When Ronald Reagan proclaimed in his first inaugural “We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around,” he was not taking off on some libertarian tangent or making an obscure philosophical point. He was following in the footsteps of the Founding Fathers who erected a frame of government that began with the words “We the People.” He was also trying to return government to its important but limited role in people’s lives—a role that both political leaders and the people understood until 1912 but has been mostly misunderstood and abandoned since then. At Philadelphia in 1787, the Framers of the Constitution created a national government that would be effective—even energetic—in its functions but also limited to those functions. The people were to be the ultimate guardians of both the effectiveness and limitations of government. The only way such a republic—unprecedented in modern history—could work would be if the people acted as a vigilant and constitutionally-minded sovereign jealous of their rights.

The authority of the people is made clear in at least three respects in the Constitution, and their vitality is powerfully suggested in a fourth. First, the Constitution holds both the lawmakers and the executive accountable to the people through elections, whether direct or indirect. The foremost depository of the people’s will is obviously the House of Representatives, whose members are directly elected every two years. According to James Madison writing in The Federalist, every constitution is designed to find rulers with the wisdom and virtue to pursue the common good and to make sure those rulers remain virtuous while holding the public trust. Elections are the means to both of those ends. In other words, if those in office lose their virtue, they can be thrown out of office by the people through regular elections. The people are the true source of term limits.

Second, the Constitution embraces, indeed creates, the system known as federalism. Not only can the people exert their authority through elections at the federal (national) level, they can also throw their support behind the state governments against federal encroachment. The chief means of doing so in the original Constitution was through the Senate, whose members were elected by state legislatures. Indeed, the Framers of the Constitution originally thought that the people’s loyalties would lie overwhelmingly with the states, not the remote national government. Their opinion owed to the history of the Revolution—in which the states were extremely jealous of their powers; the confidence that men of great talents and ambitions at the national level would devote their energies to the high pursuits of “commerce, finance, negotiation, and war,” to quote Hamilton in The Federalist, not with local concerns; and the general tendency of human nature to prefer the things closest to us. (Not many people living in Dallas root for the Steelers.) To this end, should the national government extend its powers beyond those enumerated in Article I, section 8, the Senators—whose loyalties lie, and whose careers are made, not in the national capital but in the state capitals—would defend the prerogative of the states and thereby the liberties of the people.

Third, for the Constitution to be adopted, it was imperative that the first Congress adopt a Bill of Rights to be appended to it. The Bill of Rights, authored mostly by Madison, was meant to serve as an education to the people in what their rights are and an encouragement to them to guard those rights jealously. It is also abundantly clear what would be the greatest threat to their rights. The Bill of Rights begins with the words “Congress shall make no law respecting” and ends with the words “or to the people.” That is, the greatest threat to liberty would come from government—though republican—exceeding its constituted authority and encroaching on the rights of the people.

Finally, there is the latent suggestion in the Constitution that the people will be doing the vast majority of the work in civil society, and the government will be needed chiefly to establish the rule of law, to protect the society from internal and external enemies, and to set up a system of uniform commercial exchange.

(more…)

Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers.  I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

But the age of chivalry is gone. . .

—Edmund Burke

The growing resistance to the choice facing all airline passengers in America between a highly revealing body scan and an aggressive pat-down is another sign that Americans are rediscovering their natural, inalienable rights, for whose protection governments were instituted among men in the first place.  But there may be another issue at stake that is as essential to our humanity and our civilization.  Will today’s men allow women to be either photographed in the form of a nude negative (for now, until the technology adds color to the negative) or touched indecently by strangers?  More simply, will men allow women to be violated?

Let us consider the various scenarios.  A man takes his wife and three daughters ages ten, fourteen, and eighteen on vacation.  To get on their plane—any plane—he must allow them all to be scanned or fondled.  In either case, the TSA employees get to see or feel the stages of emerging and full womanhood.  The father’s only choice is not to go on vacation or to throw away his manhood, his role as protector, in the security line along with the bottle of water he could not finish.

(more…)

The Republican Party’s 2010 Agenda, “A Pledge to America,” is in many ways an impressive document.  It contains both principles and policies that answer the call for a more accountable government in Washington.  It is particularly strong on the health-care issue.  Should the Republicans succeed in repealing ObamaCare, it will be rightly regarded as one of the most crucial victories in stopping the growth of the progressive welfare state.

As I look over the Republican Pledge, however, I am not convinced that it has all the power and principle it needs to change the direction of politics in Washington and actually to return the federal government to the limited—though important—role envisioned by the Founding Fathers.  Is, for example, cutting “government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels” a temporary tactic or a permanent goal?  The ultimate purpose of the Tea Party movement would appear to be not just a return to the status quo ante Obama, but actually a restoration of the first principles of government as understood by the Founding Fathers and as practiced in this nation for a century and a half.

