My learned friend, Doctor Fergus Finnerty, shared this New Jerk Times article with me the other day, ignoring my often expressed opinion of the paper out of his indefatigable sense of noblesse oblige. I reference a link to the original article, but of course they’re not going to let you read it without a subscription, and if you had a subscription to the New Jerk Times you wouldn’t be spending any time on this site.
So I uploaded the pdf and it’s attached here. I copied it below so I could add some notes, which I’ve colored in red. Dr. Finnerty teaches a class in what is called “Critical Thinking” in the Marxist educational system. He obviously considers me an ideal candidate as a student in such a course, since this is exactly the kind of thinking I have evidently failed to demonstrate to his satisfaction over the extended period I’ve known him.
Here’s the attached original Times article in PDF form:
Sitaraman – Our Constitution Wasn’t Built for This
Our Constitution Wasn’t Built for This
By GANESH SITARAMAN SEPT. 16, 2017
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.
[Not to split hairs, but it’s hard for me to think of a political movement run by thirty wealthy property owners as a “democratic revolution”]
But our Constitution has at least one radical feature: It isn’t designed for a society with economic inequality.
[Every woman and black man in the country would have been amazed by this statement. It’s also worth noting that by not building a class system into the document it essentially flattens the wealth pyramid in theory if not in fact. Regardless, somehow the system worked really well until the imposition of the permanent “War Tax”–which inevitably became the “Income Tax”, which led quickly to the uncontrolled growth of the federal government and thus useless spending and irresponsible government contractors dramatically changing the balance of power and bringing the citizenry–rich and poor–ever farther from the reigns of self-determination.]
There are other things the Constitution wasn’t written for, of course. The founders didn’t foresee America becoming a global superpower.
[Charles Thomson’s “Novus Ordo Seclorum” on the dollar bill notwithstanding.]
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.
[Alas, he gives away the secret too early in the course of this supposedly scholarly analysis. This academic retrospective is yet another of the 231,000 progressive anti-Trump hit pieces written before breakfast on the day this globalist Warrenista decided to pen yet another one]
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.
[By “Oligarchs and Populist Demagogues”, he means “people who are elected to public office by the free and constitutionally mandated election process who nevertheless were not the choice of the progressive elite.”]
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.
[Here we must strive to discover the culture the writer was envisioning that, by contrast, did not meet his definition of an “unequal society” One assumes that, since everyone was “obsessed” with the problem of economic inequality, there was a place somewhere on earth which embodied the opposite qualities and invited the observer to compare the two paradigms. But that example is not forthcoming.]
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.
[Like the writer, I would like to believe that the structure of American colonial government was based on the founder’s anticipation of acceptance by the great unwashed. If so, their expectations were soon dashed by Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Fries’s Rebellion and the resistance of Henry David Thoreau, the Iroquois, the Cherokee, Paul Cuffee, Robert Purvis, the Mormon War and the entire Libertarian Party since 1972. These political differences were, as in the times of the Romans and ancient Brits, settled at the point of the sword and life went on.]
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.
[This would have been big news to the white indentured servants of Pennsylvania and the white farm workers of Monticello and the white textile mill workers of New England.]
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.
[If they believed that, they believe what our present ruling elite believe, so clearly the difference in the ruling elite’s ‘belief’ between then and now can’t be at the heart of the writer’s argument, which, as far as I can tell, is that there’s more of a gulf between the have and have-nots in our present era as opposed to the time of the country’s founding (no argument there) and that therefore the American Constitution failed to anticipate that gulf and its onerous effects.]
Unlike Europe, America wasn’t bogged down by the legacy of feudalism, nor did it have a hereditary aristocracy.
[Most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were propertied men with inherited wealth, and many operated agrarian concerns employing an economic structure very much in keeping with the feudal model existing in France and Germany and England at the time.]
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.
[“As long as the new nation could expand west, he thought, it would be possible to have a citizenry of independent yeoman farmers.” Pinckney saw the distinction, evidently, between the propertied and non-propertied classes of England and America, The distinction wasn’t the difference in rules so much as the size of the new country. All the land in Europe was already owned by some King or Baron or brewery or rich farmer already. Most of America was occupied by “savages” that didn’t even believe in property and could eventually be persuaded to either leave or die.]
The problem, of course, is that economic inequality has been on the rise for at least the last generation. In 1976 the richest 1 percent of Americans took home about 8.5 percent of our national income. Today they take home more than 20 percent. In major sectors of the economy — banking, airlines, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications — economic power is increasingly concentrated in a small number of companies.
