Summary: Not all the attackers of the Constitution are enemies of the people, or even of the Republic. After 200 years, some believe the Constitution has outlived its usefulness, its weaknesses outweigh its strengths. The rotten boroughs of the Senate, the perhaps unlimited growth of the Executive power, the too-vague limits on judicial authority — perhaps these signal the necessity of radical reform. Here Lewis H. Lapham and Daniel Lazare make their case.
Today we have a brief excerpt from Lewis H. Lapham’s insightful book Waiting for the Barbarians (1997). In this chapter he discusses The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy by Daniel Lazare (1996). Click here to see articles by Daniel Lazare published in The Nation. At the end are links to other posts on this topic.
Chapter IX – Sacred Scroll
Over the course of a presidential election year I expect the books published on political themes to read like the speeches at a Fourth of July picnic – heartwarming cant as plentiful as the beer and as empty as the balloons – but six weeks before the New Hampshire primaries, I discovered The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy, by Daniel Lazare, to be the exception that proves the rule.
In the sanctuary of the American civil religion nothing except a private fortune in excess of $5 billion is more precious than the four pages of parchment brought forth by the corporate sponsors of liberty in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. Lazare, an accomplished iconoclast, manages within the space of a few hundred pages to assign them to the realm of magical objects in which a museum of natural history also might place the totem poles, the scraps of sacred moleskin, and the bones of a departed saint.
. . .I was glad to encounter a writer willing to suggest that only by reconfiguring our system of government (i.e., by rewriting the Constitution) can we address what by now have become the all too obvious consequences of our political weakness and stupidity. . . . The proposition seems to me to stand as proven in any morning’s newspaper.
Lazare arranges his polemic in historical sequence — the origins of the Constitution as a marvel of eighteenth-century political mechanics made to the design of seventeenth-century religious belief {through to} the blind worship of the sacred text that has accompanied the last 50 years of the country’s descent into bankruptcy and the wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. Three of Lazare’s points about the obsolete and undemocratic character of the Constitution strike me as useful glosses on a presidential election year likely to present the owner of Forbes magazine as the friend of the common man.
Virtuous Incapacity
. . .The government was never supposed to work, at least not in the way imagined by a municipal planning commission. The political shambles is deliberate, and the government’s incompetence is a testimony to its virtue. The gentlemen who wrote the Constitution were as suspicious of efficient government as they were wary of democracy, a “turbulence and a folly” that they associated with the unruly ignorance of an urban mob.
. . . Believing themselves morally and intellectually superior to the democratic rabble, they defined the practice of government as the duty of the judicious few to control and improve the instincts of the foolish many, any they undertook to render the federal political power as important as a eunuch in the court of a Ming emperor.
. . . {T}hey produced a government weak enough to preserve the institution of slavery and a Constitution rigid enough to resist the invasions of social change. The Preamble granted unlimited powers to “We the People”, but Article V (the clause that makes amendment virtually impossible by requiring a two-third vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by three fourths of the states) declared the Preamble null and void. . . .
Balanced Impotence
Political power divided into as many parts as the fragments of the True Cross couldn’t interfere with the economic power, and the marvelous state of suspended animation served everybody’s interest as long as everybody agreed that the private good was another name for the public good.
. . . Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned. If no individual or institution possesses the authority to act without the consent of everybody else in the room, then nobody is ever at fault if anything goes wrong. Congress can blame the President, the President can blame the Congress or the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court can blame the Mexicans or the weather in Ohio.
Checked and balanced by powers of all denominations, the country’s public servants become, in theory, accountable to everybody; in practice they remain accountable to nobody, . . . free to strike attractive moral attitudes while at the same time selling their votes to the highest corporate bidder . . .
The God in the Machine
Lazare traces the fervor of our present constitutional devotions to the complacence that settled on the American mind following WWII . . . The winning of the war prompted Americans to think that their military and industrial supremacy was proof of their moral and political virtue . . .
The United States in the meantime fell behind every other country in the industrialized world in most of the categories that measure the well-being of a civilized society: the most brutal police force and the most crowded prisons, the harshest system of criminal justice, repressive drug laws, a lazy and sycophantic press. Over the span of the same 50 years our political campaigns have come to resemble nothing so much as games of trivial pursuit, charades reduced to works of performance art in which the candidates smear one another with insults instead of chocolate.
. . . Theocratic societies tend to have a weak grasp of reality, and toward the end of his book, remarking on the fulminations of the Country party presently holding the majority in Congress, Lazare says “All those Republican House freshmen in early 199 sporting copies of the Federalist Papers were not all that different from Iranian mullahs waving copies of the Koran.”
A historian rather than a political scientist or a first-year congressman, Lazare doesn’t offer a set of instructions for redrafting the Constitution, but he carries his point about our idolatrous worship of the document, depriving us of the courage to imagine a future that doesn’t look like one of the Disney Company’s replicas of the nonexistent American past.
The framers of the Constitution lived in a world innocent of electricity, jet aircraft, telephones, computers, nuclear weapons, and MTV; if their political mechanism had already become outworn by the middle of the nineteenth century (that is, incapable of resolving the question of slavery), then how can we expect it to address the questions likely to be presented by the twenty-first century?
. . . But we can’t engage in the conversation unless we rid ourselves of our documentary superstitions, and until we begin to talk about revising the structure of American government, our political debate amounts to little more than a twittering of opinion polls about which candidate has the most money, the fewest felony convictions, and the best hairdresser.
About Lewis H. Lapham
Lewis H. Lapham was the editor of Harper’s Magazine from 1976 – 1981 and 1983 – 2006. In 2007 he started Lapham’s Quarterly (a magazine of history and ideas; see their website here), for which he is the Editor. He has written many books on politics and current affairs.
About Daniel Lazare
Daniel Lazare is the author of, most recently, The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy (Verso). He is currently at work on a book about the politics of Christianity, Judaism and Islam for Pantheon. {Source: The Nation}
An alternative view of our situation
America no longer functions well, but our self-esteem remains untouched. Therefore the problems must lie elsewhere than ourselves. The most popular candidates for blame are our rulers (unworthy of our greatness) and our institutions (including the Constitution). If we change them — throw the bums out! or a new Constitution — then all will be well.
IMO this is delusional thinking. It’s harmful, as correct diagnosis must preceed effective treatment. So long as we are sheep, then we will be so governed — no matter what the formal political structure. Only after we resolve to again become free men and women, after we regain control of the State, will formal political reform become possible.
For more information about this:
- We have the leaders we deserve. Visit McDonald’s to learn why., 30 October 2010
- Is it time to take the drastic step of calling a Constitutional Convention?, 6 May 2011
For more information from the FM site
For more detailed analysis see these FM reference pages:
- About America – how can we stop the quiet coup now in progress?
- About Good news about America, a collection of articles!
Here are some posts about the future of the American polity:
- Forecast: Death of the American Constitution, 4 July 2006
- Congress shows us how our new government works, 14 April 2008
- A soft despotism for America?, 22 July 2008
- What comes after the Constitution? Can we see the outlines of the “Mark 3″ version?, 10 November 2008
- A look at America’s future – grim unless we get smart and pull together, 12 March 2009
- “The Coming of the Fourth American Republic”, 24 April 2009
- More about the tottering structure of the American political regime, 17 August 2009
- A third American regime will arise from the ashes of the present one, 30 March 2010
- For America to prosper it must first burn, 22 November 2010
- Origins of what may become the 3rd American Republic (a plutocracy), 8 April 2011
- A look at the future of America, unlike the expectations of conservatives and liberals, 10 August 2011
