The Genius of America (23 page)

But this institutional deterioration did not begin with President Bush. Looking back into President Clinton's administration, we find another example of how the indifference to institutional responsibility, by both the president and the Congress, may well have cost the nation dearly in executing the constitutional requirement to “provide for the common defense.”

President Clinton was a very smart and agile leader. He often saw issues before others did. One of those issues was terrorism. He understood the gathering threat and talked about it. During Clinton's tenure there were three major terrorist attacks on American lives and property. First, terrorists drove a truck bomb into the basement of the World Trade Center in New York, killing six. Then two American embassies in east Africa were attacked, and hundreds died. Finally, terrorists blew open an American warship at dock, killing seventeen sailors. Clinton understood the challenge, but he and the Congress failed to muster an effective response.

Why? Clearly their minds were elsewhere. Clinton was enmeshed in an impeachment crisis that could be described as either epic or comic opera. Certainly, Clinton brought the crisis on himself by showing first contempt for his office and then for the authorities that he lied to. But the Republicans who controlled the House of Representatives were no better. Mann and Ornstein point out that when the Democrats investigated Richard Nixon in 1974, they insisted that every action of the House be by consensus or at least bipartisan. In further evidence of the decline of our Constitutional Conscience from then until now, the Republicans said they would handle Clinton's impeachment the same way and then did not. They impeached Clinton by party line votes, knowing there was little chance the Senate would convict him and force him from office.

The failure of the House to pull back from the precipice spoke volumes about the bitter polarization that had come to shape life in the Washington community. Impeachment was just another weapon in the partisan wars, a further escalation of the criminalization of political differences. Activists in the party base would be courted, not ordinary citizens. James Madison would be turned on his head: Rather than the mob whose passions had to be cooled by their more deliberate leaders, the public struggled to contain the sectarian passions of their representatives in Washington.

The problem was not the institutional structure but the attitudes of the men and women who had come to populate it. Clinton survived and finished his term. But a terrible sense of what might have been hangs over that period. Clinton, a border-state moderate, left office having “failed to rebuild the political center.” Partisanship would only deepen, “and both the presidency and the Congress were diminished as the central institutions of American democracy.”

But perhaps, if this is possible, the missed opportunities are even more horrible than all that. During this period, when the nation's leaders were using Madison's instruments of government to wage partisan war, a group of young men with a profoundly different view of how society should be organized slipped into the country and began learning to fly passenger airplanes, but not to land them. Neither the Congress nor the president set the needed priorities, although most Americans could not see this until September 11, 2001.

Ronald Reagan's large footprint on American politics is complex. So it is with the question of our Constitutional Conscience. Reagan's own intellectual journey is fascinating. He came to office amid a rebellion against government and embraced it. He had since the 1960s crusaded against bloat in government and what he saw as needless expansion. But by the time he took office, this strand of thought had become intertwined with attacks not just on the size of government but on the process of government as well. Certainly, Proposition 13 represented both. The framers had no consensus view on the proper size of government, only that it was something for the society to work out through the process they created. From FDR to Johnson, and in a sense even Nixon, there was a consensus among Americans that expanding government would fulfill their desires. But when that consensus collapsed, and nothing replaced it, political warfare ensued. Howard Jarvis, Lloyd Cutler and Oliver North all attacked the process. So did Reagan himself, some of the time.

These attacks took root among American people whose understanding of their Constitution was growing thin. A survey during 1988, Reagan's final year in office, found that civic knowledge had declined since 1976. A 1976 survey had “found that civic competence diminished markedly from 1969 to 1976.” The trend was unmistakable and has continued. Without this knowledge, it is very hard for Americans to meaningfully measure the conduct of their leaders and their government against the standards set by the Constitution and its principles.

Civic illiteracy erodes our American unity. It is our commitment to and understanding of the Constitution that makes us Americans, as much as anything else. Without knowledge of our Constitution and its context, without a sense of the Constitutional Conscience, we are losing the thread of what makes us Americans, what holds us together. In the words of Professor Michael Sandel, there is “a growing danger that individually and collectively we will find ourselves slipping into a fragmented, storyless condition.” And in this condition, “there is no continuity between present and past, and therefore no responsibility, and therefore no possibility for acting together to govern ourselves.”

President Reagan himself expressed this point clearly on leaving office. “I am warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.” American memory is at the heart of our Constitutional Conscience. That conscience, that sense of the Constitution and its principles, is, as Senator Lowell Weicker said soon after Reagan took office, “what holds us all together.” Without it, our country becomes different, less appealing. Reagan worried about this as he left office. We worry about it now.

Conclusion

WE

A Constitution which . . . has brought such a happy order out of so gloomy a chaos.

—J
AMES
M
ADISON
, 1831

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—S
ENATOR
R
OBERT
B
YRD
, 2005

W
E LIVE IN
a remarkable political age. More people than ever before in history, possibly a majority of all the people on earth, live under governments that could reasonably be described as democracies. The enormity of this can only be grasped by going back, as we have in this book, to that moment in the late 1700s when democracy as we now know it barely existed in the world. Indeed, the word
democracy
was essentially an insult, a synonym for
mob rule
. Yes, there were places where the king had ceded some measure of power to aristocracies or even to semirepresentative parliaments. There were also commercial cities in Europe that had allowed considerable popular participation in decision making.

