IT'S ANTI TIME

Returning to the founders: the debate on the Constitution (Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., September 1993, New Criterion)

Anyone who wishes to know about American politics has much to learn from contemporary events; but there is no substitute for careful reflection on the founding. Everything begins from the founding, and the subsequent changes have occurred to America as founded. Even the attributes of our politics said to have changed since 1787--democratization, heterogeneity, complexity, centralization, bureaucracy--were either set in motion then or took their particular character from the founding. Even when ineluctable necessities such as bureaucracy are imposed on us, we submit to them in our own way, creating an American bureaucracy. Here I have been speaking in Aristotelian terms because the American regime is not simply a theoretical, impartial republic modeled on mankind's necessities. It has its own character and has made its own culture.

Abraham Lincoln described the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in biblical language (Proverbs 25:11) as the apple of gold in the frame of silver. The apple is the natural principle of human equality; the frame surrounding it is the conventional or cultural structure that displays the principle, gives it life, and makes it ours. The two together are a whole, necessary to each other. But they are also separate parts: one that in 1776 declared the principle, another that in 1787 made it work politically. Their separateness makes a point of the act of constituting, done with calm and, despite the heated words, with a certain noble elevation in both the deliberation of the Constitutional Convention and the debate over ratification afterward.

We can be glad that the Federalists won the debate. As I said above, by the standards of contemporary political debate the argumentation was unattainably higher on both sides. But the Federalists were clearly superior. The essential question between Federalists and Anti-Federalists was over the source of great danger to republics: does it come from the many or the few? The Anti-Federalists consistently (if variously) maintained the traditional republican opinion that the few are the main enemy of republics. But the Federalists disagreed with this bromide. They offered the paradoxical judgment that the many are their own worst enemy, that the bane of popular government, in the statement of Federalist 10, is "majority faction"--a phrase that sounds like a contradiction in terms to traditional republicans. The ambitious few are also dangerous, but mainly because they can get the backing of an aroused majority. For their innovative view the Federalists were accused by their opponents during the constitutional debates, by Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s, and by later historians of lacking faith in the people, of being unrepublican. But they were intelligent republicans looking for ways to make republics more viable, and so raise them in the esteem of respectable opinion in the civilized world.

The Federalists accepted the risk of appearing to be doubtful republicans; they were a party concerned to reduce the partisanship of republics. In their Constitution they created an introspective republicanism not preoccupied with denouncing the enemies of republics but alive to the dangers from within the principle. In their view the worst faction in a republic was the one that looked like a republican majority, and they fashioned a republic that could defend itself against the republican danger, using "republican remedies."

This seems a strange argument from Mr. Mansfield, particularly given the way another, more authoritative where the Anti-Federalists are concerned, Straussian has described their thought:

[W]e shall also find, at the very heart of the Anti-Federal position, a dilemma or a tension. This is the critical weakness of Anti-Federalist thought and at the same time its strength and even its glory. For the Anti-Federalists could neither fully reject nor fully accept the leading principles of the Constitution. They were indeed open to Hamilton's charge of trying to reconcile contradictions. This is the element of truth in Cecelia Kenyon's characterization of them as men of little faith. They did not fail to see the opportunity for American nationhood that the Federalists seized so gloriously, but they could not join in the grasping of it. They doubted; they held back; they urged second thoughts. This was not however a mere failure of will or lack of courage. They had reasons, and the reasons have weight. They thought--and it can not be easily denied--that this great national opportunity was profoundly problematical, that it could be neither grasped nor let alone without risking everything. The Anti-Federalists were committed to both union and the states; to both the great American republic and the small, self-governing community; to both commerce and civic virtue; to both private gain and public good. At its best, Anti-Federal thought explores these tensions and points to the need for any significant American political thought to confront them; for they were not resolved by the Constitution but are inherent in the principles and traditions of American life.

If the Federalists were correct at the Founding--as it seems they were--that a strong central government was necessary to secure the survival of the new nation, the Anti-Federalists seem to have been proved right in the long run. That Republic, however well-intentioned and cannily devised, has indeed eaten away at self--governance, the states, community, civic virtue, and the notion of public good. In fact, it is the Anti-Federalists who have the most to say to us these days, because it is around their critique that we will have to structure reform. It will be appropriate to use "republican remedies" but they must be used to reverse the all-consuming process of centralization that even the Federalists knew they were setting in motion. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 27, 2003 8:03 AM