[I paired it down & it's still a bit of a read but it's a good one. This really lays it out.]
Shortly we will once more celebrate the Fourth of July, America’s Independence Day. But what are we really celebrating? Most Americans dimly recollect on this day, sometime in the distant past, Americans declared independence from Great Britain.
But they seldom stop to reflect on the true revolution the holiday signifies: the Declaration of Independence and creation of a nation based on a universal idea. As Alexander Hamilton put it, the United States had the opportunity to establish a government founded on “reflection and choice” rather than on “accident and force.”
The Declaration of Independence claimed to derive its authority from certain “self-evident” truths. Do we still believe in them?
HOW IT BEGAN
The political philosophy of the American republic is found in the Declaration. The architecture for that is in the Constitution. The Declaration maintains nature, including human nature, is accessible to human reason, which can ascertain our natural rights.
To secure these, governments are instituted, deriving just powers from consent of the governed. Our founding generation saw the Constitution as a framework for a type of government based on the equality and consent of a self-governing people.
In what respect are we equal under the Constitution? Only in our natural rights, which the Constitution is intended to protect. A corollary holds all human beings are equal in the sense no one person may govern another without the latter’s consent.
While the Constitution is based on mutual trust among citizens, it embodies deep distrust of those in power. Thus, a successful republic required not only virtuous citizens and broad civic trust but also mechanisms to prevent government abuse. One of its most important abuse control devices is the Constitution's separation of powers.
This was simply prudent. While their hope was enlightened public-minded men would govern, the founders realized it was necessary to have an architecture that would minimize damage in the event less enlightened public minded individuals rose to power.
HOW IT "PROGRESSED"
Clearly this is not the situation that prevails today. Unfortunately, what was created has devolved into rule by a few with interests at odds with the public at large. This ruling oligarchy includes not only unelected bureaucrats but also corporate leaders in tech, finance and media who establish rules from which they themselves are exempt.
Our presumed governors have cast aside the Declaration and abuse the Constitution at will. The result is the political crisis we face today: a lawless executive, a Congress and Court complicit in this lawlessness, leading to an out of control federal government that makes a mockery of the idea of a self-governing people.
This change in view of the relation between the Constitution and the Declaration is the result of the revolution in political thought effected by the Progressives in the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries.
While many historians have treated the Progressives as merely a “good government” reform movement, they essentially “re-founded” the republic, changing the basis of America's government from human nature & natural rights to “history” & “progress.”
The Progressives asserted a new concept of man as a being possessing no natural rights, but with potentially limitless material needs that must be provided by an administrative state ruled by “experts.” Thus the Progressives effectively replaced liberty with “efficiency” and the concept of “rights” with prescriptive entitlements.
While Progressivism is complicated & not always internally consistent, its fundamental “big idea” is there is no such thing as the sort of unchanging truth claimed in the Declaration. Instead, all ideas arise from particular historical circumstances.
Not being up to the task of dealing with complexities of 20th century American life the Constitution, said the Progressives, was outdated and incompetent to handle contemporary economic and social ills. If applied at all, they contended, it ought be applied as a “living” document, modified to meet the changes of modern life.
While the founders created a republic based on natural law and natural right, the Progressives believed there could be no abiding non-arbitrary standard of moral or political judgment, independent of human will. As such government must evolve to meet changing needs and guided by similarly evolving standards of right.
Thus as the Progressive political scientist Charles Merriam put it in 1920, it is impossible “that any limit can be set to governmental activity.”
ADMINISTRATIVE PRIMACY
Being a barrier blocking the social and economic policies they advocated, Progressives saw the Constitution’s separation of powers as an effort to enshrine legislative primacy. In the name of good government and efficiency, the Progressives sought to create a new constitutional order, with the president as its driving force.
Accordingly, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives reconceived the presidency itself, overcoming the obstacle by rising above it: The means to do so was separating politics & administration, permitting the president on matters of policy to breach the mere “parchment” barriers that divided the legislative and executive branches.
In other words, executive power & government would grow in parallel. No more would the president be at best, Congress’ co-equal, or at worst, the legislature’s frustrated servant. This reconceived presidency would also be the main instrument of a de facto new Constitution, one devoid of any foolish limited government preoccupation.
For the Progressives, the president was to embody the will of the people, a proactive government’s innovator-in-chief who understands the direction of historical forces but who unites this with popular desires. Details in both the design & execution of policies would rely on 'expertly skilled' administrators under the president’s direction & control.
The result is an increasingly centralized and bureaucratized administrative state that expands relentlessly while increasing dependence of the citizen-body on government. As Matthew Spalding has written, clients of the state are on the verge of becoming the majority faction James Madison saw as the greatest threat to free government.
Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings about democratic despotism seem more and more prophetic, as an all-intrusive state reduces the public to “being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
Let us recur to the truths of the Declaration of Independence as expressed by President Calvin Coolidge in a speech commemorating its 150th anniversary:
"If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.
Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers."
Today, our choice is between republic and oligarchy. Unless and until we recapture the former, our crisis of constitutionalism and all its attendant woes will continue.
FULL ARTICLE
