This means that state controlled companies contribute less to economic well-being than independent companies.  The report does lend some support to those who argue for a larger state role by noting the ways that governments help economies grow, by administering the rule of law, building roads, and such things.  But in doing this, government is providing only some of the conditions that make economic success possible.  If it does more than that, it risks creating the conditions that stifle growth.

These notions, of course, bring to mind the remark of President Obama that, "if you've got a business—you didn't build that.  Somebody else made that happen." I am sure you have heard of this episode.  If the President meant to point to the help that government gives to all our endeavors, he would have said the obvious.  But his remark, the longer passage in which it occurred, as well as the controversy it generated, obscured a simple point.  All the money the government spends comes from the wealth created by the hard work of Americans.  It is the hard work and initiative of Americans that comes first and is the source of all wealth, even that used by the government to assist Americans.  That will be the case unless the government completely dominates the economy, which presumably the President is not advocating. 

If the initiative and hard work of Americans is the ultimate source of wealth, then the government should do nothing to discourage this initiative and hard work.  It should do only what is necessary, so that the initiative of citizens has the greatest possible scope.  In limiting its power, in leaving to each of us, in the greatest degree possible, the wealth our hard work has earned, a government does not only what is best for the creation of more wealth but also what justice demands. 

The connection between limited government and justice is a point too seldom noted, I think.  Most advocates of government intervention assume that such intervention will promote justice—social or economic justice, as it is now called.  But the opposite is really the case.  Have you and I not discussed many times how in France what can only be called a class of people moves from executive positions in government controlled businesses to executive positions in government ministries and then back again into the state owned firms?  Have we not noted how this class protects itself and its privileges?  Have senior positions in state enterprises in China not become the sinecures of those who run the government, the Communist party elite and their sons and daughters?  Whatever wealth or privileges a government controls, it will tend to distribute not according to the merits of those who receive it, but according to the interests of those who distribute it.  That is not justice.

You noted that the current fashion for government involvement in the economy puts an end to the Reagan-Thatcher revolution for smaller government.  I appreciate your allegiance to the Anglo-American leaders so often criticized in your own country.  But I think that the vogue for state capitalism is a threat to an older revolution, the American Revolution.  To those who fought the power of government then, its injustices were more evident.  Aristocratic privilege was embedded in law; means of redress were more limited.  Taxation without representation was a clear injustice.  But having won independence and the right of representation, the injustice inherent in the power of government remained.  Thomas Jefferson understood this.  That is why in his First Inaugural address he argued for what he called frugal government that "shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."  

I hope with you that the current fashion for more government, at least in the United States, is nothing more than a response to the recent recession and that we will soon turn toward smaller government.  Justice as much as economic well-being would be best served by such a turn.  We have, of course, moved far from what Jefferson meant by frugal government.  It may not be possible to return to that Jeffersonian standard, but there are good reasons to think that a smaller, less intrusive government will be both possible and necessary in the future.  I will write to you soon about my reasons for thinking so.  

Ohio Farmer

Taxation and a Republican Constitution

To My Fellow Citizens:

The Supreme Court recently held the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to be a valid exercise of Congress's constitutional authority. Surprisingly, the Court did not find the Act constitutional under the Commerce Clause as the law's proponents had argued, but under the taxing power.  Perhaps no Supreme Court ruling in our lifetimes will be as heavily scrutinized as this one, so serious citizens will want to think about it and come to their own conclusions. 

As I noted in an earlier letter, progressives for the past century have justified expanding federal regulatory power over the economy by insisting on a broad reading of the Commerce Clause. It was a breathtakingly aggressive claim that underlay Obamacare, namely, that Congress may "regulate" commerce by mandating that individuals purchase health insurance or else face a financial penalty.  Chief Justice Roberts rejected this claim. But he then upheld Obamacare's constitutionality, nonetheless, under the taxing power.

Outraged conservatives took little solace in his rejection of the Commerce-Clause justification of the law. What difference does it make, some wondered, whether the federal government tramples our liberties under the Commerce Clause or the taxing power?  And where exactly in the Constitution does the Chief Justice find authorization for such use of the taxing power? Still, the distinction between regulation and taxation is not a case of mere semantics, and maybe this is a distinction that could make a difference.

Taxation occupies a unique place in American history and civic consciousness.  While few citizens know the origins of the Commerce Clause, nearly everyone understands that taxation somehow ignited the American Revolution.  We've all heard the phrase "no taxation without representation."  Schoolchildren learn of oppressive taxes on stamps and tea—oppressive not because British officials imposed a heavy financial burden but because they raised taxes without colonial consent.  Indeed, the colonists felt driven to resistance primarily because Parliament acknowledged no limits to its authority. 

Episodes such as the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion show that Americans' resentments over taxation persisted after the Revolution.  Nowadays elected officials often take a pledge not to raise taxes, a pledge they ignore at their peril.  In short, taxes tend to command Americans' attention and arouse their anger in ways that commercial regulations do not.  Is it mere wishful thinking to suppose that it will be more difficult for proponents of unlimited government to expand federal authority under the taxing power (than under the Commerce Clause) without alarming the sovereign people?  Chief Justice Roberts's opinion seems in some respects to throw the entire question back to the political arena.  At least to this extent, is his decision a welcome development for those Americans who don't want the Supreme Court to serve as the final arbiter of all constitutional debates?

Thomas Jefferson thought that if the Supreme Court came to be regarded as the sole interpreter of the nation's fundamental law, it would threaten the very existence of constitutional self-government.  In an 1819 letter to Judge Spencer Roane, Jefferson argued that "The constitution, on this hypothesis," would be "a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please."  Jefferson preferred genuine separation of powers in which "each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution in the cases submitted to its action."  He believed, as did most of his contemporaries, that presidents and members of Congress shared in the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution and thus maintaining the balance essential to free government. 

When Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton quarreled over the constitutionality of a national bank, or when Federalists and Republicans in Congress quarreled over the constitutionality of Jay's Treaty, they did not submit the question to the Supreme Court for a final verdict.  The Constitution's framers never meant for the Supreme Court to become the final and sole arbiter of constitutional meaning. They expected Americans to elect legislators who think seriously about constitutional questions, and this could happen only if the people took it upon themselves to think seriously about such questions, assuming their rightful role as guardians of their republican experiment.          

Of course, Obamacare supporters, who tend to want to subject politics to bureaucracy, now wish the matter closed.  But the matter is not closed. It is very much in the hands of the American people, who have a historic opportunity to assert the republican spirit that has served them so well for more than two centuries.  The health-care debate has reminded us anew of our obligation to think about the powers we wish our government to wield.  In that sense, at least, let us hope that it will prove to be good for our political health.

Ohio Farmer

America's Constitutional Story

To My Fellow Citizens:

We Americans have a constitutional history going back further than we usually think. It is an instructive history. We were a constitutional people long before we became a nation.  For nearly 170 years, England's North American colonists lived and prospered under the English (later British) constitution and thus enjoyed the rights and liberties of Englishmen.  They had colonial charters, of course, and they learned to cherish representative government.  But the wellspring of their rights and liberties, as they understood them, was the English constitution itself.  Unlike our present U.S. Constitution, the English constitution is unwritten.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was best understood as a set of judicial precedents and institutional arrangements, developed over time, which ensured a balanced government. 

This balance guaranteed that no branch of the government (though they didn’t think in terms of branches the way we do) would become too powerful.  According to the English Whig historical narrative, the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 expelled the would-be tyrant King James II, elevated Parliament, and thereby preserved English liberty through constitutional balance.  In a late-feudal and early-modern European world of absolute monarchies, English parliamentarians declared that royal power had limits.  Small wonder, then, that England's North American colonists thought themselves the freest people on earth.

But as Americans became more integrated into the British Empire, they came to understand liberty and constitutionalism in ways that differed from their brethren across the Atlantic.  Britain's clumsy efforts to extract revenue from the colonists—stamp taxes, tea taxes, etc.—ignited a great constitutional struggle.  When Parliament claimed the power to make laws for the colonies, America's political leaders met this claim with defiance.  "The true ground on which we declare these acts void," Thomas Jefferson argued, is "that the British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us."  In short, Jefferson and his compatriots declared independence from the British Empire in large part because they realized that the unwritten British constitution meant whatever Parliament said it did. 

Recognizing that an unchecked legislature posed as great a danger to liberty as did an absolute monarch, America's revolutionaries commenced the second act of our constitutional story when they set about drafting written constitutions, including the U.S. Constitution of 1787. History had shown that even in the English-speaking world power and liberty were constantly in tension. 
Societies need their governments to exercise power for the common benefit, but that power requires meaningful limits.  Fully discarding both divine right monarchy and parliamentary sovereignty, America's constitution-makers appealed to the sovereign consent of the people to impose limits on government authority and instruct public officials in what powers they may wield. 

The constitution-makers divided these powers among the three branches and between federal and state jurisdictions. They wrote bills of rights to serve as redundant checks in case any public official forgot the popular source and limited nature of government's powers.  To exercise powers not granted by the people through their written constitutions, Jefferson wrote in 1791, was to "take
possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition." In the ensuing decades, America's post-revolutionary statesmen did not always agree on the precise meaning and limits of constitutionally enumerated powers.  Universally, however, they acknowledged a good people's sovereignty channeled through written constitutions as America's salvation from arbitrary rule.

This firm belief in the relationship between liberty, the sovereign people, and enumerated constitutional powers persisted into the twentieth century, when American progressives launched the third act of our constitutional drama.  For more than a hundred years the United States had grown and prospered. Americans built canals and railroads, settled the trans-Mississippi West, and assimilated millions of immigrants. Despite a cataclysmic rebellion and civil war, the Founders' constitutional order survived.  By the early 1900s, however, many came to believe that industrialization and modernization posed challenges for which the Founders' Constitution was inadequate.  National problems, Theodore Roosevelt insisted, required national solutions. 

