What is the most important date in American history? Most of us would swiftly answer the Fourth of July. But think about today, September 17th. On this date in 1787 the convention in Philadelphia completed work on one of the greatest acts of creative leadership of all time, "this Constitution of The United States." Their work rescued America from what Madison later described as "gloomy chaos" and set the world marching toward what we can now see as the Age of Democracy.
Yet there will be no parades today, no picnics or fireworks. Perhaps a library somewhere is sponsoring a talk. Constitution Day will pass largely unnoticed. It is not surprising. Americans have over the last 40 years drifted away from a connection to our Constitution, the document that invented the United States as we now understand it and helped America to become the longest enduring democracy in history (Athens lasted 170 years as a democracy).
We revere the framers. We gobble up books about them and love snippets of their wisdom. They have become our secular gods. Yet we have little sense of what it was they actually invented. We know that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed our liberty. But liberty alone, as it turned out, was not the answer to the question of how to create a successful nation. As the framers learned in the eleven years following 1776, liberty unleashed the ambitions, the self-interests of individuals, factions and states. Selfish behavior was so rampant that the army nearly starved in the field of battle. Farmers took up arms. States threatened border war with other states. The country, if it even was a country, was falling apart. This was the "gloomy chaos" Madison confronted when he entered Philadelphia.
He and his fellow delegates saved America by recognizing that the pursuit of self-interest, which lay behind all the chaos, was fundamental to human nature. Before 1787 self-interest was something that had to be transcended to preserve Democracy. But the Constitution turned "vice into a virtue," harnessing ambition and channeling it into a system of representative government that pit interest against interest to find the greater good. Power was separated and balanced. The system was driven by "conflict within consensus" as historian Michael Kammen summed it up. There had never been a government like it before. This was their great invention: a government that let people be free by recognizing what people were really like.
The power of their invention is inarguable. Out of that sweltering hall in Philadelphia, out of that crisis of the early American nation, emerged a blueprint for government that was designed to let the people govern themselves despite their imperfections. It did not count on people to be selfless or bigger than themselves. "If men were angels, no government would be necessary,' wrote Madison. This new idea for government presumed people would pursue their own interests. Indeed it counted on them to do just that.
And it created paths for others to disagree, and resist them, or argue for something different. Their invention was a government designed to channel these struggles. To impede change until enough people supported it. To force people to the middle To encourage compromise. To spread power around so, in Hamilton's succinct vision, the few could not oppress the many and the many could not oppress the few. A lot could get done if people worked together in this system. But, if they fought each other, it could all grind to a halt.
In other words what they sent out from Philadelphia 220 years ago today was not just a piece of parchment. They created a new set of ideas about government and democracy. They had no idea how effective those ideas would be
The American "experiment" has worked better and lasted longer than any alternative.
But we do not recall all this for a history lesson. Because today, despite all our success, many Americans are feeling deeply frustrated and disillusioned with the functioning of their country. "Our conviction about American greatness and purpose is not as strong today," William J Bennett writes on the very first page of his History of The Untied States.
We are searching for a renewal.
The Constitution itself is a good place to start this day. It is after all what makes us Americans. We are not a country defined, in the words of journalist Ray Suarez, "by blood, or clan, or land origins, or religious belief." Rather, we are held together by the strength of our shared beliefs in our Constitution and its principles -- such as a respect for process, a willingness to compromise, a tolerance for dissent. We call this our Constitutional Conscience
But we have been drifting away from these principles and our modern politics has become brittle, confrontational and uncompromising. Our common bond has been unraveling. Recent experience reminds us that we make mistakes as a country when we move away from how our system was built to work. When people say now they wish The Congress and the media had done more to question the march to war in Iraq they are saying, too, that they wish the leaders of congress and the press had done more to assert their authority, and fulfill their responsibilities, under The Constitution. Even many proponents of the war concede now that the checks and balances did not work well. We believe that is precisely because of a weakening of our sense of our Constitutional roles, our constitutional conscience. Voters do not reward elected officials for executing their constitutional responsibility so it is little wonder that most elected officials don't pay much heed to those responsibilities. "People revere the constitution yet know so little about," Senator Robert Byrd said, "and that goes for some of my fellow senators."
Ronald Reagan, one of our most important 20th century presidents saw this problem coming as he left office. He warned of what he saw as a growing failure to appreciate our own history. Ultimately, he said, this would eradicate "the American memory" and threaten the American spirit. Some years later, Derek Bok the former president of Harvard worried that no one any longer bothers to prepare people to be citizens. Civics has nearly vanished from our curriculums, squeezed out in many cases by the understandable drive to teach science and math. We do that to assure our competitiveness in the world economy. But we should be just as concerned about our moral authority in the world. Moral authority comes from the strength of our principles. We are the inheritors of one of the greatest statements of democratic principles ever written. One piece of rehabilitating our moral authority in the world and our confidence in our selves is to reconnect with our own statement of best principles, "this Constitution of the United States." Franklin Roosevelt, our other great 20th Century president, said we should read The Constitution "again and again" like the bible. Or maybe we should all go to that Library talk.