Plunder and Deceit (17 page)

As the nation has learned time and again, it is American military preparedness and superiority, in combination with a proactive and prudent foreign policy, that are likely to serve as a deterrent to military conflict and prevent large-scale, long-lasting wars. Should war occur—and at times war is unavoidable—the United States must ensure that its young service personnel are the best trained and equipped on the face of the earth. Yet at precisely the time in American history when younger people need to be most vigilant and vocal, given the multiple and rising dangers facing the nation and, sadly, the failure of public officials to adequately prepare for these threats, Pew reports that more than 65 percent of younger people born between 1981 and 2005 support reducing military spending in order to preserve spending on social programs.
⁷⁹

Again, it is younger people who are called upon to defend America, American interests, and America's allies against serious and looming national security and military dangers. The DOD “2013 Demographics: Profile of the Military Community” reports that more than one-quarter (25.8 percent) of active duty officers are 41 years of age or older; however, the next-largest age group is 26 to 30 years (22.7 percent), followed by 31 to 35 years (20.4 percent), 36 to 40 years (18.0 percent), and those 25 years or younger (13.2 percent). Even more, nearly one-half (49.4 percent) of active duty enlisted personnel are 25 years of age or younger, with the next-largest age group 26 to 30 years (22.5 percent), followed by 31 to 35 years (13.7 percent), 36 to 40 years (8.8 percent), and those 41 years or older (5.5 percent). Overall, therefore, the average age of the active duty force is 28.6 years. The average age for active duty officers is 34.8 years. And the average age for active duty enlisted personnel is 27.3 years.
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Should the nation's interests or even survival become so imperiled as to require a draft, it will be younger people who are called upon to take up arms.

On July 17, 1980, in his speech accepting the Republican nomination for president, Ronald Reagan said, in part: “We are not a warlike people. Quite the opposite. We always seek to live in peace. We resort to force infrequently and with great reluctance—and only after we have determined that it is absolutely necessary. We are awed—and rightly so—by the forces of destruction at loose in the world in this nuclear era. But neither can we be naive or foolish. Four times in my lifetime America has gone to war, bleeding the lives of its young men into the sands of beachheads, the fields of Europe, and the jungles and rice paddies of Asia. We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong, but when they are weak. It is then that tyrants are tempted. We simply cannot learn these lessons the hard way again without risking our destruction.”
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WHY SHOULD THE UNITED
States Constitution, and the faithful adherence to and execution of it by public officials, matter to younger people? It provides the governing order of a republic intended to protect the individual's liberty from a tyrannical centralized authority and, conversely, the anarchy of mob rule.

On September 17, 1787, at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, delegate James Wilson, on behalf of the ailing Benjamin Franklin, read aloud Franklin's speech to the convention in favor of adopting the Constitution. Franklin stated, in part: “I agree to this Constitution, with all its Faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no
Form
of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
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Nearly half a century later, Associate Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, considered one of the great legal thinkers of the nineteenth century, delivered the same warning in August 1834 at the American Institute of Instruction. Among other things, Story explained: “The great mass of human calamities, in all ages, has been the result of bad government, or ill adjusted government; of a capricious exercise of power, a fluctuating public policy, a degrading tyranny, or a desolating ambition.”
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The fundamental objects of all free governments, Story declared, are “the protection and preservation of personal rights, the private property, and the public liberties of the whole people. Without accomplishing these ends, the government may, indeed, be called free, but it is a mere mockery, and a vain, fantastic shadow.”
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Story continued, “Life, liberty, and property stand upon equal grounds in the just estimate of freemen; and one becomes almost worthless without the security of the others. How, then, are these rights to be established and preserved? The answer is, by constitutions of government, wisely framed and vigilantly enforced; by laws and institutions, deliberately examined and steadfastly administered.”
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Story explained, as Franklin had cautioned, that a constitution, by itself, cannot secure a republic. Nor can reliance on rulers and statesmen alone. The citizenry must be alert and resolute and ensure that those who hold high office uphold the rules of governance. “It is equally indispensable for every American citizen, to enable him to exercise his own rights, to protect his own interests, and to secure the public liberties and just operations of public authority. A republic, by the very constitution of its government, requires, on the part of the people, more vigilance and constant exertion than all others. The American republic, above all others, demands from every citizen unceasing vigilance and exertion; since we have deliberately dispensed with every guard against danger or ruin, except the intelligence and virtue of the people themselves. It is founded on the basis, that the people have wisdom enough to frame their own system of government, and public spirit enough to preserve it; that they cannot be cheated out of their liberties; and that they will not submit to have them taken from them by force. We have silently assumed the fundamental truth, that, as it never can be the interest of the majority of the people to prostrate their own political equality and happiness, so they never can be seduced by flattery or corruption, by the intrigues of faction, or the arts of ambition, to adopt any measures, which shall subvert them. If this confidence in ourselves is justified . . . let us never forget, that it can be justified only by a watchfulness and zeal proportionate to our confidence. Let us never forget, that we must prove ourselves wiser, and better, and purer, than any other nation ever yet has been, if we are to count upon success. Every other republic has fallen by the discords and treachery of its own citizens.”
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For these purposes and toward these ends, it must first be understood that the Framers established a governmental system that was at once federal, representative, and constitutional. It incorporated the tradition of state sovereignty, upon which the earlier Articles of Confederation had been almost exclusively based, with the necessity of national governance to encourage commerce and trade and guarantee the nation's security and defense. However, and importantly, the authority of the new federal government was to be limited to that which was enumerated, and divided in terms of government responsibilities both within itself and vis-à-vis the several states. Hence, numerous checks and balances were built into and around the federal system.

