The Once and Future King. F. H. Buckley
Sir John A. Macdonald brought a copy of Madison’s notes to the conferences that produced the Canadian constitution. While he thought Sherman’s constitution too decentralized, Macdonald admired the American Framers, and most of the Virginia Plan was adopted in Canada’s constitution. One might therefore call Madison “the Father of the Constitution” so long as one is clear about which country is meant.
Today’s American constitution, in truth, is Hamiltonian, not Madisonian. Madison wanted a strong national government, but Hamilton went much further. He didn’t see the point of the states, and now the discretion of state governments has greatly shrunk under the federal “spending power.” The Supreme Court has upheld the power of the federal government to make grants to the states with strings attached, and the strings control just what the states can do with the money. One governor is reported to have said, “The Feds pay 15 percent of my highway budget but choose 100 percent of what I do with it.”
When one turns from the division of power between the federal government and the states to the separation of powers within the federal government, our constitution is even more Hamiltonian. Today the executive branch dominates Washington, and Congress sputters to make its voice heard. Most conservatives decry this—but not all of them. There’s a Nietzschean strain in American conservatism, one that celebrates military might, and for such people Hamilton’s celebration of “energy in the executive” in Federalist No. 70 is holy text. America may no longer be the freest country in the world, and the promise of social and economic mobility may have dimmed, but this is still the most powerful country in the world, and that’s a matter of immense pride for such conservatives.
The Nietzschean conservatives were in the ascendant a dozen years ago, but now their star has faded. They were embarrassed by the Iraq War, and they have yet to adjust to what “energy in the executive” means in the age of Obama—who is forceful in pushing domestic policies with which they profoundly disagree, while his foreign policies seem so feckless. We’re not merely “leading from behind.” We’re leading behind the French. But that’s what we’d expect from a social democrat such as Obama, who would naturally want to shrink the Defense Department budget in order to fund social welfare programs. And the best way of doing this is to adopt a fainéant foreign policy. What’s the point of having the biggest pistol in the room if everyone knows you’ll never pull it from your holster?
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
This book’s reviewers were always kind. I was particularly thankful to the reviewer in the Italian weekly L’espresso who called it “un libro magnifico,” and I just might be persuaded to give a book talk in Rome if asked. No reviewer, however, commented on my empirical findings about the loss of political freedom in other presidential countries. That’s not surprising, since few people understand econometrics. Anyway, need we care much about the constitutions of other countries if America is truly exceptional? A century and a half ago, Walter Bagehot said it was no proof of the excellence of their constitution that Americans made it work, since Americans could make anything work.
The question is whether that’s still the case. In the past, American politicians could cut deals across the table, but we haven’t seen much of that lately. Think, for example, of the budget impasse of 2011 and the inability of the last Congress to pass needed legislation. Pundits fault the politicians for this, but I’d cast the blame more widely. It’s not the politicians, it’s the people. After his party took a beating in the 1994 elections, Congressman Barney Frank was asked, “What do you think of the fact that the people repudiated your party?” He replied, “The people? They’re nothing to write home about either.” I wish more politicians spoke like that.
If politicians are more divided today than in the past, that’s because the voters are more divided. In what the journalist Bill Bishop calls “the Big Sort,” we’re now less likely to encounter people with whom we disagree on politics. We don’t go to the same clubs or the same churches. We don’t care to live on streets where our neighbors think us heartless bigots or preening idiots. Robert Dahl notes that people moderate their views when they’re not separated along political lines, geographically or socially; but if all the people one knows belong to the same party, the moderating influence disappears. When that happens, the man of the other side is not just an opponent, but an enemy.
I’ve always considered Mark Steyn a giddy optimist. Steyn wrote After America to describe a world after America’s withdrawal from the world stage. I think he nailed it, except that he missed a growing withdrawal of Americans from the United States. What is often absent today is pride in American institutions, in a common heritage. If American government worked better in the past, it’s because the country was more united then. There was a sense, last felt for a brief moment after 9/11, that we’re all in this together, that we can appeal meaningfully to the common good, that America might stumble but in the end would always remain faithful to its ideals. But that was then. If politicians today can’t agree across party lines, that’s no surprise. They’re just like us.
The faith in American exceptionalism and in the country’s special promise has also diminished, and the superiority of the country’s republican principles is little taught in classrooms today, if current textbooks are any guide. The brightest American high school students will take an AP American history course, and for most of them this will be the last course on the subject they’ll take. In it they’ll spend a great deal of time studying what’s wrong with the country, from the perspective of race, class and gender, but very little on what is admirable about America. The course exposes students to some of the more shameful moments in the country’s past, but pitilessly tears asunder the mystic chords of memory to which Lincoln appealed in his first inaugural address. In doing so, the course diminishes what the French writer Ernest Renan thought defines a nation: the sense that fellow citizens not only share glorious things but also have forgotten some unpleasant things.
Each year, an ill-educated cohort of voters—devoid of culture, of judgment, of an attachment to anything greater than themselves—arrives in America, a spectacle aptly described by the filmmaker Denys Arcand as “the Barbarian Invasions.” I am referring to the millennials, of course, but then we immigrants aren’t much better.
On April 15, 2014, after this book was first published, I became an American citizen. It was Tax Day. It was as if I had been told, “Welcome to America—here’s the bill!” But the naturalization ceremony was highly moving. I was with a group of more than a thousand new citizens, and we were asked to stand when the name of our former country was called out. The Venezuelans, as we discovered, are a very demonstrative people; the British and the Canadians far less so. But for all of us the ceremony was emotionally charged, and it was impossible to walk away without the highest of hopes for our new country. Perhaps that includes its Constitution, if the Supreme Court decides that it has a role to play in our constitutional crisis.
F. H. Buckley
Alexandria, Virginia
February 19, 2015
The Fall and Rise of Crown Government
The prejudice of Englishmen, in favor of their own government . . . arises as much or more from national pride than reason.
—THOMAS PAINE, COMMON SENSE
Over the last 250 years there have been four American constitutions. Each has resulted in a different form of government. We have seen three thus far, and now are on the cusp of a fourth.
The first constitution, in