Was the Constitution a Mistake?

You knew it was coming. Those who bow down to the goddess of democracy now take serious offense, not merely at the Electoral College, but at the United States Senate. Michael Tomasky has just sounded the alarm and we should pay attention to what he says. Because if today’s radicalized Democratic Party has its way, we will scrap the Constitution and the Senate and the Electoral College… in favor of a mass democracy, that would be, government by referenda.

Apparently, Tomasky, whose book If We Can Keep It was just reviewed by Jason Zengerle in the New York Times, confuses republican government with democracy. A republic is distinguished from monarchy because people, or at least some of the people, choose representatives. These representatives govern, but they are not forced to do exactly what their constituents want them to do. Naturally, if they stray too far from their campaign promises they can be recalled. Or they can be voted out of office at the first electoral opportunity. 

But this is not the same thing as a democratic system where the people decide. One remarks, with some chagrin, that in today's America, if the people vote in a referendum for a policy that certain people disapprove of, they will immediately have the referendum overturned by a federal judge. In many cases, the American rule of law has been replaced by the rule of lawyers, that is, the rule of judges.

When Tomasky suggests that the American republic is insufficiently democratic, he is making a couple of serious mistakes and trafficking in confusion. Confusion between a republic and a democracy. His book's title, If You Can Keep It, was part of a sentence uttered by Benjamin Franklin, who stated that the constitutional convention had given the nation: "a republic, if you can keep it." 

On the other hand, he is correct to point out that political parties, which he largely disapproves of, are far more polarized than ever before. By his faulty reasoning this explains why America elected Donald Trump to the presidency. Ergo, he concludes a Constitution that would allow us to elect Donald Trump is fundamentally flawed. We can ignore the fact that the Constitution has been amended and reinterpreted over the centuries, and that we may certainly do so in the future. Providing that we respect the genius of the document, not cavil about its mistakes.

Zengerle summarizes Tomasky’s arguments, thus sparing us the travail of having to read the book:

He contends that the founders, with the Connecticut Compromise, designed a fatally flawed system for our federal legislature. By mandating that the Senate be made up of two representatives from each state, they gave outsize influence to sparsely populated states. As for the House of Representatives, a blasé attitude about maintaining districts of equal size led to inequality, with rural areas of 10,000 constituents having the same representation as urban ones with 50,000 constituents. This situation only changed with a 1964 Supreme Court decision mandating “one person, one vote.” “The founders were visionaries,” Tomasky writes. “But they were human. They made some mistakes.”

Oversized influence… Heaven forfend. On the other side, the founders wanted to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. And from the possibility that large states take advantage of smaller states. A system that has worked more or less well for over two centuries should not be dismissed quite so glibly.

Tomasky has a top down view of politics. He argues, not unpersuasively, that our willingness to take on debt, both personal and national debt, derives from a court decision from 1978, one that I, for one, had ignored.

Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp. (1978) was “a pulverizingly dull case,” which ruled that banks should abide by the usury laws of the state in which they were chartered, not where their customers lived. By making this change, the court drove banks to move to states with the lowest, or even no, interest rate regulations, leading to an explosion in the credit card business and, as a result, an explosion in consumer debt. Where Americans had once cherished “thrift, discipline, doing without,” Tomasky writes, “in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans started to become a different people than they had been.” He adds: “Our consumer selves have overwhelmed our citizen selves.”

It’s interesting to identify something resembling a proximate cause of America’s love of debt, and especially of its unconcern about paying the debt. While America did recover from the massive debt it took on to fight World War II, it has not yet recovered from the debt taken on during the Vietnam War, when the nation decided that it could afford what was at the time called guns and butter. As for spending the nation into oblivion by massive indebtedness, Tomasky might have mentioned the national champion of debt creation, the Obama presidency. In the space of eight years Barack Obama roughly doubled the debt that the nation had accumulated from the time of George Washington.

We can blame it on a court decision or we can blame it on profligate politicians. We can also blame it on voters who do not understand the workings of debt… voters who the original constitution did not allow to vote.

As for the current state of polarization, the Democratic Party has been leading the way. It has refused to accept the legitimacy of a duly and fairly elected president. Thus, if we were to try to understand why the system is breaking down, we should point out that, today’s Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton and other incompetent frauds, do not respect the results of elections that they do not win. Rarely has the Republican Party shown such overwhelming contempt and disrespect for a duly elected Democratic president.

Tomasky blames it on social forces, on inchoate ideas that have infected and corrupted the system. One might say that the nation has been infected by ideology because ideology is easier to understand and easier to sell to the masses. We have gotten to the point where an imbecile like Alexandria Occasional-Cortex is a leader of one of America's great political parties.

Zengerle explains:

His second point is that will is “the most overrated commodity in politics.” “It’s useless to hope that politicians can just go back to getting along the way they once did,” Tomasky writes. “They didn’t get along better in the old days because they were nicer people, or because they had the will to do so. They got along better because a particular set of historical forces and circumstances produced a degree of social cohesion that called on them to cooperate more. Today, a totally different set of historical forces and circumstances exist.”

Happily for all of us, Tomasky does not blame politicians. In a Hegelian flourish, he blames historical forces, forces beyond our control. Being a good liberal Democrat, he should have asked what his own party is contributing to the crisis. It’s called taking responsibility.