On September 17th, our nation celebrates Constitution Day, which marks the anniversary of its signing in Philadelphia by 39 of the 55 men who helped draft it. For decades the date passed unremarked until the late Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia sponsored legislation requiring all recipients of federal funds to do something, anything, to celebrate the world's oldest written constitution of a nation still in effect. After some initial groaning, the grantees have gotten into the swing of things, and now a thousand flowers bloom about the Constitution each year in mid-September.
Never before has the Constitution gotten more lip service than today. The Tea Party, in particular, has made the Constitution its personal political slogan. But rather than seeking to grapple with the Constitution's inherent conflicts, as the framers themselves did, these sunshine pseudo-constitutionalists want true believers in their agenda, not honest inquiry about constitutional principles.
I encountered this phenomenon recently in the bookstore at George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate, when an elderly lady was shown a copy of my most recent book on the Constitution and introduced to me as its author.
She eyed me skeptically. "Do you believe in the Constitution?" she asked. "Ma'am," I explained, "I've been writing about the Constitution for almost 30 years. I try to explore all sides of the issues in my book."
She clearly wasn't satisfied. "But do you believe in the Constitution?"
I got the feeling that I was supposed to clap my hands and incant three times, "I do believe in the Constitution -- I do, I do, I do believe in the Constitution."
"I may not believe what you believe about the Constitution," I replied, "but I do try to understand it."
This latter-day version of constitutional triumphalism is both historically inaccurate and deeply flawed. Only when we as citizens can appreciate the all-too-human compromises and contingencies embodied in our nation's charter can we paradoxically appreciate its radical achievements for its time. As Yale Law professor Akhil Reed Amar wrote: "The adoption of the Constitution was the most participatory, majoritarian, and populist event the Earth had ever seen." And yet it allowed slavery and required a long series of amendments to approximate the bulwark of liberty we celebrate on this day.
The Constitution is a compact for citizens, not a bumper sticker. We serve its purposes best by wrestling with its meaning, not blindly following a pied piper like Glenn Beck. His dirty little secret is that he is exactly the kind of demagogue that the framers feared most, and they limited the structure of government to keep such babblers out of power.