As our imperious head of state takes his most recent ill-timed vacation and the stock market falls, the ranks of unemployed Americans grows, and crises and commotions remain unresolved the dustbin of history is being prepared.

Anger at failed leftist policies and leadership from the American black left in the guise of Representative Maxine Waters of the Black Congressional Caucus and the growing American black right as represented by Congressman Allen West of Florida appear to show that a flash point has been reached.

The founders used the term “experiment in self-government” to describe the new nation they had created because they had no expectation that it would be permanent, only a hope that it would be. The founders understood that nothing is stable across the ages but for change – therefore, they made our system of government flexible.

Maxine Water’s legitimate abandonment complaints about the president’s recent big-black-bus tour across several mid-western states were that no black communities had been visited. Allen West said on August 18th “I’m here as the modern-day Harriet Tubman to kind of lead people on the underground railroad away from that plantation into a sense of sensibility.” Congressman West was referring to the Democratic party and the failed liberal policies that it espouses by his use of the term “plantation”.  Both West and Waters, representatives of black America from two opposing political worldviews agree on this point that the Democratic party and its progressive liberal policies have been a great disappointment, if not a complete failure.

The simultaneous disaffection and anger of Waters and West (and those they represent) signals an end to the paradigm of the Democratic party as the sole political defender of the black community and thus the likely demise of the now definitively failed political ideologies of progressivism and fantasist Utopianism.

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Republicans in Congress are hewing to the best traditions of the founders of the nation, and the founders of their own party, in their effort to keep a lid on federal borrowing. The idea that there is some constitutional bar to their refusal to raise the debt limit betrays Democratic desperation.

The Constitution was established so that a stronger Union would be able to pay its debts. The Confederation government had already defaulted on its Revolutionary War obligations. Thus the new government assured its creditors in the new Constitution, which provided that “All debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.” The Federalists and their successors paid off the entire national debt by the 1830s.

After the Civil War, the American people settled permanently the possibility of repudiating the national debt. Section four of the Fourteenth Amendment simply says, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law… shall not be questioned.” Thus the Republicans foreclosed the possibility that, should the Democratic party return to power, it would repudiate the war debt—or pay the Confederate debt.

While other provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment provoked intense debate, section four did not. “I need say nothing of the fourth section,” said Representative Thaddeus Stevens, “for none dare object to it who is not himself a rebel.”

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So now a new group has appeared claiming to eschew all political labels. Appropriately, they have taken the moniker “No Labels.” A closer examination of this group, however, seems to indicate that this is about as artificial as artificial can get.

The “No Labels” approach is inherently contradictory. Simply by creating the group and giving it a name, it has been labeled. Now we have Republicans, Democrats, and No Labelers. While it claims to be inclusive, it seems to attract primarily those to the left of center, whether Democrats or Republicans. The thing is, they don’t consider themselves left of center; rather, they place themselves squarely at the center and conclude that anyone not of their ilk is a “wingnut.” In fact, one of this group’s founders, John Avlon, wrote a book using that term.

I think it’s also instructive that this movement, such as it is, arose only after Republicans took back the House, made gains in the Senate, swamped governorships, and dominated state legislatures in the November elections. Why all of a sudden the need for a centrist party? Obviously because the Republicans did so well—and they must be stopped.

This effort is probably not going to make much of a dent in American politics. The idea that there are no “sides” in political debate is fanciful. Even the Founding Fathers had to face up to that. The Constitution, as originally written, did not take into account the development of political parties. There was this high hope that statesmen would govern for the good of all. Yet during Washington’s administration, we divided into Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans.

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The Constitution of the United States of America is a remarkable document.  It is eloquent in its simplicity, clarity and in its power.  It revolutionized (first in America, and then throughout most of the western world) the relationship between those who are governed and those who govern.  It has served as a governing template for much of the democratic western world.