As I noted in an earlier letter, progressives' belief in the inadequacy of eighteenth-century governments to deal with twentieth-century problems compelled them and especially their intellectual heirs on the political left to adopt a kind of "living" constitutionalism. The U.S. Constitution, they say, is organic; it must evolve as society’s challenges multiply.  It is true that on four separate occasions the first generation of progressives at least had the decency to amend the Constitution.  As they discover more and more "national" problems, however, modern progressives grow impatient with constitutional restraints and the people's sovereignty. They turn more and more readily to virtually lawless government-by-experts. When asked to identify constitutional authority for one or another proposed progressive remedy, they sometimes react with utter astonishment.

There is a strange irony in the name "progressive," for the progressives' "living constitution," in replacing enumerated powers and the sovereignty of the people with the unlimited sovereignty of government, resembles the British constitution we rejected over two centuries ago. The next historic act in America’s constitutional drama is to recover the Founders' Constitution.               

Ohio Farmer

Franklin's Fourth

To My Fellow Citizens:

Benjamin Franklin snatched lightning from the sky and scepters from the hands of tyrants, a contemporary once said of him.  The lightning snatching refers to Franklin's famous kite flying in a thunderstorm to prove the connection between electricity and lightning.  As for snatching scepters from tyrants, this might refer to a number of Franklin's activities.  The one most fitting to recall on July 4 is Franklin's connection to the Declaration of Independence.

The principal author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, sent Franklin the draft, asking for his opinion.  Franklin made several editorial suggestions, one of great importance.  Jefferson had written "We hold these truths to be sacred and inviolable; that all men are created equal…"  Franklin suggested instead, "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal…"

Some have seen Franklin's suggested change as an appeal to the scientific language of the day at the expense of the more religious sentiment present in the word "sacred."  Yet Franklin did not object to Jefferson's mention of Providence; nor did he object to the phrase "the laws of nature and of nature's God."  Neither was Franklin one to appeal to authority.  What was his intention, then, in suggesting the phrase "self-evident"?   

To understand this, we must recall the consequence of human equality.  If human beings are equal, it means that no one has a right to rule another.  Neither nature nor God has given to one individual, one family, one race, or one class, the right to rule others without their consent.  To be ruled justly, each individual must consent to be ruled.  Equality is the foundation of self-government, free government.

To call human equality sacred and inviolable establishes how important it is, but it does not tell us how we know it.  But if men are to enjoy free government, to never be ruled unless they consent to it, they must know that they are equal.  This must be the most unquestioned political knowledge a citizen possesses.  It must be an idea that carries its own evidence with it.  It must, in brief, be self-evident.  Franklin suggested inserting the phrase "self-evident" in the Declaration to make the foundation of self-government depend on nothing else but the understanding of self-governing men.

It may seem to us, indeed, that human equality is self-evident, heirs as we are to the revolutionary accomplishments of men like Franklin.  But is it really self-evident?  Reflect for a moment on the wonderful irony at the heart of the Declaration:  probably the two most intelligent and most variously and spectacularly talented of our statesmen joined in the founding of our nation by declaring themselves self-evidently equal to all others.  Do not the evident inequalities of men like Franklin and Jefferson call into question the supposed self-evident equality of men?

In fact, they do not.  What is self-evident when we consider Franklin is not that he was equal in intelligence or talents to other men.  This is most self-evidently not the case.  What is self-evident, however, is that no matter how superior Franklin was to others, he was still a human being.  Although surpassingly intelligent, he was not all-knowing.  Although exceedingly industrious, he was not all-powerful.  He did not possess the attributes of a deity.  He was human and self-evidently heir to human limitations and frailties.  Due to his evident abilities, Franklin led every enterprise he was associated with.  Due to his self-evident humanity, he did so only with the consent of those he led.

Franklin's insertion of the term "self-evident" into the Declaration was a critical improvement of the text.  Considering its meaning will always bring us to a better understanding of equality and self-government.  In offering this improvement, Franklin was continuing—when he was 70—his life-long activity as an improver, as a man who sought better ways to do things, from cleaning streets to testing the forces of nature.  This was in keeping with the argument of the Declaration.  If men were equal, then they were not to be judged by their family, religion, race, or class but by what they did.  Franklin discouraged would-be immigrants to the United States who had only their birth or family name to recommend them.  In America, he wrote, "people do not enquire of a stranger, what is he? but what can he do?"

Franklin's life, shaped by the knowledge that a man should be judged above all by what he does, embodied the principles of the Declaration before it was written.  This is why he is often called the first American.  By embodying these principles, Franklin was also manifesting most tangibly his equality with other men.  When he arrived in Philadelphia, Franklin was a nearly penniless 17-year-old.  He had only his talents and industry to rely on.  In this, he was like all men.  Nor could he predict, because it was not in his power, what would result from applying his talents industriously.  In this, he was also like all men.  He could not be assured of achievement, he could only work so as to deserve it. 

More than his editing of the text, Franklin's life was his greatest contribution to the Declaration.  He is the model of an American.  His life not only embodied the Declaration, it vindicated its principles and the hopes of those who drafted it and of those who then and ever after were inspired by it.  Franklin first and above all others showed the good that a free man, a self-governing man, could do.  And so in its own way does the life of any citizen who following Franklin strives to do the best no matter what he has.  Such a life may not snatch lightning from the skies but it will continue to snatch scepters from tyrants.

Happy Fourth,

Ohio Farmer

 

A Statesman in Congress

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

This Friday marks the 160th anniversary of the death of Henry Clay (June 29, 1852). With only a few years excepted, Clay served in the House of Representatives and the Senate from 1803 until his death almost 50 years later. When he died, he was the most famous American of his day and received many, many eulogies. One of them came from a little-known, former one-term Congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln, who eulogized Clay as "my beau ideal of a statesman."

In calling Clay a "statesman," Lincoln chose his words carefully, and he used a term we don't hear much anymore. But it's one we must recapture if we are going to understand the kind of people we need in public office to revitalize the American experiment in constitutional self-government.

To recapture the idea of the statesman, we must, among other things, recall how to distinguish it from the idea of the "leader" bequeathed to us by the Progressive Movement over a century ago. "Leader" is an old word with a respectable heritage—Thomas Jefferson referred to George Washington, for example, as "our great leader."  But the Progressives, beginning with Woodrow Wilson, poured new wine into this old bottle, and our public discourse has been drinking this Progressive vintage ever since.

Progressives who talk about "leadership" also talk about "vision."  They mean that a leader somehow must have a vision, a vision of the future into which he will lead his followers. A progressive leader moves people away from where they are toward some new goal divined by the leader—actually, toward goals that must constantly be renewed as we make endless "progress" into an always receding future. To lead the country into the progressive future requires leading it away from the supposedly outmoded goals, principles, and institutions of the American Founding.

The statesmanship of Clay (and Lincoln after him) was guided by the goals set out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: to protect the "unalienable" rights of every individual to "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness"; and "to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."  A statesmanlike pursuit of these goals requires "vision," too, but vision of a sort very different from the progressive variety.

Statesmanlike vision is part of the virtue that Aristotle called prudence. Prudence does not mean "caution"; it means knowing what the right goals are and seeing how to move toward them in the particular circumstances that you face. The prudent statesman has great political vision, like a great quarterback who can see the whole field and make adjustments at the line of scrimmage. Having that kind of larger outlook can be hard in Congress, where there are so many particular interests and passions always trying to narrow your view. But, as Lincoln said, Henry Clay had that broader statesmanlike perspective: "Whatever Mr. Clay did, he did for the whole country. In the construction of his measures he ever carefully surveyed every part of the field, and duly weighed every conflicting interest."

The right kind of compromise is often part of the statesman's prudence. On at least three occasions (the last in 1850), Henry Clay cobbled together a deal in Congress that held a shaky country together. For this he earned the title "The Great Compromiser"—not because he gave in on his fundamental principles but because his compromises preserved the Union and kept the spark of liberty alive. His deals had their critics, and some of their criticism is not off the mark. But Clay was willing to make imperfect compromises because he knew that in politics consequences matter. It's not enough simply to have good intentions: the right action is also the one that has the best possible results. The statesman's compromise is one that, without violating the larger principles at stake, gets as much good as possible out of imperfect circumstances.

To achieve what Clay achieved in his long career required qualities that set him apart from his sometimes more seemingly successful political competitors. As Lincoln said:

Even those of both political parties who have been preferred to him for the highest office, have run far briefer courses than he, and left him, still shining high in the heavens of the political world. Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Polk, and Taylor, all rose after, and set long before him. The spell—the long enduring spell—with which the souls of men were bound to him, is a miracle. Who can compass it? It is probably true he owed his pre-eminence to no one quality, but to a fortunate combination of several. He was surpassingly eloquent; but many eloquent men fail utterly; and they are not, as a class, generally successful. His judgment was excellent; but many men of good judgment, live and die unnoticed. His will was indomitable; but this quality often secures to its owner nothing better than a character for useless obstinacy. These then were Mr. Clay's leading qualities. No one of them is very uncommon; but all taken together are rarely combined in a single individual; and this is probably the reason why such men as Henry Clay are so rare in the world.

Statesmen like Henry Clay are rare, but sometimes our Republic needs them. They don't try to lead us to a new political ideal; they help us see how to return to the principles of our Founding and Constitution. They know that the people are supposed to lead themselves by adhering to the Constitution they set up, not by following a leader as he envisions the next goal revealed to him by the always progressing "living constitution." In helping to keep our Founding principles alive in the minds of the American people, they render a noble and glorious service both to our country and to all mankind.

They come to "belong to the ages," as someone said less than a generation later of the little-known Congressman who once eulogized Henry Clay.

Ohio Farmer

 

Material and Spiritual Security

To My Fellow Citizens:

In an earlier letter, I described and criticized the view that our Constitution gives the government the power and duty to provide us with material security because such security is necessary for democracy.   In fact, as I argued, economic insecurity does not deprive any one of their rights or prevent them from exercising them.

In addition to being wrong, the argument that to ensure democracy the government must ensure our material security is paradoxical.  To even attempt to provide material security, the government would have to have such power over our lives and livelihoods that the government would have all the freedom and citizens none.  This is hardly what we call democracy and so, paradoxically, such an effort to preserve democracy destroys it.