Moreover, the new federal government was to be a means by which the civil society would be protected and improved, not an end unto itself with the power to bully, control, and ultimately devour the civil society. The primary goal, therefore, was to prevent the centralization of power in the new federal government and to deny a relatively few institutions and public officials the kind of unlimited authority that both corrupts and destroys. Consequently, the Constitution's structure was consistent with the entire rationale behind the American Revolution, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and infinite speeches and writings during the period. Indeed, it relied in many ways on the thinking of some of the most prominent philosophers of the Enlightenment, especially Charles de Montesquieu, from whom the Framers borrowed their most indispensable idea—
separation of powers
.

As I explained in
Ameritopia
, Montesquieu was a French philosopher who lived from 1689 to 1755. He was the most influential of the French Enlightenment philosophers during the American constitutional period. His seminal work,
The Spirit of the Laws
, had a profound effect on the Framers during the constitutional period. For example, Montesquieu observed that “[t]here are three kinds of government. REPUBLICAN, MONARCHICAL, and DESPOTIC. . . . I assume three definitions, or rather, three facts: one,
republican government is that in which the people as a body, or only a part of the people, have sovereign power; monarchical government is that in which one alone governs, but by fixed and established laws; whereas, in despotic government, one alone, without law and without rule, draws everything along by his will and caprices.
”
⁶
(Italics in original)

Montesquieu makes the crucial point that unlike other forms of governance, “in a popular [or republican] state there must be an additional spring, which is VIRTUE.” “When that virtue ceases, ambition enters those hearts that can admit it, and avarice enters them all. . . . The republic is a cast-off husk, and its strength is no more than the power of a few citizens and the license of all.”
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Montesquieu was well aware of history's fondness for tyranny, most frequently manifested in the form of concentrated, centralized power in the hands of a few individuals or institutions. He insisted that the best antidote is a fixed, established constitution in which the functions and powers of government are divided among distinct branches. Montesquieu declared: “Political liberty in a citizen is that tranquility of spirit which comes from the opinion each one has of his security, and in order for him to have this liberty the government must be such that one citizen cannot fear another citizen. When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a simple body of magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically. Nor is there liberty if the power of judging is not separate from legislative power and from executive power. If it were joined to legislative power, the power over the life and liberty of the citizens would be arbitrary, for the judge would be the legislator. If it were joined to executive power, the judge could have the force of an oppressor. All would be lost if the same man or the same body of principal men, either of nobles, or of the people, exercised these three powers: that of making the laws, that of executing public resolutions, and that of judging the crimes or the disputes of individuals.”
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These words had a profound influence on the Framers.

In
Federalist 47
, James Madison, in defense of the proposed Constitution and in response to the Antifederalists—who did not believe the lines between and among the three branches of the new federal government were bold enough—insisted that the Framers had been faithful to Montesquieu's maxim on separation of powers. Madison cites Montesquieu by name no fewer than four times in this essay alone, and further underscores that “[t]he oracle who is always consulted and cited on this subject is the celebrated Montesquieu.”
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Madison refuted the naysayers insisting that under the proposed Constitution “[t]he magistrate in whom the whole executive power resides [the president] cannot of himself make a law, though he can put a negative on every law; nor administer justice in person, though he has the appointment of those who do administer it. The judges can exercise no executive prerogative, though they are shoots from the executive stock; nor any legislative function, though they may be advised with by the legislative councils. The entire legislature can perform no judiciary act, though by the joint act of two of its branches the judges may be removed from their offices, and though one of its branches is possessed of the judicial power in the last resort. The entire legislature, again, can exercise no executive prerogative, though one of its branches constitutes the supreme executive magistracy, and another, on the impeachment of a third, can try and condemn all the subordinate officers in the executive department.”
¹⁰

The Framers were also heavily influenced by English philosopher John Locke, who lived from 1632 to 1704, and especially by his book
The Second Treatise of Government
. Locke argued, among other things, for the overarching import of elected legislative bodies, for they directly represent the people. Therefore, he insisted, legislatures must not delegate the power of lawmaking to any other entity. Locke wrote: “The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands: for it being but a delegated power from the people, they who have it cannot pass it over to others.”
¹¹
Locke continued, “The power of the legislative, being derived from the people by a positive voluntary grant and institutions, can be no other than what the positive grant conveyed, which being only to make laws, and not to make legislators, the legislative can have no power to transfer their authority of making laws and place it in other hands.”
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The Framers fervently believed they had constructed sufficient divisions of power and distinctive enough roles for each of the federal branches, with certain unavoidable, practicable, but delimited overlapping, providing the citizenry, then and in the future, with a form of republican government consistent with enlightened self-rule. But, again, the people, in the end, would necessarily be required to stand point in the vanguard against would-be overlords and the predictable insatiability of their power lust.