AZspot

We argue fiercely today about the intended relationship between the famous opening phrase (“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,”) and the famous main clause (“the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”). But it’s fruitless to try to nail down that relationship, to hope to prove for good and all that the opening phrase is or is not a preamble, or that a preamble does or does not determine the meaning of a main text, or that a “being” phrase means something different from or identical to a “whereas” clause.

The sentence is weak. The weakness is deliberate.

Madison couldn’t afford, on the one hand, to let the amendment seem to contradict the hard-won federal military power in the main body. He couldn’t afford, on the other, to underscore too strongly for the states’ comfort the overwhelming nature of that federal power. He seems therefore to have resorted to a preamble-ish-like phrase (others in the first 10 don’t have preambles), referring to supposed benefits of state militias, but resorting to the loose “being” construction — technically a kind of “absolute” phrase that modern English avoids, for good reason — that has left the phrase’s grammatical relation to the main clause permanently in doubt.

And even as the amendment’s opening phrase refers to a “free state,” its main clause refers to a “right of the people.” In 1789 Madison was still trying to move sovereignty away from the states and locate it in what the Constitution’s preamble calls “We, the people” — citizens of the whole United States. Some today who favor assertive gun laws follow the historian Garry Wills’ famous argument that the opening phrase refers to a state power, not an individual right, and that whereas in the Fourth Amendment, “the right of the people” does refer to individuals, in the Second it doesn’t. Meanwhile, defenders of a right to private gun ownership insist that when the founders said “a well-regulated militia,” “a free state,” and “the right of the people,” they simply meant that private individuals must remain armed against potential tyranny.

However well or poorly such arguments are formed — Wills’ is exhaustively well-founded and logical; many of the gun advocates’ are not — both sides in the current gun-rights debate are trying to make sense of something intended by its author not to make that kind of sense. Madison was not trying to protect a right to individual gun ownership. He was trying to conjure a mood of grudging, semi-coherent consensus, to establish nationhood. To that end, he denied real divisions and real effects and wrote the denial into founding law.

We must learn to manage, somehow, the unintended consequences of founding politics. To that end, we must face up to them. Without the nationalists’ smoothness — even their slipperiness — at the constitutional convention and during the amendment process, our nation might not have come into being. Neither Madison nor any other founder could have envisioned the modern uses that the Second Amendment has been put to, or that arms have. For political reasons having little to do with our struggles today, the founders incidentally built a murky confusion around the relationship of guns and liberty into American culture, a confusion that stunts, all these years later, much-needed public discussion of what has long since become a deadly national problem.

To begin to free ourselves from incoherence, to begin thinking publicly about how we might drastically reduce our penchant for gun violence, we must face the stark fact that in this case, our founders don’t have much help to offer us. We’re on our own.

That the Hamilton revival admits conservatives and liberals alike gives it obvious appeal. But if opinion-shapers really want to strengthen democracy by enhancing competition, opportunity, and mobility, Hamilton is not their man. Nor did he want to be. Neo-Hamiltonians of every kind are blotting out a defining feature of his thought, one that Hamilton himself insisted on throughout his turbulent career: the essential relationship between the concentration of national wealth and the obstruction of democracy through military force.

Study of Greek and Latin literature, and of the ancient world’s history and politics loomed much larger in American education during the latter half of the eighteenth century than it does in American education today. Most of the Framers at one time or another, in translation or in the original Greek or Latin, had read such ancient authors as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, Livy, and Plutarch – philosophers and historians who described the constitutions of the Greek and Roman civilizations. But from such study the American leaders of the War of Independence and the constitution-making era learned, by their own account, chiefly what political blunders of ancient times ought to b e avoided by the Republic of the United States.

For the Greek city-states of the sixth and fifth and fourth centuries before Christ never succeeded in developing enduring constitutions that would give them order and justice and freedom. Civil war within those city-states was the rule, rather than the exception, class against class, family against family, faction against faction. And when half of those cities went to war against the other half, in the ruinous Peloponnesian struggle, during the last three decades of the fifth century – why, Greek civilization never wholly recovered from that disaster.

Leading Americans did study closely the old Greek constitutions. In his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (published in 1787, on the eve of America’s Great Convention), John Adams examines critically twelve ancient democratic republics, three ancient aristocratic republics, and three ancient monarchial republics – and finds them all inferior to the political system of the new Republic of the United States. James Monroe, a hero of the Revolution, later the fifth president of the United States, wrote descriptions of the ancient constitutions of Athens, Sparta, and Carthage – finding them all seriously flawed and not to be emulated in much by Americans. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, the authors of the Federalist Papers that explained and defended the Constitution drawn up in 1787, often referred to “the turbulent democracies of ancient Greece” (Madison’s phrase) and to other ancient constitutions. In general, these three writers found the political systems of Greece and Rome “as unfit for the imitation, as they are repugnant to the genius of America” (again, Madison’s phrase).