If we consider the claim that government must provide material security in light of the founding of our country, however, we arrive at another and deeper paradox.  The great enemy of democracy at the time of the Founding was not the effort to provide material security but the effort to provide spiritual security.  For more than a thousand years, governments had claimed a right to rule based on divine sanction.  They claimed to be God's rulers on earth, and in the name of carrying out God's will they dictated what their subjects could think and do, what they could wear or with whom they could associate.  They did this, they claimed, for the good of their subjects, to ensure their salvation, their spiritual security.  They thought not at all about their subjects' material security.

The Founders noted, as others had before them, that although the rulers did not care about their subjects' material security they did seem concerned about their own.  They ensured it by wringing it from the labor of their subjects.  Talk of providing spiritual security was a pretense for injustice.  Whatever may have been the good intentions behind the effort to provide spiritual security, such is human nature that inevitably the vast powers necessary for such a purpose were put to tyrannical ends.  As I remarked in a previous letter, "Americans know that on this earth the rule of God always means only the rule of men, who claim to act in God's name and with his unlimited power and yet act merely in their own self-interest."

Faced with spiritual tyranny, the Founders established a government that promised spiritual liberty.  Of material security, they thought not at all and the government they established promised nothing.  Human life had been too poor for anyone to have thought of material security as a goal.  The Founders hoped for prosperity, certainly.  They believed that the creative power and energy liberated by their new government would increase it.  But they understood that human life was so needful and precarious that providing material security was something no power on earth could do.

But the new regime of liberty proved good almost beyond imagining at allowing men to produce wealth.  Within little more than 100 years, it became possible for some to think distributing wealth more important than producing it; conquering want a possibility; sharing in the conquest, each citizen's right; and ensuring it, a government's duty, for which it should be given the necessary power.  Paradoxically, such thinking was possible only because of the freedom and prosperity that such a new conception of government would destroy.

It may seem an exaggeration to say that giving government the power to provide material security will extinguish freedom.  But think of the endless needs of human beings and thus the endless demands for security or freedom from those needs.  Think of the already vast power of technology, extending now into the very intricacies of human biology.  Think of the intrusive power of government and how power corrupts.  Think of combining these powers on the assumption that they must satisfy those needs and you can easily imagine the threat to freedom.  Indeed, in a final paradox, the claim that government must provide material security would lead to a government with tyrannical powers exceeding those of the spiritual tyrannies the Founders fought to overcome.

No doubt many of those who speak of government providing material security are well-intentioned.  But we know where the road paved with good intentions leads.   We need to remind the well-intentioned that freedom and insecurity are inseparable.  That we may run, means we may fall.  That a business may start up, means a business may fail.  To remove this insecurity, we would have to remove freedom itself.  We cannot have security, spiritual or material, unless we give up freedom.  But, wrote Jefferson, "almighty God hath created the mind free."  It is that freedom and the prosperity and happiness it makes possible that is the only true compensation for the insecurity that is unavoidably part of human life.

Government cannot give us either material or spiritual security.  No government would be free that attempted it.  To the extent we may possess either kind of security, we must earn it by hard labor.  In truth, all the American Founding promised was the freedom to engage in such unending labor, to the measure of our abilities and the limit of our time.  It is not common, especially in an election year, to speak in such a way about the promise of American life.  But if we remember that to speak otherwise is to flirt, however innocently, with tyranny, we will remember as well the beauty and true greatness of that original promise.

Ohio Farmer

 

The Reason of the Public

To My Fellow Citizens:

Every year, a lot of people think up all kinds of new constitutional amendments. Politicians and intellectuals propose them often enough: one professor, for example, recently suggested 23 new ones. It’s been 20 years, however, since America ratified the last amendment on May 7, 1992.  Is that a good thing? It seems worth reflecting on that question in our continuing effort to equip ourselves to inherit and pass on (or even enhance?) the great American heritage of political freedom.

Thomas Jefferson hoped that the entire Constitution would be changed or re-ratified every 20 years. We should not, he wrote, look upon a constitution with "sanctimonious reverence." It is not "like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched"; it is simply a means to achieve the great ends of a free society laid out in the Declaration of Independence. "The earth belongs always to the living generation," Jefferson argued, and "laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind."

This is a powerful argument, but it did not convince Jefferson's friend and life-long political ally, James Madison. Madison shared Jefferson's view that while the Constitution is the how of American government, the Declaration is the why. The Constitution is important as the means by which we Americans achieve the moral and political purposes declared in 1776.

But unlike Jefferson, Madison had been at the Convention in 1787, and he knew that the "miracle at Philadelphia" was not only that the country conceived a constitution there. It was that our nation as a whole began to acquire constitutionalism – the idea and habit of steadfast adherence to the rule of law and to a written document that guides us as a people.

Madison knew that the people must have a constitutional disposition if they were to keep their authority from degenerating into mere willfulness. The Constitution is supposed to limit the federal government; but it is also supposed to show the people their limits – that their government cannot do anything they want, but only what the Constitution permits. It cultivates good habits of political moderation and lawfulness by reminding the people that there is something above them and their will – justice. It says to them that if they want to keep their authority, they must always exercise their power according to "the laws of nature and of nature's God," as the Declaration says. To be a Declarational people, Madison knew, Americans must always remain a constitutional people.

As a constitutional people, we must be careful about changing the Constitution because while the people make the Constitution, it also makes the people. As Madison said in Federalist 49, frequent constitutional change "would, in great measure, deprive the government of that veneration which time bestows on everything, and without which perhaps the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability." Without such sober reverence, the "PASSIONS, therefore, not the REASON, of the public would sit in judgment. But it is the reason, alone, of the public that ought to control and regulate the government." 

This means that every time someone proposes to change the Constitution, he is really proposing to change the character of the American people. Sometimes the proposed change is an improvement that makes the people more like their true selves – that is, it makes the people live more fully according to our fundamental principles. The 14th Amendment, for example, has molded the self-evident truth that "all men are created equal" into a political habit; we are now a people who understand that no government – state or federal – can deny people "equal protection of the laws." The amendment has made us more republican, in the proper sense of the word.

But constitutional change could work the other way. Consider the increasingly popular idea of amending the Constitution to replace the Electoral College with a direct popular vote for president. This would also affect the character of the people, and not in a good way. The will of the numerical majority would become the constitutional rule for filling our highest office, strengthening in the public mind the false idea that a simple majority is always the right way to do things. In addition, all citizens would be lumped together into one undifferentiated mass, which denies that there are any constitutionally respectable differences of interest or attachment between, for example, people in Ohio and people in California. But we really do have such legitimate interests and attachments, as we can see in our federal system. This change would cause Americans to become more inclined to regard all particular interests and differences with greater suspicion, and to have a weaker attachment to our states in favor, naturally, of a greater attachment to the federal government.

Not surprisingly, abolishing the Electoral College is usually favored by those who distrust differences between human beings and who want a more energetic federal government devoted to reducing those differences. From Madison's point of view, these people share the vice of the "[t]heoretic politicians, who… have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights… they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions" (Federalist 10).

Being wary of tampering with the Constitution does not mean that we should confuse it with the Ark of the Covenant. Jefferson was right: we can touch it, and we won't die. We've already done that 27 times. We should always consider the Constitution in light of its higher ends – above all, securing every person's natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and governing ourselves as free men and women. But Madison was also right: if we are going to achieve the purposes of the Declaration, we must treat the Constitution with real reverence, and think hard about how any changes to it would change the very character of our country.

The 27th Amendment was ratified only 20 years ago. But it was originally proposed way back in 1789 as part of the original Bill of Rights. It took 203 years to be ratified – a long time, to be sure. But that probably would not have bothered the man who first proposed it, James Madison.

Ohio Farmer

 

Progressives and Regressives

To My French Friend:

You raise lots of good questions, Jean-Luc, about my previous letter on the speeches of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama at Osawatomie.  For the moment, let me comment on just one.  

I think you are right to say that Mr. Obama drew a false parallel in his speech, when he compared himself to Roosevelt as he did.  Just as Roosevelt argued that the government had to have more power to counter the centralization in corporations of the wealth and power created by the industrial revolution, so did Obama argue that the government required yet more power to counter the centralization in corporations of the wealth and power created by the information revolution, the more recent transformation the President acknowledged our economy has gone through.  

The problem with this parallel is that the two revolutions are very different—in fact, they are opposed—in their effects.   Corporations centralized power during the industrial revolution because it was the most efficient way to get their work done.  All decisions, all actions require information.  Manufacturing a product requires thousands of decisions, for example, about raw materials, design, marketing, and many other things.  Getting the information to make those decisions is costly.  Bringing all those decisions and the processes they make possible under central control in a corporation reduces those costs.  Furthermore, when dealing with a mass of less skilled workers a hundred years ago, it made sense to give them simple tasks and to centralize control over them by giving them rules and regulations that they had to follow in carrying out those tasks.  The information revolution is changing all this. 

Consider your own situation.  You design and can manage industrial control systems for corporations around the world from France because the internet connects you to thousands of sensors that automatically feed you information.  The cost of gathering the information you need to decide and act on a problem in a California plant is a fraction of what it would have been even a few decades ago for the plant itself to do that work.  And you can do it more cheaply than they can because you can do it for many others at the same time.  Furthermore, you and your colleagues are skilled.  The company in California does not need to give you detailed rules on how to do your work.  In fact, such rules would make you less useful and productive.  They merely tell you what they want and they leave it to you to figure out how to do it.  The information revolution means that corporations can and need to decentralize, to disperse their power and authority. 

The administrative state of rules and regulations that Theodore Roosevelt championed was a response to industrialization.  The industrial age is ending, as the President himself acknowledged.  Shouldn’t the administrative state be ending as well then?  Instead, the President proposes more rules and regulations.  

Everywhere we look, whether the streets of Cairo or New York City, offices in France or family rooms in America, the information revolution is putting more information and thus more power into the hands of individuals.  Everywhere that is but in the minds of people like the President who acknowledge that our case is new, but who cannot think or act anew.  It is striking how backward looking, how trapped in the past so-called progressives are.   I agree with you that they should be called regressives. 

