What the Founding Fathers Intended
As of late, I've started to become acquainted with politics, a sphere of which I have remained largely (and happily) ignorant of for most of my adult life. These are waters that one must cautiously wade into.
There is one very common argument that I find is invoked by the right and the left, in order to decry an action taken by the opposing party: it goes against what the founding fathers intended.
Call it the appeal to authority. Conservatives claim that this or that policy put forth by the liberals is a perversion of our basic democratic principles. Liberals rake the same muck about the conservative agenda. This would make you think that the best way to set public policy would be to extract the DNA of Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin from amber, clone them several times over, and turn them loose in Washington D.C. to set our current administration straight.
It's a good first question to ask: should we care what our founding fathers would think of the political issues facing us today?
My answer is a dodgy and noncommital one: "Well, yes and no".
The insinuation that we must consider the founding fathers to guide our fundamental values is predicated on a poor assumption: that there was consensus among the whole lot of them. This is demonstrably not the case. Adams, for example, was horrified by the idea of democratic self-government, since he thought the masses were incapable of ruling themselves, and favored instituting a monarchy. Hamilton wanted to create a strong central bank at the federal level, which, in hindsight, was a brilliant move to create a strong government, but other founding fathers fought him on this. Most of them agreed on a few core general principles, which is how they managed to come together and put together the Constitution, but the finer points of the organizing documents were something they debately hotly amongst themselves for years to come.
This is the first misconception I held about politics for many years: that the solution is find some harmony between two opposing viewpoints. Politics has nothing to do with this. It never has. The very fact that politics exists is evidence of pluralism; if everyone agreed on everything, if we all shared the exact same principles, then Congress could take down the tent poles and all of them could go home.
It's not about reaching a compromise, it never has been, and we shouldn't think this is somehow the goal of politics. A corollary: let's not have the conceit to think that the polarization of our own day is somehow new and unique to our generation.
There was an excellent article on this point in Time magazine (is it still a magazine?) last month, titled There's Nothing Virtuous About Finding Common Ground. By way of example: what is the middle ground between the slave owners and the abolitionists during the Civil War? Do the slaves get to be free 3 days a week, but the other 4 days they remain slaves? There's no room for hand-wavey moral relativism when human rights are at stake.
Thomas Paine is not officially considered to be one of the founding fathers of the country, if the absence of his face from our currency is any indication. (Jefferson ended up on the rarely-used two-dollar bill precisely because he opposed Hamilton's proposition for a central bank.) This is unfortunate, because he was one of the towering public intellectuals of the revolutionary days, and his influence in shifting public opinion in favor of revolution cannot be overstated.
Jefferson himself never wrote any polemic about the rights of individuals, apart from the Declaration...but if he had committed them to paper, they would likely have resembled Paine's Rights of Man. The work itself was written as a response to Edmund Burke's criticism of the French Revolution, and Paine's rejoinder is both a jab at hereditary monarchy and adherence to antiquated legal codes, and a call to recognize that all men have inherent natural rights that governments cannot restrict.
In the early pages of his work, Paine writes: "The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it. That which may be thought right and found convenient in one age, may be thought wrong and found inconvenient in another. In such cases, who is to decide, the living or the dead?"
I'll restate my original question: should we care what our founding fathers would think of the political issues facing us today?
What is so often pointed out is the idea that the United States is a "Christian nation", namely, that we should be a nation of Christians because all of our founding fathers were. This is a point of ongoing contention, with the religious cherry-picking this or that quote about "God" or the "Creator" from the organizing documents and claiming them as Christian statements. Washington was a church-going man, and believed that his mission to free the colonies from the tyranny of King George III was ordained by God. But these kinds of statements are deist, at best. The founding fathers took such great pains to conceal their own religious beliefs from the public, and to ensure that the workings of government were wholly separate from the churches, that it can hardly matter to us what they believed. What if a secret document emerged that revealed that John Adams was a closet Methodist? Does this mean we are all somehow bound by our laws to become Methodists?
The next problem is that, while we have the text of the organizing documents, we don't always know their reasoning. Consider the text of the First Amendment as pertains to free speech: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech..." We know that they wrote it, and while we can make good educated guesses as to why they wrote it, but we don't know for sure. We have letter, but what of the spirit? How are we to apply this general blob of text to more specific situations that the authors could never have anticipated?
So, even where consensus naturally emerged in the documents themselves, we have no direct access to the lines of reasoning that birthed them in the first place. Perhaps we can do a seance at the Jefferson Memorial?
Pluralism is a reality in the United States, and it has been from the start. If there is any legacy that the founding fathers wished to bequeath to us, it was likely this one. They all died arguing with each other about the details of the country they sacrified so much of their lives to create, and we have taken up their mantle. As long as conservatives and liberals go on accusing each other of perverting the "true" spirit of democracy that the founders intended, and as long as neither side is persecuted or silenced, then the spirit is alive and well.
