The Genius of America Read Free

government before becoming a president, saw it “as too complex to be understood.” But the complexity was no accident. It was designed that way to make change difficult without consideration and consensus. A simple majority should not get its way, itself a point of departure from most democracies. James Madison was passionate on the point that majority rule was not an adequate test of what was right or wrong for the country.
    Despite the role the framers built for government as an obstacle to rash or speedy change, the American government has, as designed, incrementally allowed much change. Over time, that change has been extraordinary. Since the Great Depression, a forty-year consensus among Americans thrust government from a small participant in their lives to a central player. That consensus produced, for example, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and an expansion of civil rights, voting rights and environmental protections. It also sharply increased the expectation among the people that government could solve problems.
    But in the last decades of the twentieth century, that consensus unraveled, leaving intact only expanded expectations that government can solve our problems. The country became divided into a multitude of different interests, each demanding that its own policies be enacted into law. Discord now demarks the political landscape, fueled by political “leaders” who reason that they can secure their own position by promising to support one interest against another.
    As the clamor rises, the government cannot accommodate all these competing demands. Indeed, it was designed to frustrate them. So, naturally, there is great frustration and anger among many of these groups whose demands and expectations have been unsatisfied.
    None of this would have surprised or upset the writers of the Constitution. They believed action without consensus was far more dangerous than stasis while searching for consensus. But what might have worried them is how the political frustrations have turned into attacks on the process itself. The values that compose our Constitutional Conscience are meant to reinforce each other. We accept compromise because we feel we are represented in the decision. But many Americans no longer feel well represented. This is due in part to dysfunctions in the Congress that need to be fixed. But, even more, it is also due to our increasing unwillingness or inability to appreciate a central principle of the Constitution: American government was not established to satisfy our specific wants, but to sort out all our desires and demands and find some common good.
    What have you given us? Benjamin Franklin was asked as he left the Constitutional Convention. “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
    Quoting Franklin’s warning in this context may seem alarmist. Certainly, we have never been richer or more powerful as a nation. Yet within we harbor deep doubts and divisions that undercut our unity. A key element of this has been a tendency to blame the process of government, the one the framers gave us, for our problems. This attitude is corrosive and threatening for the reason Learned Hand, the great jurist, once explained: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there . . . no constitution, no law, no court [can] save it . . . A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.” Our Constitutional Conscience, what we believe in our hearts and minds, is more central even than the document itself and all the rulings of the Supreme Court. Certainly, it is not dead in us. But we do believe it is ailing.
    In Part Three, we trace back to the late 1970s the rise of an unhappy attitude toward government and recall how Ronald Reagan crystallized it in his first inaugural address in 1981.
    It had been a long journey for Reagan—actor,