CT Blue

The latest print version (not yet on-line, so far as I could see) of the American Prospect contains an article titled Did the Founders Screw Up?, subtitled Why Presidential Democracy No Longer Works in America. This sent me burrowing through my Ipad to find a draft blog post that never made the cut (if you think the stuff I publish is crap, just imagine the stuff that I don’t stick up), which contained, among other things, some musings about the Constitution’s inadequacies.

So, did the Founders screw up? Were I on the jury it would take me less than a minute to return a not guilty verdict. The Founders did not see themselves as little gods (most of them, after all, were as close to non-believers as you could get those days), nor did they see the Constitution as holy writ. That’s why they included not one but two ways to amend the Constitution. Here’s how I put it in that never published draft post:

The founders would have been the first to admit that the Constitution, like all works of man, was fallible, and would not necessarily answer to future needs and situations. They knew that they couldn’t predict the future, so they provided for a method of changing the Constitution. One method, never used, allows the states to petition for a new Constitutional Convention. The constitution is, in fact, showing its age. The flaws in it, along with various anomalies grafted onto it (e.g., the filibuster, the two party system), and circumstances the founders could not have foreseen (corporations allowed to spend unlimited money in secret to buy elections by decree of the Supreme Court, technological changes, vast differences between the populations of states with equal representation in the Senate, etc.), have conspired together to doom this country to dominance by an unholy alliance of the rich and the superstitious. We could use a new constitution.

Imagine, though, if we had to pick delegates from among the crop of politicians currently occupying the national stage (and where else, realistically speaking, would we get them?). Is there anyone out there who would argue that the resulting document would be anything but a travesty?

So, the Founders did not screw up. They did what they had to do: trust that future generations would carry on their work. Their framework worked well for the 18th century and long into the 20th, but like any system it has weaknesses, and those weaknesses have been systematically exploited. The 18th century model doesn’t work in the 20th century, but we are incapable of seeing the problem, which is just as well, because if we did, we would be incapable of addressing it. The Constitution’s inadequacies will eventually bring us down, but not as quickly as we would if left to our own devices. The fault, dear friends, is not in our stars or in the Founders, but in ourselves.