There is one very common argument that I find is invoked by the right and the left, in order to decry an action taken by the opposing party: it goes against what the founding fathers intended.
Call it the appeal to authority. Conservatives claim that this or that policy put forth by the liberals is a perversion of our basic democratic principles. Liberals rake the same muck about the conservative agenda. This would make you think that the best way to set public policy would be to extract the DNA of Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin from amber, clone them several times over, and turn them loose in Washington D.C. to set our current administration straight.
It's a good first question to ask: should we care what our founding fathers would think of the political issues facing us today?
My answer is a dodgy and noncommital one: "Well, yes and no".
The insinuation that we must consider the founding fathers to guide our fundamental values is predicated on a poor assumption: that there was consensus among the whole lot of them. This is demonstrably not the case. Adams, for example, was horrified by the idea of democratic self-government, since he thought the masses were incapable of ruling themselves, and favored instituting a monarchy. Hamilton wanted to create a strong central bank at the federal level, which, in hindsight, was a brilliant move to create a strong government, but other founding fathers fought him on this. Most of them agreed on a few core general principles, which is how they managed to come together and put together the Constitution, but the finer points of the organizing documents were something they debately hotly amongst themselves for years to come.
This is the first misconception I held about politics for many years: that the solution is find some harmony between two opposing viewpoints. Politics has nothing to do with this. It never has. The very fact that politics exists is evidence of pluralism; if everyone agreed on everything, if we all shared the exact same principles, then Congress could take down the tent poles and all of them could go home.
It's not about reaching a compromise, it never has been, and we shouldn't think this is somehow the goal of politics. A corollary: let's not have the conceit to think that the polarization of our own day is somehow new and unique to our generation.
There was an excellent article on this point in Time magazine (is it still a magazine?) last month, titled There's Nothing Virtuous About Finding Common Ground. By way of example: what is the middle ground between the slave owners and the abolitionists during the Civil War? Do the slaves get to be free 3 days a week, but the other 4 days they remain slaves? There's no room for hand-wavey moral relativism when human rights are at stake.
Thomas Paine is not officially considered to be one of the founding fathers of the country, if the absence of his face from our currency is any indication. (Jefferson ended up on the rarely-used two-dollar bill precisely because he opposed Hamilton's proposition for a central bank.) This is unfortunate, because he was one of the towering public intellectuals of the revolutionary days, and his influence in shifting public opinion in favor of revolution cannot be overstated.
Jefferson himself never wrote any polemic about the rights of individuals, apart from the Declaration...but if he had committed them to paper, they would likely have resembled Paine's Rights of Man. The work itself was written as a response to Edmund Burke's criticism of the French Revolution, and Paine's rejoinder is both a jab at hereditary monarchy and adherence to antiquated legal codes, and a call to recognize that all men have inherent natural rights that governments cannot restrict.
In the early pages of his work, Paine writes: "The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it. That which may be thought right and found convenient in one age, may be thought wrong and found inconvenient in another. In such cases, who is to decide, the living or the dead?"
I'll restate my original question: should we care what our founding fathers would think of the political issues facing us today?
What is so often pointed out is the idea that the United States is a "Christian nation", namely, that we should be a nation of Christians because all of our founding fathers were. This is a point of ongoing contention, with the religious cherry-picking this or that quote about "God" or the "Creator" from the organizing documents and claiming them as Christian statements. Washington was a church-going man, and believed that his mission to free the colonies from the tyranny of King George III was ordained by God. But these kinds of statements are deist, at best. The founding fathers took such great pains to conceal their own religious beliefs from the public, and to ensure that the workings of government were wholly separate from the churches, that it can hardly matter to us what they believed. What if a secret document emerged that revealed that John Adams was a closet Methodist? Does this mean we are all somehow bound by our laws to become Methodists?
The next problem is that, while we have the text of the organizing documents, we don't always know their reasoning. Consider the text of the First Amendment as pertains to free speech: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech..." We know that they wrote it, and while we can make good educated guesses as to why they wrote it, but we don't know for sure. We have letter, but what of the spirit? How are we to apply this general blob of text to more specific situations that the authors could never have anticipated?
So, even where consensus naturally emerged in the documents themselves, we have no direct access to the lines of reasoning that birthed them in the first place. Perhaps we can do a seance at the Jefferson Memorial?
Pluralism is a reality in the United States, and it has been from the start. If there is any legacy that the founding fathers wished to bequeath to us, it was likely this one. They all died arguing with each other about the details of the country they sacrified so much of their lives to create, and we have taken up their mantle. As long as conservatives and liberals go on accusing each other of perverting the "true" spirit of democracy that the founders intended, and as long as neither side is persecuted or silenced, then the spirit is alive and well.