Eighteenth-century Americans did respect Solon, the lawgiver of Athens in the sixth century B.C. But Solon’s good constitution for his native city had lasted only some thirty years before a tyrant seized power in Athens. Few American leaders were much influenced by Greek political thought; John Adams wrote that he learned from Plato two things only, that husbandmen and artisans should not be exempted from military service, and that hiccoughing may cure sneezing. Ancient Greek culture did indeed help to shape education in America, but Greek constitutions had next to no part in shaping the Constitution of the United States – except so far as Greek constitutional flaws suggested what the framers at Philadelphia ought not to adopt.

Not only did mandates pass muster with the Framers in Congress, they were signed into law by George Washington and John Adams. Those who say that the Founding Fathers would object to any governmental regulation of the free market should double-check their history. They won’t like what they find.

(via slacktivist)

Contemporary American politics is conducted in the shadow of historical myths that inform our present-day choices. Unfortunately, these myths sometimes lead us terribly astray. Case in point is the popular idea that America’s economic tradition has been economic liberty, laissez faire, and wide-open cowboy capitalism. This notion sounds obvious, and it fits the image of this country held by both the Right, which celebrates this tradition, and the Left, which bemoans it. And it seems to imply, among other things, that free trade is the American Way. Don’t Tread On Me or my right to import.

It is, in fact, very easy to construct an impressive-sounding defense of free trade as a form of economic liberty on the basis of this myth. Unfortunately, this myth is just that: a myth, not real history. The reality is that all four of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore were protectionists. (Even the pseudo-libertarian Jefferson came around after the War of 1812.) Historically, protectionism has been, in fact, the real American Way.

This pattern even predates American independence. During the colonial period, the British government tried to force its American colonies to become suppliers of raw materials to the nascent British industrial machine while denying them any manufacturing industry of their own. The colonies were, in fact, the single biggest victim of British trade policy, being under Britain’s direct political control, unlike its other trading partners. The British knew exactly what they were doing: they were happy to see America thrive, but only as a cog in their own industrial machine. As former Prime Minster William Pitt, otherwise a famous conciliator of American grievances and the namesake of Pittsburgh, once said in Parliament,

If the Americans should manufacture a lock of wool or a horse shoe, I would fill their ports with ships and their towns with troops.

Thus the American Revolution was to some extent a war over industrial policy, in which the commercial elite of the Colonies revolted against being forced into an inferior role in the emerging Atlantic economy. This is one of the things that gave the American Revolution its exceptionally bourgeois character as revolutions go, with bewigged Founding Fathers rather than the usual unshaven revolutionary mobs.

It is no accident that after Independence, a tariff was the very second bill signed by President Washington. It is also no accident that the Constitution — which notoriously does not authorize a great many things our government does today — explicitly does give Congress the authority “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.” (Article I, Section 8.) This fact drives flag-draped libertarians crazy, but there it is.

Landowners made up 95 percent of the population in the cashless post–Revolutionary War slump. Like them, Washington tried to sell land or rent it. He bartered for virtually everything he needed. He swapped fish caught in the Potomac for shingles, planks, nails, and rum for the field hands at harvest time. He abandoned tobacco planting and raised wheat, which he sold to neighbors to feed their slaves. With the cash he realized from wheat sales and from stud fees for mules he introduced into America because they ate less than horses, Washington paid white weavers he imported from England to turn flax he was raising into linen clothing for his workers, white and black, and to pay his taxes. He allowed his slaves to keep muskets to hunt for small game. To seek a solution to the lingering economic crisis, Washington agreed reluctantly to preside over a reform-seeking constitutional convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, but he had to borrow the cash to get there and stay there for four months from his next-door neighbor, George Mason.

Washington’s cash-poor lifestyle was typical of other Founding figures. Jefferson accepted payment of debts owed him during the revolution in worthless Continental money, but, after losing the war, British merchants he owed refused to accept American currency. He never recovered financially. He even borrowed from his slave chef and body servant, James Hemings, brother of the famous Sally, when he accompanied James Madison on vacation. It took Jefferson 54 years to complete Monticello. Hordes of relatives and political favor seekers were in mortal peril if they arrived to freeload after dark. They could plummet through the unfinished floors of the mansion. In 1819 ex-President Jefferson co-signed a note for a political lieutenant in the next postwar depression and, when his henchman bellied up, Jefferson grew increasingly impecunious. When he died, Monticello and its slaves, all but five of his longest and closest household servants—were sold at auction to cover his debts, and the Jefferson heirs lost Monticello. James Madison fared little better in his post-White House years as, once more, a depression swept postwar America, making land sales, or sales of any kind, impossible.

Slavery was not only an institution protected by law in the early American republic, but it also became an institution that defined the early American republic. The complex and immoral debates that arose in defense of the institution helped to determine the actions of many Founding Fathers. The creation of the Declaration of Independence, the Northwest Ordinance, and the Constitution were all influenced by the existence of slavery. Through the actions of our early founders, slavery became not only an institution but also a culture, fully protected by law. It is no wonder that slavery, and all the debates that went with it, would continue to shape American history and eventually contribute to our bloodiest war ever: The Civil War.