Every federal office holder swears allegiance to the Constitution, not to any leader, not to any party, not to any political philosophy—only to this document, which is the foundation upon which our form of government is based and against which all legislation and judicial actions are measured.  The President vows to do his job faithfully and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

And while there is no way of divining what today’s crop of leaders would have thought of the Constitution had they been present at the founding when it was first circulated prior to ratification, we have our doubts whether many of today’s ruling class, including President Obama, would have found common cause with Washington, Adams (John), Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton or Jay, all of whom loomed so large on the emerging American landscape.

This speculation is not intended as criticism of our political leadership or of the president.  Many great American patriots who were present at the founding opposed ratification of the Constitution.  Indeed, such American icons as Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, George Mason and James Monroe, were resolutely opposed to ratification of the Constitution, so wary were they of concentrated federal power. Time has, of course, demonstrated the remarkable wisdom of those who fought for ratification and the value of the gift they bequeathed to us all.  The question raised by this essay, however, is posed as the basis for discussion of whether a document written so long ago, which lays out with simplicity certain fundamental rules and relationships, can truly guide this nation 221 years later.

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Back in 1946, an ingenious advertising executive named Karl Frost suggested a simple, straightforward political slogan to the Massachusetts Republican Committee: “Had Enough? Vote Republican,” it read. This slogan was soon found on billboards all across the country, and in November of that year the Republicans picked up fifty-five seats in the House and twelve in the Senate, seizing control in both chambers.

By that November, the country had suffered under the New Deal for fourteen years, and Americans, understandably, were fed up. Moreover, as Michael Barone pointed out last May, “After World War II Democrats wanted to retain wartime high taxes, pro-union labor laws, and wage and price controls, all manipulatable for political benefit by political insiders. Republicans  . . . won big enough majorities to lower taxes, revise labor laws and abolish controls.”

Were I in the shoes of Michael Steele, I would buy up billboard space all over the country and slap up the same slogan – for something similar should be possible this November. The healthcare debate was over some time ago. When Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in January, it was made abundantly clear that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party had lost that debate decisively. Now, in the face of fierce public opposition, they have jammed the bill through Congress, and they have done so without the cover of a single Republican vote. For this – as William Daley, the mastermind of the Chicago machine, warned in an op-ed that appeared in The Washington Post on Christmas eve – they will pay dearly and not just this coming November.

Abraham Lincoln once observed, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” It is possible, of course, that events will intervene between now and November. It is conceivable that the healthcare bill and the manner in which it was passed in both the Senate and the House will be forgotten. But this is not likely. If the Republicans stick together, mount a principled opposition to the Obama administration on all fronts, and recruit first-rate candidates to run in every district at both the state and the federal levels in November, it is highly likely that there will be a political earthquake in this country on a scale not seen since 1932.

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In earlier posts – here and here – I drew attention to the pre-eminence of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu in and for a time after the eighteenth century, and I suggested that at least one of the reasons for his pre-eminence is still pertinent today. There are other such reasons, which I addressed at length in Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty and in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, and they, too, deserve consideration. I will discuss one such here.

Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws is a large book, and it is difficult to know which elements within it are the most salient. There is, however, one passage in which Montesquieu tells us outright that what he is about to say is fundamental to everything else that he says. “I,” he writes near the end of the first of the work’s six parts, “shall be able to be understood only when the next four chapters have been read.” Then, in those four chapters, he argues that forms of government are closely related to the size of the territory that must be governed. Republics are well-suited to polities small in extent; monarchies, to polities of intermediate size; and despotisms to polities great in size.

The pertinence of this claim to the situation of the American Founding Fathers should be obvious. Especially in modern times, this would appear to mean that republicanism can only be viable in mountainous places such as Switzerland, where the geography virtually rules out the establishment of anything but tiny states. It is, then, in no way surprising that the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists turned to a considerable extent upon the question whether it is somehow possible to establish a viable republic on an extended territory.

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