It is true, of course, that the transfer of power to individuals that I just spoke of will never be complete.  Neither you nor I are arguing for some kind of absolute individualism.  As I noted in my previous letter, we acknowledge, for example, that governmental action is necessary to ensure that none have unfair advantage.  But this does not mean that government action and power must always be the same or must always grow.  Given the information revolution, the transformation that the President acknowledged, our real task is not to keep building up the centralized industrial age bureaucracy but to figure out what aspects of that bureaucracy we can do without and what might need to be preserved but changed. 

The transformation we are going through has the potential to enhance human freedom, but while the President acknowledges the transformation, he does not acknowledge its potential.  At Osawatomie, he presented it not as an opportunity but as a problem that only government could fix.  If Jefferson were alive today, I think he would see this potential for freedom as he once saw such potential in America’s abundant land.  Living on one's own land, Jefferson thought, was the best way to ensure that citizens would live free and be safe in the enjoyment of what they labored to achieve.  Our circumstances have changed.  The age of the family farm has passed for most of us.  But the age-old longing for freedom and justice that Jefferson sought to satisfy can find fulfillment still, I believe, in the new forms made possible by the latest transformation of our lives.  Indeed, that transformation can give fresh life to individual liberty.  We should not let it be smothered in rules, regulations, and thinking suited to a by-gone era. 

There is more to say about all this, Jean-Luc, as you know, and I look forward to our future correspondence.

Ohio Farmer

 

Our Promissory Note

To My Fellow Citizens:

Next Monday will mark the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. With the opening of his monument on the National Mall, Americans now have a day and a place to honor King's public life and legacy.

We can benefit ourselves on this occasion by taking a moment from our busy lives to call to mind King's most famous address, the 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It has many memorable thoughts and phrases, but all of them are framed within the context of the opening lines, which declare:

we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

King's anchoring of his speech in the principles of the Declaration of Independence would make perfect sense to the Declaration's author. In the last significant letter Thomas Jefferson wrote less than two weeks before his death on July 4, 1826, he talked about the Declaration and his hope for America. Jefferson had been invited to come to Washington, D.C., for a 50^th anniversary reunion with the last remaining signers of the Declaration. He had to decline because of his poor health, but the invitation gave him one last chance to explain the significance of the Declaration: 

May it be to the world [he wrote] what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the Signal of arousing men to… assume the blessings and security of self government…. All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them....

For Jefferson, the principles of the Declaration were not just the historical foundation of our break from Great Britain. They were the moral foundation for our future, which was to be the story of the unfolding and deepening of the Declaration’s principles in American society and politics. America, Jefferson hoped, would become more and more "Declarational" over time.

But that would only be possible if we continued to re-learn the "self-evident" truths on which our country is built. Those truths need to be learned and re-learned by every generation, precisely because they are "self-evident." This familiar phrase does not, as we are usually inclined to think, mean "obvious."  It does not mean "innate":  you don't just know a self-evident truth by being alive. If we did, how could we explain the fact that no society in history had been fully based on those truths until 1776?

"Self-evident" means something that contains the proof of its truth within itself. It is something that is obvious once you have been enlightened to it. For example, the familiar Pythagorean theorem in geometry ("a" squared + "b" squared = "c" squared) is a self-evident truth: you understand it once you've studied it in geometry class. Before then, it is incomprehensible. After that, it is clear and easy. 

The truths of the Declaration are like that. Our Founders were enlightened to them by experience and the study of great thinkers, and we have been enlightened to them by learning and re-learning them in each succeeding generation. That is both hopeful and fearful. It is hopeful because it means that anyone can in principle learn these truths; they are not limited to a particular time, place, or culture. They can be discovered and implemented by anyone at any time and in any place. It is fearful because every generation must be enlightened to them or they will be forgotten even by those who once knew them.

Abraham Lincoln understood these facts. Inside the Memorial in front of which King spoke are the famous words of the Gettysburg Address. In that address, Lincoln began by invoking 1776, when "our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that 'all men are created equal.'"  Lincoln called equality a "proposition," rather than a "self-evident" truth because in the years before and during the Civil War, many people had forgotten or denied the principle of equality; some even called it a "self-evident lie."  For Lincoln, the great purpose of the Gettysburg Address and of the Civil War itself was to restore in the public understanding the self-evidence of those truths—to restore the promise of freedom for all. That is what he meant when he called for a "new birth of freedom": freedom was born in the Founding and had to be re-born during and after the war.

One hundred years after Lincoln's efforts, Americans still faced the challenge of restoring the American promise of freedom. As King said, he had come to redeem the "promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Like Jefferson and Lincoln before him, King called us to remember and re-learn the meaning of our Founding principles. This is something each generation needs to do, if we are to preserve and perpetuate the great American promise of freedom to all. So this coming Monday, let's honor the American life and legacy of Martin Luther King by using the day to "refresh our recollections" of these principles and restore our "undiminished devotion to them."  

Ohio Farmer

 

The Shades at Osawatomie

To My Fellow Citizens:

On August 31, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt gave a revolutionary speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, and a couple of weeks ago President Barack Obama visited Osawatomie and wrapped himself in the mantle of Roosevelt's revolutionary progressivism. Thomas Jefferson saw it coming. 

Jefferson did not predict that Roosevelt would make a speech at Osawatomie. He merely predicted the subject of Roosevelt's speech. Jefferson feared that at some point social and economic change would call into question the character of the American republic, portending a revolution that would change it fundamentally. He feared this because he talked to a French peasant woman. 

Jefferson was then Ambassador to the Court of Louis XVI. Representing a poor government, Jefferson was not able to afford the display thought necessary for the French Court’s most elaborate ceremonies. So, one day, instead of attending such a ceremony, Jefferson took a walk in the countryside near Versailles. He happened upon an old peasant woman. Falling into conversation with her, he listened as she spoke of her difficulties. As Jefferson later wrote to a friend, he learned that she had no land and was not allowed onto the vast lands held by the nobility who used them only for sport, riding at their pleasure and hunting wild game. She was entirely dependent on the hand-outs and odd jobs the aristocrats deigned to give her. Her children, she told Jefferson, often went to bed hungry. 

Jefferson was appalled by the destitution of the woman. He told his friend that the critical difference between France—indeed the rest of the world—and America was that in America land was available to all who wished to work it. The land gave opportunity—equality and liberty—to all and secured to Americans the blessings of republican government. And so it would be, Jefferson wrote, until the land was used up. 

As it turned out, industrialization, not population growth, used up the land, so to speak. As America industrialized, people left their farms. As they did so, the wealth generated by industrialization spread to all but unequally. Individuals and corporations amassed great sums. Theodore Roosevelt and people like him, who called themselves Progressives, believed that the old limited national government championed by Jefferson was no longer adequate to these new circumstances. At Osawatomie, as the shade of Jefferson hovered over him, Roosevelt announced the New Nationalism. 

By the New Nationalism, Roosevelt meant a powerful president acting in the name and on the behalf of the people who would control the "special interests" (Roosevelt's term) to ensure equality of opportunity. At Osawatomie, in the spirit of Jefferson, Roosevelt spoke of "the triumph of a real democracy, . . . of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him." Roosevelt understood, as Jefferson did, that opportunity so understood satisfied the age-old longing for justice and at the same time encouraged our virtue—the best there is in us.

The revolution in our government foreseen by Jefferson and announced by Roosevelt did not concern its goal—equality of opportunity—but the means to achieve that goal. Jefferson as much as Roosevelt thought government should prevent monopolies. But beyond this Jefferson believed that liberty itself was equality of opportunity and limiting the power of government would maximize liberty. Roosevelt believed that the great wealth and power of individuals and corporations required a powerful central government to ensure equality of opportunity for everyone else. 

But the progressive revolution did not stop with the means our government used. Over time, gradually but inevitably, it sought to change its goal. How do we know that there is equality of opportunity? Is it enough to pass laws and impose regulations? If we do so, and inequalities persist or reappear, then perhaps government must do more. It must not simply ensure an equal playing field but a more equal score at the end of the game. 

This is the view President Obama expressed in his speech at Osawatomie. With the shades of Jefferson and Roosevelt hovering over him, he said that the fundamental issue was that inequality of outcome meant there could be no equality of opportunity.  "Gaping inequality," he announced, "gives lie to the promise that's at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try." 

Like Jefferson and Roosevelt, Obama sees equality of opportunity ("you can make it if you try") as the heart of America. Unlike his predecessors, however, he believes that inequality of outcome or wealth denies equality of opportunity. If it does, then to save the heart of America, the government must work to prevent inequality of outcome.

Let us note immediately that the President made no argument to prove that inequality in wealth, "gaping" or otherwise, reduces opportunity. He merely asserted what has become a Progressive dogma, one that revolutionizes the goal of our government as much as Roosevelt revolutionized the means.

What are we to make of these revolutions? Let us acknowledge that governmental action was and is necessary to ensure that none has unfair advantage. All agree on this. But let us also acknowledge the contradiction at the core of Roosevelt's revolution: restricting liberty cannot create opportunity. The power of government, therefore, should be as limited as possible, so the heart of America, opportunity for all, beats as strongly as possible. Let us acknowledge, finally, that a government that works to equalize outcomes, the hope of Obama's revolution, will need to exercise such power that it will imperil opportunity and thus both justice and virtue even more than Roosevelt's revolution did. This above all was the revolution Jefferson feared as he walked with the peasant woman and looked to the future.

Ohio Farmer

 

One People

To My Fellow Citizens:

Many advanced democratic countries have a big problem: stagnant or declining populations. Birth rates have dropped and the average age of citizens has risen. Unless something is done, the economic and financial strains on society could be disastrous.

One possible solution is immigration. But countries in Europe and Asia have struggled with the idea of immigration because they are not sure that they can take people from other parts of the world and still remain, for example, Danish or Japanese.

Is America any different? In the days after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, a television commercial aired that made a simple but profound point. One by one, people came onto the screen: they looked different, dressed differently, had different jobs, and were from different places around the country. But each one looked straight into the camera and said the same thing: "I am an American."

They were reminding us that we Americans are "one People," as the Declaration of Independence says in its opening line. It was a bold statement to make in 1776 considering that the Americans were divided into 13 often fractious and disunited colonies. What made Americans "one People"?

