It has become commonplace these days to say that America is in a time of crisis. We fear terrorism. The wars we launched in response to terrorism have descended into frustrating carnage abroad while, at home, we are engaged in a domestic struggle to find the proper line between needed security and our treasured liberty. There is sense that we are losing our way.
But there another thought that could provide both perspective and solution. Crisis is nothing new for us as a nation. We have been down the road of crisis before. We have faced and overcome much worse. The framers anticipated these moments and they gave us the tools for working through them, if we will remind ourselves of their wisdom and their invention.
Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of liberty needs to be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. What a wonderful bit of Jeffersonian poetry. But we think something less dramatic, but perhaps harder in its own way, is needed right now. We as Americans need to tend our own garden. We need to renew not just our faith but our understanding of the system the Framers gave us. That understanding requires more than some sound bites about liberty and freedom. We need to embrace that our liberty and freedom flow directly from less glamorous but still vital ideas, such as compromise, and checks and balances, and representation and process. A dash of humility would not hurt either.
We paid insufficient attention to these values in the last few years. Partisan and ideological determination overwhelmed the search for consensus and common ground. Again, as we have before, we are learning that we make mistakes as a country when we do not follow the political processes and principles the framers laid out. This is not the first time that has happened.
Perhaps, it can be the last (for at least a long time).
Two of our most important modern Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, each saw the importance of renewing our understanding of American Constitutional government.
Roosevelt became President in the middle of the worst crisis of American Democracy since the Civil War. The link between the American political system and its economic success had snapped. Around the world, dictatorships of the left and the right were on the rise. There were people who came to FDR-- serious, important people-- to advise him that he might have to take authoritarian powers himself. Looking back we came much closer than many people realize to the loss of our democracy. But we did not lose it, thanks to the resolve of FDR and the strength in the American people of what we have come to describe as our Constitutional conscience. Four years later Roosevelt, in his first fireside chat of his second term as President said he hoped the American people had reread their Constitution in the last few weeks. "Like the bible," he said, "it ought to be read again and again."
Ironically, Roosevelt said this in a speech in which he argued for a plan to weaken the Supreme Court and strengthen the power of the Presidency and the Congress by putting more of his appointees on the Court. It is a testament to the strength of our Constitutional conscience that Roosevelt's way of arguing for this plan was to present it as a defense of the Constitution, not an infringement of it. The system stopped him anyway and even without these expanded powers he guided the country out of Depression. The court packing plan he outlined in that fireside chat has vanished into history. It turns out that the more important notion of that speech was Roosevelt's insistence that we reconnect with the Constitution regularly.
Half a century later, Ronald Reagan was saying farewell after eight years as President. He had come to office in the midst of a crisis of confidence. Watergate, stagflation, the Iran hostage crisis, the residue of the 60's had combined to shake Americans' faith in their country. Reagan had worked with considerable success to rebuild that faith. As he said farewell he took pride in that accomplishment.
But he recognized that the job was only partly done:
This national feeling is good, but it won't count for much and it won't last unless it is grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge. An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over thirty five or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions.
Roosevelt and Reagan are the touchstone President's of the American Century. In some ways they could not represent more different political moments. The first brought a powerful centralized federal government into our domestic lives. The other drew the line to limit it. Yet across the half century that separated them they each affirmed the centrality of connecting Americans to their democratic heritage.
"So we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important," said Reagan. He concluded: "If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual."
We agree. Indeed, we think we owe it to the Framers and all succeeding Americans who have struggled for the Constitution to renew our connection to our own history. But even more, we owe it to the future, which will be shaped by our actions.
There is a strong sense we have become selfish and self-involved as a people. It is hard to say whether we are more self interested than Americans at the time the Constitution was written. It was written because the Framers thought we were very selfish and they decided they could not fight human nature, only harness it. That was the genius of their system. It accepted us for who we are and yet still offered the optimistic vision that we could, as a nation, compromise our differences to agree to do great and good things.
We are all for ideas to make us less selfish or self-interested. But we are with the Framers in doubting that human nature can be fundamentally changed.
But they were right that our more selfish impulses can be channeled. Americans throughout our history have understood that it was in their own interest, ultimately, to preserve this system that balanced everyone's demands. That understanding is what we mean by our Constitutional conscience. It is what the historian Sean Wilentz means when he describes the need for coalitions that cut across lines of wealth power and interest in order to protect our fragile democracy. It is noble to try to make people different. We admire those who try. But politics is the art of the possible. The Framers made it possible for us to live together in liberty and community. The 220 year history of our Constitution is a history of Americans repeatedly rekindling our belief that our own interests are served by this system that grants extensive liberty in exchange for willingness to compromise and tolerate differences. We need to rekindle that belief once more.
If we have one message, it is this: there is nothing about our past success that guarantees our future success. Each generation must do that for itself. We believe this is a hopeful message, because we are not alone in our struggle. We have been given a great gift and with it a great responsibility. We are the inheritors of the longest democratic tradition in the world. Americans still hold in great respect the men who began that tradition and the men and women who carried it forth and bequeathed it to us. That respect is a resource for us now. What we have tried to communicate is that the struggles we are having, the frustrations we are feeling, are exactly the struggles and frustrations the Framers anticipated when they designed our democracy. We can lean on them and their experience. By reaching backward to them and their ideas, we can move forward.