[While this is undoubtedly true, that’s not the biggest problem. In colonial America, money and property almost automatically translated to political power. Political power–which translated roughly to military and police power–was finite and depended largely on what used to be known as ‘popular sufferance’. This is no longer so. The power of the ruling elite–now global and backed by a Federal Reserve system that can ‘create’ wealth by itself–is no longer limited by wealth in terms of dollars.Wealth per se is no longer necessarily an expression of political power. It needs to be directed to achieve that aim. Only its application by a government or industrial endowment–the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the CFR, the UN, the WTO–can result in social control. The average upper class neurosurgeon living in a two million dollar Westport McMansion does not inherently have more political clout than I, a poor working class schmuck, do].
While much of the debate has been on the moral or economic consequences of economic inequality, the more fundamental problem is that our constitutional system might not survive in an unequal economy. Campaign contributions, lobbying, the revolving door of industry insiders working in government, interest group influence over regulators and even think tanks — all of these features of our current political system skew policy making to favor the wealthy and entrenched economic interests. “The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest,” Gouverneur Morris observed in 1787. “They always did. They always will.” An oligarchy — not a republic — is the inevitable result.
[Statistically, every single government on earth since Aga of Kish in Sumeria has devolved (or evolved, if you’re a Darwin fan) into oligarchy, since it provides the greatest return for the ruling elite. Babylon, Rome, medieval Britain, probably first century Samoa too, though I can’t swear to it. However regrettable this process is, how would our form of government per se make any difference in the long run, even granting that some theoretical variation of what we have now would result in greater ‘fairness’, whatever that means.]
As a republic descends into an oligarchy, the people revolt. Populist revolts are rarely anarchic; they require leadership. Morris predicted that the rich would take advantage of the people’s “passions” and “make these the instruments for oppressing them.” The future Broadway sensation Alexander Hamilton put it more clearly: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people: commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
[Again, a less than cleverly hidden reference to his real thesis, the immortal cry of the progressive left: “Trump stinks and everybody who supports him is a nazi racist.”]
Starting more than a century ago, amid the first Gilded Age, Americans confronted rising inequality, rapid industrial change, a communications and transportation revolution and the emergence of monopolies. Populists and progressives responded by pushing for reforms that would tame the great concentrations of wealth and power that were corrupting government.
[And, of course, the heroic progressives were utter failures at actually accomplishing their stated goal, though they did succeed in vastly expanding the size and power and expense of the corrupt government they supposedly disliked so much.]
On the economic side, they invented antitrust laws and public utilities regulation, established an income tax, and fought for minimum wages. On the political side, they passed campaign finance regulations and amended the Constitution so the people would get to elect senators directly. They did these things because they knew that our republican form of government could not survive in an economically unequal society. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching an economic democracy.”
For all its resilience and longevity, our Constitution doesn’t have structural checks built into it to prevent oligarchy or populist demagogues. It was written on the assumption that America would remain relatively equal economically. Even the father of the Constitution understood this. Toward the end of his life, Madison worried that the number of Americans who had only the “bare necessities of life” would one day increase. When it did, he concluded, the institutions and laws of the country would need to be adapted, and that task would require “all the wisdom of the wisest patriots.”
[There is just so much to wince at in this seemingly inoffensive paragraph.
“It was written on the assumption that America would remain relatively equal economically.” The writer’s claim to telepathic contact with a person dead for two hundred years would be more authoritative if he didn’t contradict himself immediately by postulating that Madison worried about more people struggling with only the bare necessities. But don’t be fooled by his seeming inconsistency and supernatural claims. Besides his predictable attacks on the ‘demagogue’ in the Oval Office, his real point is made on the last line: “the institutions and laws of the country would need to be adapted, and that task would require ‘all the wisdom of the wisest patriots’.”
Constitutional Revisionism: The Last Refuge of the Progressive Elite.]
With economic inequality rising and the middle class collapsing, the deep question we must ask today is whether our generation has wise patriots who, like the progressives a century ago, will adapt the institutions and laws of our country — and save our republic.
[Just in case you missed it. Progressive Judicial Activism 101.]
Ganesh Sitaraman, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, is the author of “The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic.”
[There you have it, friends. Yet another reason why lawyers shouldn’t write about (or think about) Economics (or History). Once they talk about these subjects for a while–especially with other lawyers–they can convince themselves that they’ve achieved some understanding simply because whatever they’re talking about has some legal consequence. By this logic, when a tornado strikes a house and a claim for damages ensues, the lawyer doing the paperwork is suddenly a meteorologist.
There are major leaps of logic involved in comparing the largest, most technologically advanced empire in the history of the world with an eighteenth century backwater that boasted a per capita GDP of a couple thousand dollars and operated on mule power. If the writer’s point is that ‘Economic Inequality is Bad’, I’ll buy that. If he wants to use this as a jumping off point to a rationale for substantively changing the American Constitution–including the ‘Free Speech’ part of the Bill of Rights–he has a hard row to hoe from the standpoint of legal justification alone. But that is the point of the progressive view of the Constitution as ‘A Living Document’:
“It’s Legal When We Say It Is.”]