In the past, countries were united by a common tribe, race, or geography, or by being subservient to a common emperor. As emperors and kings faded away in modern times, so did empires and kingdoms. But people in newly democratic countries in Europe and Asia still tended to be tied together by common race, religion, or blood, or by the geographical lines drawn by former conquerors.

Was that true of America? In Federalist 2, John Jay says:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

Jay was right: in our Founding era, Americans often shared similar ancestry, language, religion, type of government, and customs. We were certainly brought together by a common struggle in the Revolutionary War. Those things did help to unite us.

Yet it is also true that even among people who seemed so similar, Americans were very different from one another. They were made up of many different nationalities, denominations, and backgrounds. Underneath our commonalities and our differences, what made us the Declaration's "one People"?

As I recalled in a previous letter, Thomas Jefferson once described the Declaration of Independence as an "expression of the American mind." He didn't say the American "heart" or even the American "character"—but the American mind. That’s important. Our heart feels emotion; character is made up of habits and dispositions. But the mind holds our ideas and principles—the ideas and principles that shape our characters and govern our emotions and lead us to choose to live as we do. That is what unites Americans at the deepest level, binds us together as "one People," and makes us the distinctive people we are.

Americans do certainly have important emotions and habits in common. We are famous for loving our country, for example, in a way that strikes some other people as too exuberant. And we are known to be habitually optimistic: for an American, the glass is almost always half full. But those sentiments and attitudes are the products of the ruling principles that united us in 1776 and still do today. We love our country because it stands for freedom. We are optimistic because freedom makes us think that we can do anything we set our minds to.

This matters. It means that the newest immigrant can be just as American as someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. In fact, new arrivals can be more American because it is sometimes easier for them to understand that American patriotism is not inherited; it cannot be passed down like property from generation to generation. It is born from an understanding of the country's principles and from conforming one's civic life to them. No one is more American just because his family has been living here for many generations; anyone—regardless of where he comes from or when; regardless of his race or religion or experience—can be an American if he embraces America's ruling principles.

That's why America has always been a place open to immigrants. A person doesn't have to "look" American to come here. He just needs to embrace the political consequences of the truths,

that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

But he does need to embrace those truths. He has to want to be an American, not just someone who lives or works here.  Immigration has historically been a gift to America because it has always led to integration—to the newcomers becoming part of the "melting pot." Not that all our colorful differences in ancestry, religion, or customs melt away, but that we melt together morally and politically on the basis of the common principles that we all share as human beings, regardless of our race, religion, or background.

For good reason, immigration will continue to be a big issue in our national conversation. As we discuss it, let's remember the principles that should guide our thinking. Immigrants don't just bring new bodies, talents, and energy to the country. They can give us the opportunity to re-invigorate our American mind by reminding us all of the principles that make America what it is. They do this when they assume their American responsibility and become self-governing human beings who choose to live together according to the principles of liberty, equality, and the rule of law.

This is how our country renews itself in body and soul: by immigration and integration. It's how we become ever more the "one People" envisioned by our Founders.

Ohio Farmer

A Commercial Republic

To My Fellow Citizens:

The United States was founded as a republic, but there was a spirited debate concerning the kind of republic the new country would be. Thomas Jefferson advocated an agrarian republic based on self reliant yeoman freeholders. He believed that domestic manufactures engendered dependence and corruption, both of which would undermine the virtues necessary to sustain republican government.

Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, argued for a commercial republic. Only such a system, he thought, could provide the necessary conditions for the security, prosperity, and liberty of American citizens. Over the years, many have argued that the Founders saw commerce as a means of channeling the passions of the people, implying that the American republic is based on the narrow self interest of citizens. But Hamilton's understanding was more elevated.

He saw a commercial republic as creating not only prosperous and free citizens but also virtuous ones. The obligations incurred through commerce and trade would, in Hamilton's view, habituate the citizens of the United States to the virtuous and law-abiding behavior necessary for self-government and provide opportunities for developing the excellence of the human intellect.

In addition, Hamilton believed that commerce would provide the prosperity necessary for American greatness. A commercial republic would not only create the military and naval power necessary to enable a limited republican government to protect the natural rights of its citizens to their lives, liberty, and property, but also offer a hospitable environment for the most high-minded citizens to achieve the honors—even fame—they were capable of deserving for their exertions on behalf of their country. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 72, "the best security for the fidelity of mankind is to make their interests coincide with their duty."

Hamilton's view prevailed and the United States has risen to become the most prosperous and powerful nation in the history of the world. But recent ongoing economic crises have undermined confidence in the commercial republic that for so long created wealth and power for American citizens. The reason for these economic crises can be traced to the abandonment of the very virtues that Hamilton sought to instill in his fellow citizens.

The virtue necessary to sustain republican government has been replaced with a sense of entitlement and debased dependency. Many Americans have come to accept the Progressive or European social-democratic idea that the purpose of government is not to protect the equal natural rights of individual citizens—the rights invoked by the Declaration of Independence: to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—but instead to adjudicate the distribution of goods and services among competing claimants.

Those who take this position view the United States, not as a community of individuals, but as an array of groups whose demands must be met. But since government produces nothing on its own, certain favored groups prosper at the expense of others. Progressives invoke the language of rights, but what they mean by the term are privileges or claims to resources that are granted by government.

The result has been an explosion of government spending on behalf of client groups that threatens the financial stability not only of the United States but also of a global economy that depends on America's financial stability.  Debt in and of itself is not the problem. As Hamilton proved, debt prudently managed on behalf of a government of limited power, can lubricate the wheels of commerce. But massive government spending to provide limitless entitlements for a dependent class of recipients produces not only economic problems but political and moral ones. The very concept of "entitlements" creates a dependency that is at odds with, indeed undermines, republican virtue.

At the same time, the U.S. government has pursued policies and imposed regulations tailor-made to destroy the spirit of entrepreneurship that fuels a commercial republic.  As a result, the American economy limps along, as businesses curtail hiring workers and avoid productive investment in the face of uncertainty about future economic policy. Like barnacles on a ship, government policies place a drag on the productive spirit of American citizens that is necessary to achieve the benefits of a commercial society.

In order to reap those benefits, it is necessary to reinvigorate that entrepreneurial spirit. This can only be done by reversing the culture of dependence that the demand for government-provided entitlements has engendered, which has separated interest from duty, contrary to Hamilton's admonition. The primary goal of American statesmanship today must be to reunite the interest and duty of citizens, in Hamilton's sense.

Ohio Farmer

Regime of Liberty

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

9-11 changed everything:  so many have said.  But as we reflect on that day, it is good to recall what has not changed in the ten intervening years. 

Seasons have come and gone.  Leaves have turned color in New England's fall; flowers bloomed in the desert southwest with the spring rain.  Snow has piled high in the western mountains and filled rivers and reservoirs.  Drought has beset new areas, as it ended in others.  Torrential rains have brought flood waters; hurricanes have wreaked havoc; earthquakes shaken the West, the East, and points in between.  And the land has brought forth harvest after harvest.

Couples have fallen in love; babies have been born; the young have aged; some of the old, the famous and the unknown alike, have passed away, disease and time taking their toll.  But as always, the population of the United States has increased steadily, by more than 30 million.   Over 11 million people not born citizens became citizens.  All of them, like the millions who have come to us one way or another throughout our history, were drawn by the hope of a better life.

We have held two Presidential elections; over 130 elections to the Senate; over 1700 elections to the House of Representatives; and almost countless elections of Governors, state legislatures, judges, district attorneys, sheriffs, school boards, municipal commissions, and numerous other offices of public trust.  Some of these elections were barely contested, others bitterly fought, all part of the oldest continuing tradition of democratic politics known to history.

All of these events and many others have unfolded since 9-11, following a pattern unbroken since our Republic came into existence.  They manifest the unending concerns of the American people and of the republican government of, for, and by the people that has been ours for over 200 years.

Like floods, hurricanes and droughts, enemies remain part of our life as a people.  Among our current foes are those who oppose us because they do not accept the idea of the sovereignty of the people.  Only God, they believe, can be sovereign or all-powerful.  God must rule, therefore, not the will of the people.  Calling the people sovereign is blasphemous, and blasphemers must be punished or destroyed. 

Americans know that on this earth the rule of God always means only the rule of men, who claim to act in God's name and with his unlimited power and act merely in their own self-interest.  Americans reject such tyranny.  They long ago concluded that an all-powerful God may be disappointed in what His creatures do but could not be threatened by their exercise of his gift of freedom.  We suspect that those who kill and destroy in the name of a supposedly threatened God actually kill and destroy to defend their own privileges or their fragile sense of self-righteousness. 

In attacking the rule of the people, our current enemies are like those we have confronted and defeated before.  Nazis and Marxists similarly disparaged the sovereignty of the people, in favor of rule by a supposed master race or master class.  Not only did these former enemies disparage American principles, they disdained the American people.  They thought us cowards or too soft and divided to defend ourselves.  Our current foes made the same mistake.

It is understandable that our enemies underestimate the resolve and power of the people.  We do on occasion ourselves.  But when we do, we should recall what Thomas Jefferson understood, something else that has not changed.  A regime resting on the sovereignty of the people, a regime of liberty, will release immense energy and creative force.  More important, only such a regime can satisfy the age-old longing for justice—a human longing that will not be denied.  That is the true source of our power and our resilience.  It is in the light of this fact that we should contemplate the demands of peoples across the Middle East, especially the young, for governments based on the sovereignty of the people.  A sign of the weakness of our current enemies, of their impending defeat, is not their death but the rejection of their ideas by their own children.

As for ourselves, we should remember that government of, for, and by the people has never been easy, but it is best.  And it will endure and prosper, as will the people it serves.

Ohio Farmer

In Search of Monsters

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

"Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States." This is the first sentence in President Obama's recently issued Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities.  Is it true?

