Our Constitution Wasn't Built for This

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: September 19, 2017 at 5:19:33 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Our Constitution Wasn't Built for This
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Our Constitution Wasn’t Built for This
> By GANESH SITARAMAN
> Sep 16 2017
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/16/opinion/sunday/constitution-economy.html>
>
> Exactly 230 years ago, on Sept. 17, 1787, a group of men in Philadelphia concluded a summer of sophisticated, 
> impassioned debates about the fate of their fledgling nation. The document that emerged, our Constitution, is often 
> thought of as part of an aristocratic counterrevolution that stands in contrast to the democratic revolution of 1776. 
> But our Constitution has at least one radical feature: It isn’t designed for a society with economic inequality.
>
> There are other things the Constitution wasn’t written for, of course. The founders didn’t foresee America becoming a 
> global superpower. They didn’t plan for the internet or nuclear weapons. And they certainly couldn’t have imagined a 
> former reality television star president. Commentators wring their hands over all of these transformations — though 
> these days, they tend to focus on whether this country’s founding document can survive the current president.
>
> But there is a different, and far more stubborn, risk that our country faces — and which, arguably, led to the TV 
> star turned president in the first place. Our Constitution was not built for a country with so much wealth 
> concentrated at the very top nor for the threats that invariably accompany it: oligarchs and populist demagogues.
>
> From the ancient Greeks to the American founders, statesmen and political philosophers were obsessed with the problem 
> of economic inequality. Unequal societies were subject to constant strife — even revolution. The rich would tyrannize 
> the poor, and the poor would revolt against the rich.
>
> The solution was to build economic class right into the structure of government. In England, for example, the 
> structure of government balanced lords and commoners. In ancient Rome, there was the patrician Senate for the 
> wealthy, and the Tribune of the Plebeians for everyone else. We can think of these as class-warfare constitutions: 
> Each class has a share in governing, and a check on the other. Those checks prevent oligarchy on the one hand and a 
> tyranny founded on populist demagogy on the other.
>
> What is surprising about the design of our Constitution is that it isn’t a class warfare constitution. Our 
> Constitution doesn’t mandate that only the wealthy can become senators, and we don’t have a tribune of the plebs. Our 
> founding charter doesn’t have structural checks and balances between economic classes: not between rich and poor, and 
> certainly not between corporate interests and ordinary workers. This was a radical change in the history of 
> constitutional government.
>
> And it wasn’t an oversight. The founding generation knew how to write class-warfare constitutions — they even debated 
> such proposals during the summer of 1787. But they ultimately chose a framework for government that didn’t pit class 
> against class. Part of the reason was practical. James Madison’s notes from the secret debates at the Philadelphia 
> Convention show that the delegates had a hard time agreeing on how they would design such a class-based system. But 
> part of the reason was political: They knew the American people wouldn’t agree to that kind of government.
>
> At the time, many Americans believed the new nation would not be afflicted by the problems that accompanied economic 
> inequality because there simply wasn’t much inequality within the political community of white men. Today we tend to 
> emphasize how undemocratic the founding era was when judged by our values — its exclusion of women, enslavement of 
> African-Americans, violence against Native Americans. But in doing so, we risk missing something important: Many in 
> the founding generation believed America was exceptional because of the extraordinary degree of economic equality 
> within the political community as they defined it.
>
> Unlike Europe, America wasn’t bogged down by the legacy of feudalism, nor did it have a hereditary aristocracy. Noah 
> Webster, best known for his dictionary, commented that there were “small inequalities of property,” a fact that 
> distinguished America from Europe and the rest of the world. Equality of property, he believed, was crucial for 
> sustaining a republic. During the Constitutional Convention, South Carolinan Charles Pinckney said America had “a 
> greater equality than is to be found among the people of any other country.” As long as the new nation could expand 
> west, he thought, it would be possible to have a citizenry of independent yeoman farmers. In a community with 
> economic equality, there was simply no need for constitutional structures to manage the clash between the wealthy and 
> everyone else.
>
> [snip]
>
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