One of my favorite things to do when I’m feeling particularly masochistic is wade into the swamp of current affairs. I try to keep up as best I can, but I find it depressing and frequently tune out due to lack of mental strength. Listening to politicians talk, to me, is particularly exhausting, especially if I don’t subscribe to their ideological worldview and I find most of them to be raging hypocrites. Listening to bullshit cliches and never actually learning real information is both frustrating and infuriating.
And nowhere, nowhere, do you get more cliches with no information than the big highlight events: state of the union, inauguration, presidential debates, etc…
Anyone who has ever paid any attention at all knows that politicians on both sides of the aisle LOVE to invoke our Founding Fathers. It’s their all time favorite thing, and if they can link Jefferson, Adams, Washington, etc…to their causes, they do it.
I hate this invocation, personally. The men who founded our country had the foresight to give us an experimental, amendable (and so far, enduring) system of government but they lived in a world we would barely recognize as modern and would probably think most of our modern conveniences were witchcraft. Older Americans, and quite many younger ones, barely understand how something like television actually works. Do you think our founders would have any informed opinions on the damage Fox News does to our democracy? They’d barely be able to cope with catching up on our technology, let alone render a valuable opinion on its implications for American life.
David Sehat’s The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible takes a look at just why our politicians do that.
It’s a popular myth, one that Sehat debunks thoroughly in The Jefferson Rule, that the political climate at the founding of our country was, somehow, less polarized. Our most enlightened founders put aside their petty differences to come together and magically come up with a Constitution and system of government and somehow execute this new radical, never before done plan without any conflicts.
Even the newest student of history, one opening his/her first non-high school textbook, knows this is BS. Maybe it was less “polarized” but it was no less contentious. While Washington was unanimously elected twice and called for non-partisanship and warned against faction and political parties, his cabinet was constantly fighting with each other. In particular, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson were not so secretly constantly at each other’s throats and tearing each other apart behind each other’s backs. Hamilton favored a stronger central government, Jefferson favored less consolidated power. Washington tended to favor Hamilton and his view, and Jefferson towards the end of his tenure and then after he left the cabinet, worked to undermine Hamilton AND Washington.
It’s important to understand Jefferson’s views (smaller, more limited government, weaker executive branch, etc…) because it’s Jefferson whose views and actions then become the most problematic. While Jefferson preached the glories of small government principles, his acts as President strongly contradict these things. To argue the Louisiana Purchase was anything but an exercise of federal power is to do the most high flying of mental gymnastics. And Jefferson’s protege, James Madison, eventually came around to Hamilton’s thinking on the national bank and strong-armed northern states when America began its first foreign war since the Revolution.
But Jefferson was the first to refer to the principles of the founding as the end all, be all of reasoning. He used phrases like “the true principles of the Revolution” and called his fellow countrymen heretics to “the holy cause of freedom.” He was the first to take “founding principles” and use them to back his own and ideas. It’s still done to this day, the rule of the title being, “Thou Shalt Not Betray Founding Principles.”
Sehat goes on to argue that politicians and ideologues who refer to founding principles are those who can’t make a more rational/contemporary argument for what they believe should be done, and appeal to the warm sentiment the American people feel for their founders and their founding.
Very few politicians of the modern age actively reject the idea of following founding principles. One of the most prominent was Theodore Roosevelt, who in his 1905 inaugural address, said, “Our forefathers faced certain perils which we have outgrown. We now face other perils, the very existence of which it was impossible that they should foresee.”
What is interesting is that this appeal to founding principles fades during and after the Civil War until about the 1920s (this time includes Teddy Roosevelt, as previously mentioned). This, according to Sehat, is because the Civil War rendered the American political landscape a complete disaster and that nobody wanted to touch founding principles. The Constitution was supposed to prevent armed conflict, instead the country went to war over what the Constitution meant.
What I find most interesting is that while the Founding Fathers were incredibly educated, enlightened men for their time and we act as if they had all the answers, they definitely didn’t have all the answers. Part of the brilliance of the Constitution is that questions of power (federal vs. state, responsibilities not specifically enumerated in the document, etc..) are basically ambiguous and left unanswered. Argument over them is the answer. Things are taken on a case by case basis and we basically duke it out in elections and in courts to come up with answers to questions the Founders left no specific answer to. It’s actually brilliant, allowing the government of the people to change as the governed change. The brilliance of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton is that they planned it that way, even if they were arguing over interpretations of the Constitution before the ink was dry.
The Jefferson Rule was an interesting, intelligent read. Considering the current political environment in the United States, I highly recommend it for anyone interested in better understanding current affairs.
words in scarlet ink 