It seems that there have always been, and until human nature changes there will always be, monstrous tyrants in the world doing monstrous things to anyone they can get in the grip of their claws. Whole nations seem capable of becoming bloodthirsty mobs.  Some rather nasty tyrants have been in the headlines lately.  Presumably Americans, who don’t like tyranny of any degree and who began our progress in the world proclaiming the natural right to overthrow tyrants, are especially opposed to tyranny that is atrocious and genocidal.  We could probably get 100% of sane Americans to agree that it is desirable to prevent it. But does this make preventing it a "core national security interest" and a "core moral responsibility" of the country?  

If men were angels there would be no atrocities to trouble us, but until men become angels, to implement this Directive will require endless American intervention across the sinful and suffering world.  America would have to become the "universal landlord," to use a colorful Shakespearean phrase, and this would be neither morally desirable nor strategically feasible, even assuming we were determined to exert all our means to this end.  If—unmindful of these moral and strategic truths—we actually meant what we say in the Directive, we would need urgently and radically to increase American spending on our armed forces.  We are certainly not going to do that. To the contrary, the President and his entire administration have taken pains to make clear that they intend to reduce American military power.  The President issued the Directive at the very time when he was emphatically making known his willingness to cut American defense spending drastically as part of his domestic negotiations over the debt ceiling. So, we do not mean what we say in this Directive, and everyone can see that. America is announcing its obligation to intervene to prevent evil in the world at the very same time that it is diminishing its ability to do anything about it. This is not "moral responsibility" but the height of moral irresponsibility.  It is moralistic boastfulness.

Given America's deteriorating defense posture, the President's Directive seems perfectly calculated to achieve moral bankruptcy in the eyes of the world to complement our actual bankruptcy at home.  From the victims of tyrants and their sympathizers it will bring resentment as they see us giving mere lip service to our moralistic commitment. From the tyrants—who are not in the habit of paying heed to weakness—it will bring increasing contempt for our boastful limp-wristed moralizing that speaks loudly and carries no stick.  

The President’s Directive also represents a further subordination of American foreign policy to the dictates of international institutions, especially the United Nations.  There is nothing morally responsible about submitting America's actions in the world to the judgment of this body.  Many of its influential members are the very tyrannies committing the atrocities the President wants to make pronouncements about.

There is an old saying about the world of nations. In that world, "the strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must." This is not a cynical principle, but a candid observation of the facts. It is an expression of moral and strategic modesty. When you are weak, you are in no position to prevent injustices in the world, even injustices to yourself. If America wants to do any good in the world, for itself or anyone else, it is paramount that we be strong. Thus in its infancy, when the United States was weak, George Washington in his famous Farewell Address looked forward to a time when America would be strong enough to have "command of its own fortunes," and when  "we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel."

Within the memory of the older generation in America, the United States became the most powerful nation on earth, and it remains so.  But this is no cause for such boastful and empty pronouncements as the President's Directive. Especially as we recklessly fritter away the strength we have acquired with such effort and good fortune.

If we might more modestly suggest what is "our core moral responsibility," to ourselves and to mankind, we would say as we did in an earlier letter: It is to succeed in our own experiment in freedom. If we can show by the enduring success of our experiment that free government can be good government, this will be the greatest benefit Americans can bestow on their fellow human beings—our own political well being will be a constant act of philanthropy. 

Americans should intervene in the world when intervening enhances the prospects of the American experiment. To commit to more than that betrays America's national security interest and our core moral responsibility to ourselves and our fellow human beings. Much better than the boastful posturing of the President's Directive are the modest words of John Quincy Adams: America "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all [but]…the champion and vindicator only of her own."  If we vindicate our own freedom by securing it and using it well, it will be, as it has been from the beginning, a blessing and an inspiration to the world. It is as true today as it was when newly elected President Thomas Jefferson said it in his first inaugural: we are "the world's best hope."

Ohio Farmer

Words and Politics

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

Everyone across the political spectrum has been rightly celebrating the one grace note of the recent protracted battle in Washington over raising the debt ceiling—the moment when Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords appeared on the House floor, still recovering from her grievous wounds, to cast a vote on the climactic legislation. 

Giffords' welcome presence revived discussion of "civility" in our political life, a respectable term that had been deployed in the most uncivil way against raucous Tea Party activists in the moments after Giffords' shooting in January.  Then in the heat of the debt ceiling battle, leading journalists and office holders who have been most sanctimonious about civility called the Tea Party "terrorists." It should go without saying that civility is important to "civil society," but it should be equally noted that a high rhetorical pitch is especially endemic to democratic forms of government that put a premium on serious public argument over essential questions of justice and policy.  There is an opportunity here for the Tea Party to turn this attack on its head, and to break new rhetorical ground in Washington.

The fervency of Tea Party rhetoric about potentially tyrannical government is nothing especially new or different in American politics; nor is there anything new in critics using extreme language to attack the Tea Party's supposed extremism.  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who first fought each other with extreme bitterness and then conducted one of the most edifying correspondences between statesmen in human history, might well find the current discussion of civility in politics to be frivolous and unserious.  Jefferson's supporters charged Adams with wanting to refasten British monarchy on America, while Adams' supporters alleged that Jefferson's election would mean the importation of the French guillotine and the blood of revolutionary terror running through every American town. 

Our tender censors of political discourse would exhaust their vocabulary of outrage if faced with the harshness of public discourse at earlier periods of our history, not to mention the ways the hot tempers of political argument spilled over into actual violence.  The famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr was a rare but not unheard of thing in the early years of our republic; as nastily as our politicians can speak today, at least no one has been assaulted in a Capitol chamber like Senator Charles Sumner in 1856, when Rep. Preston Brooks beat Sumner savagely with a cane in the heat of the bitter debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  Nor have we seen mobs descending on newspaper offices and shooting editors as occurred in Alton, Illinois in the famous case of Elijah Lovejoy in 1837—the event which inspired the teaching of Lincoln's first great speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum the following year.

It may not simply be a lack of historical perspective, however, that has led to the current focus on civility in politics.  There is no doubt that changes in modern mass media have amplified our political discord.  In two generations we have gone from a media world of mostly print and radio to 24-hour television news and the always-on, unfiltered anarchy of the Internet.  Perhaps this may amount to a qualitative change in the effect of political rhetoric, just as the invention of movable type 500 years ago was a socially and politically disruptive mass media technology.  Like movable type and cheap books five centuries ago, our all-encompassing high tech mass media world is here to stay.  As the kids say, deal with it.

There is one aspect of political rhetoric, however, that office holders have within their power to change, and that change might help remove the sense many citizens have that our political class is remote from us.  When elected officials arrive in Washington, they very quickly pick up a way of talking that is not found in any other walk of life.  It comes in two forms.  First is the language of "comity," the way in which our senators and representatives habitually refer to their bitter political opponents as "my good friend from the great state of Colorado," and so forth.  In a few cases, this language expresses a true friendship across party lines, but it is usually a lie, and everyone watching on C-SPAN knows it is a lie. 

This language probably is an import from the British parliamentary procedure of referring to the "right honorable gentleman from Blaby," or some other specific constituency, in the House of Commons debates, but the formality of assuming honor in one's opponents is a different thing than asserting friendship where none exists.  This language of comity probably serves a useful purpose in keeping political discourse more temperate, but why not drop the pretence and use more neutral language—"the representative from New Jersey," "the senator from New Mexico," even "the honorable representative from New Jersey"?

Second, elected officials in Washington always lapse quickly into a Capitol Hill jargon that subtly reinforces some bad tendencies of modern government in ways that are almost unnoticed, but which contribute to the peoples' dislike of our political class.  Members of the House, in particular, speak of "my constituents" back home in the district.  But speaking of your fellow citizens as "constituents" abets the notion that your primary job is to pry as many goodies from Washington as you can for your "constituents." If the Tea Party caucus really wants to mark themselves out as a different kind of political force, they should think about banishing the term "constituents," and instead speak of citizens—a term which emphasizes our political equality.  (By the way, like the "right honorable gentleman" usage, this particular formulation is also an import from Britain, and it conveys the sense that our elected officials are our masters more than our representatives.)

In a similar vein, Tea Party caucus members should try not to use Capitol Hill jargon, which most members, especially new ones, adopt to convey the air of insider-sophistication.  Some of the special terms of art on Capitol Hill, like "budget reconciliation" and so forth, are unavoidable, but other phrases could benefit from Chruchill's rule of linguistic simplification.  For example, don’t speak of using an "expedited process" to consider budget issues; instead, say "fast track." Then the fact that nothing is ever fast in Congress will be revealed with some embarrassment for the process-oriented insiders.

If Tea Partiers actually speak differently as well as thinking differently, it will mark them out even more as a reforming force in Washington.  And if they do that, their critics will continue to call them names, mostly short, non-jargony names that are easy to make out.  That will be another sign of their impact.

Ohio Farmer

The American Mind

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

We saw in the last letter that the revolutionary principles Americans declared to the world on July 4, 1776—the principles that gave rise to a New Order of the Ages when, in support of them, the American people pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor—were not "new principles . . . never before thought of." They were principles already well understood by the American people, who were in the midst of a historic conversation about the principles of political freedom, a conversation that gave birth to what Jefferson called "the American mind."  The Declaration of Independence expressed in bold American terms the logic of political freedom that had become the common sense of the American people.

One essential ingredient of this logic of freedom, which is still very much part of American common sense, was the idea that, because human beings are equal and free by nature, legitimate government can only arise from the consent of the governed. A nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal will—if circumstances permit—be under a "government of the people, by the people, for the people." In other words, the principle of equality gives rise most naturally to a democratic or republican form of government. James Madison expressed this idea in Federalist 39, where he considered whether the government proposed under the new constitution would be "strictly republican." "It is evident," he wrote, "that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America . . . [or] with the fundamental principles of the Revolution."

Because of our conviction that consent is the foundation of legitimate government, we are concerned in every election that the election be fairly conducted, truly expressing the choice or consent of the people. But although consent is the only foundation of legitimate government, it does not follow that all governments founded on consent deserve the respect of freedom’s partisans. The Founders did not suppose that a tyranny must be submitted to by a minority just because a majority elected it. That would mean asking those who are to be oppressed by a majority to accept their oppression with equanimity—as the rightful expression of the noble principles of democracy.  It would be to tell oppressed peoples everywhere to cease their struggles for their natural rights as soon as they learn they are outnumbered. What could be more slavish?