But nowhere was there anything like what a group of men, desperately trying to save their fledgling country, invented in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. They wrote “a Constitution which . . . has brought such a happy order out of so gloomy a chaos,” James Madison said of his handiwork many years later. They wrote a Constitution that invented a new kind of representative government. It ushered in what we can now see as the Age of Democracy in which “representative government bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty . . . has become the political norm.” In a recent book on the rise of democracy, the British scholar John Dunn finds Madison's pride understandable given the far-reaching effects of his invention: “It secured the new Republic extremely effectively, and, as we now know, for a very long time. In doing so, it turned the United States into the most politically definite, the best consolidated and the most politically self-confident society on earth. It also, over time . . . opened the way for it to become overwhelmingly the most powerful state in human history.”

Quite an impressive summer's work.

But where are we in the life span of this invention? The American experiment has now lasted longer than any democracy in history. (Athens, for example, lasted only around 170 years as a democracy.) It has also spawned and inspired many others to pursue democracy. After much spillage of words and blood across the twentieth century, there is no longer even a serious intellectual challenger to representative democracy as the best and most legitimate way to organize government. What a long way we have come from 1787! “The United States is now the oldest enduring republic in world history, with a set of political institutions and traditions that have stood the test of time,” wrote the historian Joseph J. Ellis.

The framers would have been stunned by this success. They knew the lessons of history were against them. They had learned from experience that individuals set free pursued their own interests. Large numbers of individuals pursuing their own interests led to chaos. Chaos invited dictators, homegrown or external, to intervene to restore order, snuffing out the very liberty people had fought to establish. They understood this cycle from their reading and, more, from the first eleven years of their own nation, which by 1787 seemed to them to be descending into the gloomy chaos Madison wrote of later.

That is why they saw democracy as “fragile.”

Fragile because the framers had come to understand that in pursuit of their self-interests, Americans, like everyone else, would be willing to trample the “democracy” of others thus endangering their own.

Fragile because it was dependent on the broad participation of Americans in the nation's political processes.

Fragile because it was dependent on the willingness of Americans to acquiesce to the results of such a process.

Fragile because of the Constitution's delicate arrangement of checks and balances.

Fragile because it was a system for institutionalizing compromise. There would always be citizens searching for a more perfect system, some system that promised more wealth, or more security, or more equality, or a more glorious future, or just more of whatever it is they particularly wanted.

That was the challenge the framers confronted in 1787. People wanted what they wanted for themselves. The framers' solution, wonderfully modern and, in 1787, totally original, was to adopt a more realistic view of people and adapt their design for government to that view. They enlisted vice “on the side of virtue.” They set out to prove how a representative democracy could operate without special public virtue, how “an avaricious society can form a government able to defend itself against the avarice of its members.” In other words, this was not a government as good as its people. It was a government designed to produce results better than the desires of each individual person! And that is how the people ensured their own liberty. Out of many, one—
e pluribus unum
.

To accept democracy as it emerged from Philadelphia meant to accept, as Franklin said, that this was no perfect system, just the closest to perfection a human design could come.

The framers worried that their new democracy would last only a few years. But amazingly it succeeded. Two hundred and twenty years later, the many offshoots of modern representative democracy have triumphed around the world. How ironic, then, that its original American version, with its complicated checks and balances, faces meaningful challenge in the place where it was born.

This is not the first such challenge in American history, of course, and we hope not the last. It won't be if we face it, as previous generations faced their constitutional challenges. The challenge takes new forms each time. But at heart the issue is always the same: We want what we want, and we are convinced that the system that is stopping us is wrong, flawed, broken or outmoded.

This is the essence of our present challenge. The bond between government and governed has become strained. Americans are deeply frustrated with the workings of their government. They see it as unresponsive, unrepresentative, ineffective, crippling. Can you imagine even a handful of Americans acknowledging today that the purpose of their government is to produce results better than the desires of the people as individuals? Not likely.

We Americans love the framers. We consume books about them and revere their words. But we have lost our connection to what they actually invented and how that invention over time created in us what we have come to call a Constitutional Conscience. We have lost the narrative thread that connects us to the story of our constitutional democracy. That story tells us two things. First, how the framers learned a series of lessons between 1776 and 1787 and used these lessons to craft our government, the blueprint for which became the Constitution. And second, how we, the people, created a Constitutional Conscience from the essential meaning of that Constitution—its freedoms and its processes and tradeoffs—and guided by these principles were then able to adapt time and again through our history to an evolving America.

This narrative thread is vital to us. It is the story that makes us Americans, ties us to our government and ties our government to us. Without it we have begun, without being totally conscious of what we are doing, to drift away from our constitutional system. We are drifting away because our knowledge of our system has grown thin. From the 1960s onward, according to Derek Bok, civic education has been declining and by the 1980s had nearly vanished. “It is striking how little energy is devoted to trying to engage citizens more actively in the affairs of government. Civic education in the public schools has been almost totally eclipsed by a preoccupation with preparing the workforce of a global economy. Most universities no longer treat the preparation of citizens as an explicit goal of their curriculum.”