While holding those elected in 2010 to their own Pledge, we should urge Republicans and concerned citizens to press beyond the necessary tactics for winning elections in 2010 and consider a more complete set of first principles that will return government to its more limited place in our lives.  To this end, I offer the following.

Human beings are individuals.  They are born not into a class or a race or a special interest but into the human community.  The American ideal has always been to treat individuals not as belonging to preferred classes or groups but as individuals.  Attempts to categorize and hyphenate individuals, particularly for political purposes, are far from being American.

(more…)

“The middle class is still treading water, while those aspiring to reach the middle class are doing everything they can to keep from drowning.”

—President Barack Obama, 8 September 2010

Bad metaphors bring bad policies. During the Great Depression Americans were told that “the pump” had to be “primed.” Despite twelve years of pump-priming, F. D. R. did not bring America out of the Depression. Bipartisan tax cuts targeted against Truman’s “Fair Deal” did.

Roosevelt had also used the metaphor of “war,” but that analogy was brought to perfection in L. B. J.’s “war on poverty.” The image is problematic. Marines going into a battle, for example, want to know, as they are locking and loading, who the “bad guys” are, that is, whom to shoot. Who were the bad guys in the “war on poverty”? The impoverished? The rich? When President Obama took office a year and a half ago, the universal call from the Democrats was to pass a stimulus package in order to “jump start” economy. Is the American economy really an old jalopy whose owner would not dare go out for a drive without taking his jumper cables? Yet that image was invoked countless times without a trace of irony as the government was moving in to take over parts of the auto industry.

If bad political metaphors are not exposed, bad policies invariably follow. That is why one of the most important moments in the debate over independence was when Thomas Paine required the American colonists to rethink the idea of Britain as the “mother country.” Does a mother send an army to attack her young? Do not children eventually grow up? In deciding to become a republic, Americans chose not to have a permanent parent overseeing their every move and aspiration.

Having failed to “jump start” the economy, President Obama and the Democrats are moving onto a new metaphor. The people are “drowning.” Now this is an indisputably powerful image. Who would not throw a “life line” to a person who is drowning? Only the most unfeeling capitalist on his mega yacht (about the size of John Kerry’s) would let someone go down in the treacherous waters of the present economy. When examined closely, though, the analogy reveals more than the president knows.

(more…)

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, Homer teaches us, something every school child used to know. Beware of politicians and expert educators bearing standards, the last seventy years or more of Progressive education should have taught us. But we are slow to learn.

We have been given almost a month to digest the hundreds of pages of the new National Governors Association’s Common Core State Standards that could well become national standards pressed in some way upon every child who attends a public school in America. So we had better read, write, and think fast. Pundits and educationists, even some stalwarts of education reform, are beginning to praise these new standards as being more comprehensive than any before, far better than what the diverse and unreliable states are providing. Schools will now be held accountable to “higher standards”; teachers will know what they are responsible for teaching; students will be swept up in “the vision of what it means to be a literate person in the twenty-first century,” which, we must surmise, is very different from what it meant to be literate in, say, the eighteenth century, when the likes of Thomas Jefferson read Latin and Greek for fun. It all sounds wonderful. At least it does until sensible people realize that these standards, which are only the best of the worst of the existing state standards, have absolutely nothing to do with sound education. It will be a mistake to get bogged down in a discussion of whether these standards are better than the various state standards since the whole enterprise is just a diversion hiding what truly ails public schools. The reason is obvious to anyone who has ever listened to some of these so-called experts drone on about standards without ever making a literary reference or drawing a lesson from history or even talking about a book.

Let us imagine an author at his craft, say, Herman Melville while writing Moby Dick, or Jane Austen working on Pride and Prejudice. Now assuredly what these literary artists hoped above all else was that a century or two from their own time students in high schools would be using their great works not better to understand love or honor or revenge or nobility or happiness, but to “analyze how multiple themes or central ideas in a text interact, build on, and, in some cases, conflict with one another”; as well as to “analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).” We know that this sort of innocuous thing is what the authors had in mind because that is what our teachers told us in school. We remember the drill: the plot graphs—rising action, climax, falling action (or denouement)—the cast lists of main characters and outlines of “main ideas,” the possible literary techniques—foreshadowing, alliteration, onomatopoeia. What we do not remember is one dad-gum thing about these stories: what insight they gave us into the human condition, what they portray as heroism, villainy, love, or self-deception. We do not remember any of these life-ennobling themes because those matters never came up in our English (what are now called our “Language Arts”) classes.

(more…)