These days this point has particular relevance to the various uprisings—some apparently supported by majorities—across the Arab world. These uprisings and rebellions are typically against various forms of tyranny, but they often seem to possess the potential to replace one tyranny with another. How would Jefferson’s “American mind” think about such human events?  It would begin, I think, by acknowledging that majority rule is the natural authoritative expression of the consent of the governed; in the same breath, it would observe that free government is instituted to secure the rights of all the people, not just the majority.  The very purpose of free government thus sets limits to what even a majority may rightly do.

Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, expressed this idea with characteristic felicity when he urged his countrymen to "bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possesses their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression." The will of the majority must be exercised within the bounds of that moral order which legitimates majority rule itself.  A thousand tyrants are no more palatable than one.  Majority rule and minority rights are therefore inseparable principles of free government. Being bound to respect minority rights does not detract from the majority’s right to rule; it dignifies it. Americans are partisans of free government, but this does not make them partisans of elective despotism, at home or abroad. Oppressive majorities deserve no more respect from us than any other oppressors.

This leads to another ingredient of the logic of political freedom or of American common sense—the idea of "equal law," which Jefferson mentioned in his first inaugural. As we have noted, the idea of human equality and freedom carries with it the recognition of human rationality; it also contains within it recognition of the limits of human rationality.  Because human beings are by nature rational beings, one man may not rightly rule over another as he may rightly rule over a non-rational being (a dog or a horse, for example).  But also, because no man is all-knowing or all-good—that is, because human reason is limited and fallible and subject to human passions—one human being may never rightly subject himself to the unrestrained will or unlimited power of another. This is what Madison meant when he wrote that "government... [is] the greatest of all reflections on human nature."

If men were angels [he wrote], no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

Human nature or human equality—the fact that human beings are neither angels nor mindless brutes—gives rise to the idea of constitutional or limited government. This is a political constitution that conforms to the natural constitution of man. Because human beings possess reason, their consent can give rise to legitimate government; because human reason is fallible and subject sometimes to unreasonable passions, human government must be subject to law.

It required much experience, reflection, and study for the American revolutionaries and founders to equip the American mind so that its common sense might establish free government that would be good government. Their exertions have left a rich legacy to us, making it easier—though never easy!—for us to ensure that America will continue to be what the revolutionaries and founders rightly thought it was at its inception—"the world’s best hope."

Ohio Farmer

Novus Ordo Seclorum

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

America will always have the honor of being the first nation on earth to dedicate itself to the self evident truth that all men are created equal, as it did in declaring independence on July 4, 1776. In that dedication truly was created a New Order of the Ages—a Novus Ordo Seclorum as we say on the Great Seal of the United States. Let us take the occasion of this Independence Day to continue our reflections on what this means. What does it tell us about the foundations, forms, and purposes of American politics? What does it require of us—deserve from us?

Lincoln called the idea of equality the central idea of the American political experiment, from which all its other ideas radiate. It is, he wrote, “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times”; it is a philosophical idea about human nature and the just relations of each human being to all others. The revolutionary and founding generation of Americans expressed this idea of human equality in a variety of ways. The familiar language of the Declaration of Independence is "that all men are created equal." To express the same idea, the Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 12, 1776) stated that "all men are by nature equally free and independent." The Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (March 2, 1780) stated that "All men are born free and equal."

To say that all men are by nature equal is to say that human beings are not naturally subordinated one to another: Whatever the many differences may be among human beings, no man is by nature a master; no man is by nature a slave. This is what Jefferson’s vivid metaphor meant, which we quoted in the last letter: "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." Of this revolutionary idea, at the heart of the Declaration and at the heart of the American experiment in self-government, Lincoln wrote on the eve of Civil War, “that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” And so it has proven to be: a powerful rebuke and a stumbling block to every form of tyranny and oppression—whether of race, class, or religion, whether home grown or foreign born—that has raised its head over the past two centuries.

Human beings, then, are naturally free as they are naturally equal. It is from this human equality and freedom that the founders derived the idea that government could only be justly founded on consent. Because human beings are not by nature subordinated to one another—that is, because they are equal and free—their consent must be obtained before any human being may rightfully exercise authority over them. It is the voluntary consent of the people that gives authority to government. Only a being possessing reason—a being who can distinguish right from wrong—is capable of voluntary consent. This is why the deepest root of American politics is in the fact, as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, “that Almighty God hath created the mind free.”

Government among free and equal men is formed, the American Founders would say, by social contract or social compact. In the words of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780: "The body-politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people." The American body-politic is a voluntary association begun when, in the last words of the Declaration of Independence, "for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge[d] to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." This is the political community that new citizens enter into when they become citizens. To take on the responsibilities of such citizenship, it is necessary—for citizens old and new—to understand the principles on which this citizenship is based. So it is a useful tradition, as the Fourth of July comes around each year, to reflect again—and again—on the American political principles famously declared to the world on the original Independence Day.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote late in life, in drafting the Declaration of Independence he had not meant to proclaim any "new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of," but merely to express "the American mind." The Declaration contains a stunning summation of the principles of free government; but it was only because the American people already understood these principles that it was possible to establish a government based upon them. Similarly, only if we are capable of understanding these principles will we be able to preserve and perpetuate, maybe even to strengthen and improve, the free institutions—the Novus Ordo Seclorum—that began to arise from them in 1776.  For our own sake and for the sake of the cause to which our country was dedicated on that original Fourth of July, let us take this occasion to renew our dedication to that cause and its noble principles. No one else can do it for us. It will do a world of good. And it is a cause worthy of the last full measure of devotion.
Happy Fourth.

Ohio Farmer

A City Upon a Hill

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

 Is America exceptional? Is it unique among the nations? If so, what makes it so? And what are the implications of the fact? These are not policy questions, but questions about ideas and historical circumstances that are at the foundation of policies. They are the kinds of questions, it seems, that you and other elected and appointed public officials are often compelled for no particularly good reason to answer, as was the president a short time ago. Perhaps this may sometimes seem a tedious requirement of your job, especially when journalists asking the questions have no interest other than ginning up a headline. And so it is understandable if on occasion you reach for plausible sounding formulas in the hope that they will not cause a headline of an undesirable sort. But your answers can matter a great deal. They can be an opportunity to shape the public’s sentiments and opinions in a way that helps free government remain good government.  Answering such questions—even when they haven’t been asked—has in the course of our history given an opportunity for America’s greatest statesmen in small or large ways to strengthen the capacity of their fellow citizens to govern themselves. On the other hand, there is hardly a greater mischief that can be done to the people than to give them bad answers to such questions.

In my last letter I took the liberty of questioning the notion, recently espoused by some leading public officials, that America is exceptional because its principles give it a special right and responsibility to lead. This is a confusion, I argued, if an understandable confusion, of a genuine American exceptionalism that is older than America itself—namely, the idea of America as an example to the world—“a city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop said to the future Massachusetts Bay colonists.  By 1776, when the thirteen colonies assumed their separate and equal station among the powers of the earth as the United States of America, they did so proclaiming principles that made America truly exceptional.  “We hold these truths to be self evident,” they declared, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights,” including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No people on earth had ever based the authority of their laws on such an assertion. So the historic effort to establish government upon this principle was in truth an unprecedented and exceptional—a then unique—experiment in self government.

As Thomas Jefferson put it in his last surviving letter, written just before he died fifty years to the day after July 4, 1776, the American idea of equality meant “that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” America was exceptional in founding our politics on what is least exceptional about us, on what we share with all other human beings at all times and in all places, rather than on any accidents of birth or circumstance that separate us.  For this reason, Jefferson thought that the principles proclaimed in the Declaration not only gave hope to all Americans but were “grounds of hope for others,” everywhere and always.

The experiment of living up to these principles is the American experiment—the effort generation after generation to rise to equality, as Lincoln put it. So long as America remains America, it will be the country first dedicated to this proposition that all men are created equal, and ever aspiring to rise to its demands. Lincoln, echoing Jefferson, called the American idea the “principle of ‘Liberty to all’—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprise, and industry to all.”

The American experiment claimed to be an exceptional experiment not only because of its principles, but because conditions here in America were more favorable to the experiment in self-government than anywhere else in the world. The Founders’ America really was a land of opportunity as had never been known in the world before. The United States, as the saying then had it, became “the best poor man’s country on earth.”  Ordinary people, secure in their equal liberty and therefore full of hope and enterprise, could farm their own land and enjoy in peace the bread of their labor; and for the first time in human history, they or their children could aspire without limit to great things—even to the Presidency of the United States. If the experiment in self government fails here, our Founders thought, that failure might be taken as a strong proof that, contrary to American assertions, human beings are not made to govern themselves.

Just as Jefferson and Lincoln hoped, the example of America has helped spread the blessings of liberty to other peoples. Many countries now claim equality as the principle of their politics.  May they live up to those principles, as we hope to do ourselves!

Here in America, when we succeed in living up to our principles, we do something more important than establishing our right to lead.  We establish our worthiness to lead, whenever our interest guided by our justice should require. To rise to these principles, we must understand them. And since we are not born understanding them, we arrange as best we can to learn them from one another—sometimes by listening to our politicians talk about our country—and to hand them down to our children. Can there be a more propitious occasion to refresh our understanding than the annual approach of the Fourth of July?  Let us return to these themes next week.

Ohio Farmer

Capacities of Mankind

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

In recent weeks, the course of human events—from Tunisia, to Libya, to Egypt, to Syria—reminds Americans once again that tyranny is common in the world, that it is hard to remove, and that it is even harder to replace it with freedom and good government. We Americans, of every political stripe, generally like to consider ourselves enemies of tyranny and friends of freedom in the world. Of course, we have lots of debates among ourselves (and with others) about what this means and what this requires of American foreign policy. These debates have been rekindled lately, and I take this occasion to recollect that America came into existence by overthrowing a tyranny and that we have had our own struggles replacing it with freedom and good government.