Introduction adapted from Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes' The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved our Country and Why It Can Again. (Bloomsbury 2007).
Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes: What the Framers Knew and Alan Greenspan Didn't
The Framers did not ask people to rise above self-interest but instead expected them to pursue it. Pitting interest against interest, as Madison put it, is a way of ensuring liberty.
Larry Sabato: Thoughts on The Genius of America
I am in full agreement with Lane and Oreskes that we must redouble our efforts in the mass media and education to inform people about the structure of the Constitution. What we do not know can hurt us.
with all we know to be true today, it's time for us to follow the framers' instructions and coerce the congress to issue the call for our first national convention. whether or not a country as polarized as we are can agree on anything, the convention clause of the constitution can also be seen as a civic ceremony that brings "we the people" together and stops the "supreme law" from being suspended by corporate interests.
http://www.foavc.org
http://www.articlev.org
And another thing our country was not founded on capitalism, our Constitution and Bill of Rights speak of individual human rights and the common good. Those who would try to make our constitution a worthless piece of paper have already been very busy. They have convinced us that "the common good" is the boogeyman "socialism". And regulations in place to protect us are bad because they effect corporate profit and somehow corporate profit is connected to jobs. They have us all just about convinced that our constitution was written to support their "every man for himself" capitalism.
Whoever the Democrats nominate for the presidency must be on record stating that he or she will relinquish the powers usurped by the current executive and restore the power and prestige of the Constitution by returning to the legislature those rights and responsibilities that were wrongly handed over to the President.
He wore more stars on his shoulder than anyone: five of them. General of the Army. It has been aptly put that, when he became Commander-in-Chief, it wasn't a promotion.
He's the one who gave us the term, "military industrial complex." He warned us, in January of 1961, that it was a threat without precedent in the American experience.
"Ike was right."
This country is only what we, collectively, make it become. No one will do it for us; plenty of people will try to divide us against ourselves and profit from that division.
We owe it to the honor and the memory of our forefathers to make of this country, and of this world, at the very least what THEY, through "blood, sweat, and tears," made of it and then gave to us.
We also owe to the other nations of the world that we should be considerably more than what we have lately been. There is a Lady in a harbor who still holds her lamp beside "a golden door." But just what have we lately made of the country that she is still a proud symbol of?
Here's just a few facts about our "touchstone" former president:
He funded death squads with money obtained from weapons sales to a country he had denounced as an affirmed enemy of the United States; he supported and armed Saddam Hussein throughout the dictator's worst human rights abuses and also increased support of the mujahideen tenfold; he rolled back environmental and social protections; he refused to address the AIDS crisis in order to pacify his fundamentalist supporters; he helped build upon a contrived "culture war" that sought to devolve political dialogue in America into a forum of ad-hominem attacks and non-issues; and he turned deficit spending into an economic policy (a policy that is now followed to a tee in our present state of affairs). All in all, the Reagan administration seems to have done nothing more than provide our current "decider-in-chief" with a template for how best to abuse power for your own ends by deconstructing the fundamental principles this country was founded on.
http://hnn.us/articles/5544.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/08/EDG777163F1.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/09/BUGBI72U8Q1.DTL&type=business
http://www.grist.org/news/muck/2004/06/10/griscom-reagan/
IF we could reconnect with the constitution, and perhaps find new restrictions, new checks and balances to replace those that have been worn out or coopted, we could restore our Federalist Republic (we are not, and have never been, a democracy).
But I fear that too many generations have passed without knowledge of the things of which you speak. I grew up reading Franklin and Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison. But of my generation (the one after the boomers), I was an exception. Perhaps the exception that proves the rule. I do not believe that the boomers knew our constitution, what is was, what it means, how to protect and serve it. I know that my generation does not. And in the age of no child left behind, I can't see how my children could know of it.
Sadly, the generations that must fix the nation are not a generation that will read the tattered old instruction manual, but rather a generation that is used to finding new ways to do things.
If we could have a new constitutional convention, debate all the old cogs and widgets, and propose new ones, I suspect many of our checks and balances would survive, and gain new life. I also suspect that the new additions would be better thought out and more effective than you would suspect.
but those who want to fix our country are divided between those who want "new and improved," and those who want "200 years of perfection." I suspect only blood and tyranny will drive these disparate groups together. Till then I will wait, and be ready when the time comes. As will others, you are out there, and you know who you are. keep thinking, sharpen the stakes of war and the pens of liberty, and when you are needed, you will come and restore what has been lost.
Wearing the cloak of one or the other of these identities, a reader of the constitution will look for the support of their own mindset in the words of our nation's seminal document. In order to read the constitution in a less biased, more democratic light, the reader must first be willing to shed the cloak of ideology and own the nakedness of being both individuals and social beings. Both human traits essential for a true democracy.
From Digg --"Dear Senator
It has come to my attention, that The U.S. House of Representatives has recently passed HR 1955 titled the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. This is now up for review in the Senate Judiciary committee, listed as S.1959.
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Here is the website containing the Act (House Resolution HR1955, also S. 1959) in full detail: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill= ...
All U.S. citizens who are doing nothing but voicing their opinions against a President and Vice President who have expanded their executive powers, bypassed our congressional check and balance, and has undermined our U.S. Judiciary System, are now at risk, by this new act, of being labeled and prosecuted as a terrorist. Vote NO on S.1959.
Thank you,