The Genius of America Read Free Page B

elected president, the voters of California adopted a proposition, number 13 on that year’s ballot, to limit the spending authority of their legislature. This reinvigorated a process, initiative and referendum, that allowed Americans to vote directly on issues and circumvent their state legislatures (or even the Congress under a version now being pushed by former U.S. senator Mike Gravel). That is, philosophically, exactly the opposite of the view of the framers, who gave process a central role in their vision of democracy.
    This historical context would not have occurred consciously to many of the spokesmen for the gathering effort to take power from government. Reagan believed profoundly in America, and one of his important contributions was a revival of what he called “informed patriotism” steeped in an understanding of our history. Certainly, Reagan would not have accepted the idea that he was arguing across the years with the writers of the Constitution.
    But there were those who explicitly acknowledged that they wanted to undo what the framers had invented. A few months before Reagan took office, in the frustrating final days of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Carter’s counsel, Lloyd Cutler, a consummate Democrat, called for the scrapping of the essential elements of the process created by the Constitution. “Whatever its merits in 1793, American Government has become a structure that almost guarantees stalemate.” He proposed a Parliament whose members would be more responsive to the president.
    We can see from the perspective of twenty-five years later that Reagan’s analysis of government as the problem and Cutler’s call for the abolition of the independent Congress were just the beginnings of a period of stalemate in America and consequent frustration.
    It is an irony of our age that one of America’s greatest triumphs, one of Reagan’s greatest triumphs, the collapse of the Soviet Union, coincided with a growing disillusionment at home with the American process of government, the very process which has proven so much more resilient and lasting than any of its competitor systems.
    To maintain the essential legitimacy of democracy, government must ultimately respond to the demands of its people. But America’s government is designed to slow such response, to resist, as Hamilton put it, “an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse.” This inevitably creates tension between the people and their government. This tension has intensified as the country’s politics have fractured. We are living through “the growth of a politics based upon narrow concerns, rooted in the exploitative division of class, cash, gender, region, ethnicity, morality and ideology—a give no quarter and take no prisoners activism that demands satisfaction and accepts no compromise.” In other words, a period of strife and disunity much like the early days of America out of which the framers invented the process of government in the Constitution.
    Faced with the growing divisions of our age, Congress has done less, just as the framers designed it to do. The result is ever-growing criticism of the government as an obstacle to change. People of all ideological and political stripes, frustrated by government’s incapacity to provide what they want, have found common ground in blaming the design of the government for their failure to get their way.
    But the fault, to paraphrase Cassius, is not in the government (or at least not only in the government). The government is doing what the framers designed it to do when a divided country “accepts no compromise.” It is waiting for compromise to seem more palatable than political warfare.
    Americans are always free to reject what their forefathers bequeathed them. The South tried that once. The Constitution ingeniously includes a process for its own amendment, which could even