Our success in these struggles—to the extent that we have met with success—is due to moral and political habits and dispositions that arise from principles that must be learned. These principles and dispositions are the most essential conditions of freedom. Everything else is secondary. Without them, you might exchange an unpopular for a popular tyranny, an incompetent and destitute tyranny for a competent and wealthy one. But you will never have free government.

America began its experiment in freedom with what has become and will forever remain the most characteristic and defining American affirmation:  “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”  The truth of human equality and liberty was asserted against all tyrannies—whether of race, class, or religion, one, few, or many.

That men throughout history tyrannized one another in an infinite variety of ways was not proof to the American founders that human beings do not possess equal rights by nature—rather it was proof of how rare and difficult a thing it is to secure them.  It is proof of the philosophic rigor, the moral discipline, the political sagacity, and the beneficence of opportunity that are required for reflection and free choice to prevail over ignorance, prejudice, accident, and force.

Proclaiming that all men everywhere and at all times possess by nature equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the American founders undertook the historic effort to secure these rights, so far as they thought they could then be secured, to a small people at a particular place and time.  They were acutely conscious of the limits of their ability to secure these rights.  When they were able to establish a “more perfect union” they understood full well how far from perfection they remained.  It was all the new republic could do in the first century of its existence to keep the American experiment in freedom from failing miserably at home while other less fortunate experiments struggled to give birth to  freedom in other parts of the world.

In the course of its history, the American people have many times fallen beneath the high standards they set for themselves at the beginning.  They have strayed from those principles, and they have forgotten them, and become confused about them, and allowed misunderstood self-interest to obscure them.  Our own experience has confirmed for us that democracy requires more of its citizens than any other form of government and that it is no accident that history provides so few examples of successful and enduring democracies.  We count our blessings—the blessings of liberty—when we reflect with John Adams, "how few of the human race have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children," and how few have chosen well.

The “genius” of the American people at the time of the American revolution and founding made it both possible and necessary to establish a country based on the republican principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.  As Jefferson said in explaining the genesis of the Declaration, the ideas expressed in it were “the common sense of the subject” in America.  He was merely expressing “the American mind.”  It was only because the American people had learned to embrace republican principles that it was possible to establish an American republic.  I mentioned in an earlier letter the American founders’ “honorable determination  . . . to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” This was a determination, James Madison affirmed, “which animates every votary of freedom.”  But the founders understood that any people that wished to be free, including the Americans, would have to demonstrate this capacity for themselves, and continue to demonstrate it each generation.  

As the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, the just powers of government are derived from "the consent of the governed."  Only a people prepared to consent to a free government are capable of establishing one; and once they have established it, as Ben Franklin never ceases to remind us, they will need to have what it takes to “keep it.”  At the least, this means a people must be prepared to recognize their own humanity and that of their fellow citizens; they will neither aspire to be masters nor submit to be slaves; they must be prepared to rule and be ruled in turn and to abide by the laws they claim the right to make for themselves.

We know from our own American case, even with all the natural and historical advantages we have had, that it is not easy to achieve or to keep and pass on these capacities for self government. Experience and common sense tell us that these capacities are going to be even harder to achieve without the great advantages we have had. So let us be patient and moderate in our expectations from those who may face great disadvantages.

Ohio Farmer

A Boundless Field of Power

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

Do the powers granted by the Constitution authorize the federal government to require private citizens to purchase health insurance policies? Leading progressive politicians and intellectuals dismiss this question as not serious—in their view the question is closed, irrevocably settled by the triumph of the New Deal. Nonetheless, the nation is taking it seriously, and is engaged in a historic constitutional deliberation on the question.

This individual mandate, as it has come to be called, is widely considered to be crucial to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the “Obamacare” law enacted in 2010. It is considered crucial because the law prohibits health insurance companies from refusing to sell policies to people on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions, and from imposing a lifetime cap on the dollar amount of reimbursements.  In light of these provisions, it is reasonable to expect that without an individual mandate, many people will respond to Obamacare’s incentives by waiting until they’re seriously ill to buy insurance.  No health insurance company could survive if forced to operate under that arrangement, in the same way no property insurance company could survive if its customers could wait until their houses were on fire to buy homeowner’s policies.  

As part of our constitutional deliberations, lawsuits have been filed against PPACA, with mixed results; some federal judges have upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate, and others have deemed it unconstitutional.  While the question makes its uncertain way to the Supreme Court, American citizens who are not necessarily judges, scholars or lawyers continue to wrestle with it as a matter of politics, in light of the larger question: What can the federal government do under the Constitution, and what can’t it do?

America has an instructive history of considering this question. The first big fight over it concerned the federal power to create a Bank of the United States.  When President George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed such a bank in 1791, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson objected.  He contended that because the power to create a bank was “not among the powers specially enumerated” in the Constitution, its establishment would be “a single step beyond the boundaries” drawn around the federal government, which would lead it to “take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.” Hamilton’s position was that for each power the Constitution confers on the government it also and necessarily confers “a right to employ all the means requisite and fairly applicable to the attainment of the ends of such power,” unless the Constitution specifically denies a particular exercise of power to the federal government. Hamilton’s argument persuaded Washington to sign rather than veto the bill creating a Bank of the United States.

Twenty-eight years later, Hamilton’s and Washington’s view was upheld in the famous Supreme Court decision, McCulloch vs. Maryland (1819).   As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote for the Court: “If the end be legitimate, and within the scope of the Constitution, all the means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, and which are not prohibited, may constitutionally be employed to carry it into effect.” But Marshall also wrote that the government of the United States “is acknowledged by all to be one of enumerated powers,” and the “question respecting the extent of the powers actually granted is perpetually arising, and will probably continue to arise so long as our system shall exist.”  

The debate over Obamacare shows that, as Justice Marshall expected, the question about where to draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate exercises of federal authority is still very much alive in the American constitutional conversation.  Jefferson, so to speak, continues to argue with Hamilton. Those who challenge the constitutionality of the law seem concerned, among other things, at the “boundless field of power” Congress seems to claim when it asserts a power to compel all Americans to enter into whatever private economic relationships Congress deems convenient to its purposes. Federal district court judge Roger Vinson expressed some of this concern in the Florida case, State of Florida v. United States Department of Health and Human Services, where he wrote that "Never before has Congress required that everyone buy a product from a private company (essentially for life) just for being alive and residing in the United States."

It is true, as I remarked in my last letter, that with the entrenching and expanding of the New Deal and the Great Society, America has reached a point where “the federal government can do just about anything it wants, and can do it just about any way it wants.”  Our progressive politicians and intellectuals insist that this condition is irreversible—beyond serious question. The movement of American politics over the past two years seems to be proving that this is not the case. And so the progressive insistence that the question is closed gets louder and more desperate.  Just opening the question is a significant achievement, though it leaves much statesman’s work still to do—as Hamilton and Jefferson teach us. We can learn much from both of them as we continue to recover the kind of constitutional reasoning these letters hope to help restore to governing in our country.

Ohio Farmer

An Experiment in Self-Government

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

I wrote in the last letter about the sovereignty of the people and about the oaths you take as members of Congress to uphold the Constitution. Both seem to me to be related in a beautiful way to the American experiment in self government.

Whenever I happen to think about it, I can’t help feeling a fresh sense of wonder, and then of gratitude, that the American people, upon achieving sovereign independence and proclaiming to the world their right to govern themselves, submitted their sovereign power to a Constitution, which was at once their creation and the Supreme Law over them.  This great political act reflected, I think, our recognition that the people’s sovereign power is itself subject to what Thomas Jefferson called "the great principles of right and wrong." As Jefferson put it, it was not an "elective despotism" we fought for; we seemed to understand that if our right to self government was to lead to good government, we must establish conditions under which our authoritative consent might become reflection and deliberation—conditions for drawing out from our sovereign selves what Publius called "the cool and deliberate sense of the community."  To form ourselves into a community in which, in Madison’s word, "Reason" might rule, we formed ourselves into a constitutional people. We devised for ourselves constitutional ways of constructing and shaping the authoritative consent of the people into constitutional deliberations by which we would be governed. 

Think what a people we must already have been, to be determined and able to do such a thing. When the American revolutionaries and founders looked back on the history of popular governments in the world (and they were avid students of that history), they beheld scene upon scene of turbulence and instability, of violent agitation between the extremes of anarchy and tyranny. So terrible was the picture, as Publius said, that it gave advocates of despotism an argument against free government altogether. Nonetheless, because of what they called their "honorable determination ... to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government," the American Revolutionaries insisted that American government would be founded on the"consent of the governed." In fact, as the founders knew, the proud American people would not accept any other form of government.

But this would have been a false pride, it would have been not an honorable but a foolish determination, if the American people did not possess the capacity for self-government they generously claimed for mankind. But they proved themselves not only determined to establish a government based on consent, but capable, in Benjamin Franklin’s famous phrase, of "keep[ing] it."They proved themselves not only to have the pride to insist on freedom, but the virtues necessary to do honor to it (may this always be the case). In subjecting themselves to the Constitution as they did, they proved themselves already to possess a constitution, in their souls—the constitution of a free people, without which the written Constitution would be useless parchment.  

This constitution in our American souls expressed itself in a small way recently in our expectation and gratification that members of Congress should take an oath to uphold the Constitution. This is an oath of fidelity to the Constitution, and not to us, the people. Our high regard for this oath, it seems to me, is the sovereign people’s way of telling our representatives that we expect you to be somewhat independent of us, that we think good government depends upon it. Those who originally conceived this Constitution said in many different ways that you would do your job well by remaining true to the Constitution, even when some people—I mean, us—clamored for you to do otherwise. In such moments, we count on you to "refine and enlarge" the public’s view with your constitutional deliberations. Your oath opens a slight but decisive space between the people and their representatives, in which you can exercise your constitutional judgment in carrying out your lawmaking duties. Of course, you will often disagree among yourselves about what your duty to the Constitution requires of you. But articulating those differences will benefit all of us by contributing to a constitutional politics which will be the most reliable source of enduring sound policy. If we are as good as we claim to be, you will earn our respect, and our vote, when you respect the Constitution and help us to do the same, even despite what we sometimes might think is our contrary interest. 

Ohio Farmer