The spirit of 1776 is an immigrant spirit. It is the spirit of getting away from the old world and starting again. The same spirit that motivated people, before 1776 and after, to leave their native lands and come to America, motivated America’s decision to declare its independence from Great Britain. In a way, the whole country decided to pack up and leave Mother England. Together, Americans resolved to make a new political and economic system for a new kind of people. Americans in the late eighteenth century understood very clearly what it meant to risk everything—including life itself—upon a new venture of nation-building. They understood this because they were of immigrant stock—they or their ancestors had individually undertaken the same risks that they were now jointly undertaking in violently breaking away from the British empire and setting up their novus ordo seclorum.
The immigrant character of Americans—and the American founding—is the essential background against which we must assess the progressive and left-wing critique of the spirit of 1776. This is a critique that dubs the American Founders to be landed gentry, rich white men who owned slaves, and who set up a government for the protection of their ancestral and aristocratic privileges. Although this critique became mainstream in the 1960s—and is now widely taught in schools and colleges—it originated with the early twentieth-century work of historian Charles Beard. In his magnum opus, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, Beard argued that the Founders were wealthy landowners with interests in farming and manufacturing and that many of them owned slaves. From this he deduced that the Constitution was little more than a mechanism for these rich white folk to protect and extend their own privileges. Beard regarded it as highly significant that women, slaves, and indentured servants were not represented at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention.2
These themes have been taken up by progressive scholars like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Chomsky contends that the American Founders, just like the British, were wealthy aristocrats who despised the ordinary working man whom they considered part of “the rabble.” Consequently, Chomsky writes, the Founders sought to protect slave-owners and property owners, and to pass their privileges on to posterity. The constitutional debates reveal Madison’s scheme to, as Chomsky puts it, “protect the minority of the opulent from the majority.” Zinn too stresses the affluence of the Founders. “George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous Boston merchant. Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy printer.” Zinn concludes that “from the founding of the nation to the present day, the government has generally legislated on behalf of the wealthy; has done the bidding of corporations in dealing with working people, and has taken the nation to war in the interests of economic expansion and political ambition.”3
How fair are these accusations? Certainly the Founders were among the more prosperous and better-educated citizens of their society, and a good thing this is, for who knows what America would look like had it been founded by the least successful and most ignorant citizens of the time. Admittedly, out of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia, no less than thirty owned slaves. Even so, these were not landed aristocrats who sought to conserve and extend their own titles and privileges. The proof of that is simple: Where are those titles and privileges? When I recently visited Mount Vernon, I asked about the whereabouts of the descendants of Washington’s extended family. The guide said she had no idea, but there was one relative who lived in the area, although she may have moved. In any other country, this would be astonishing. People would expect the descendants of the founder of the country to be basking in fame and wealth. This option was available to Washington, who could probably have become monarch if he had wanted to, and established a royal lineage. Instead he renounced the monarchy and opted for a system of government that would give members of the Washington family no special advantages. Jefferson’s descendants live in the same historical obscurity. The only time I have seen a public reference to Jefferson’s progeny is when the descendants of his slave Sally Hemings appeared on Oprah to insist upon their blood connection to America’s third president.
If progressives are mistaken about the spirit of 1776—if in reality that spirit is not one of landed aristocracy but of the immigrants—then does the critique of the American founding go away? On the contrary, it assumes an even more powerful and interesting thrust. In its revised conception, the progressive critique is an attack on the immigrants themselves. The charge of theft, previously pinned on putative aristocrats, is now launched against the immigrants and their progeny. The immigrants are faulted for being greedy and acquisitive and for establishing a society as greedy and acquisitive as themselves. No wonder that such a society seized the land from the native Indians. This was the original thievery. No wonder that these hard, selfish people took advantage of the slave-trade to import Africans to work for free. No wonder that the settlers set about grabbing half of Mexico by force and later establishing imperial rule over the Philippines. America, like South Africa, established a herrenvolk democracy—in other words, a democracy for the white settlers and their ilk to the exclusion of blacks and other minorities. This too was a kind of piracy, robbing dark-skinned minorities of their goods and rights under the law. Capitalism, many progressives suggest, is a system of organized theft of what working people have produced; it is well-suited to the dog-eat-dog qualities that immigrants display. And it is totally in character for these immigrant capitalists to want to use America’s military power to subjugate and dominate the rest of the world.
Throughout this book, I will be examining and answering these charges. We cannot assess them, however, without asking what is new about the spirit of 1776. In a sense, this is an answer to the ignorance of President Obama. Asked in 2009 whether he believed America is exceptional, Obama replied that he believed America is exceptional in the same way the British believe Britain is exceptional, or the Greeks believe that Greece is exceptional. Obama’s real point was that America was no more exceptional than any other country.4 In the spirit of presidential education, I venture to prove him wrong. Here I content myself with specifying the two unique principles that were articulated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and then integrated into the Constitution and the political architecture of the American founding. These principles are represented in two significant phrases: “created equal” and the “pursuit of happiness.”
According to Thomas Jefferson, the American Revolution was motivated by “the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their back, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”5 This may seem like verbal extravagance on Jefferson’s part, except that before the American Revolution, all governments in all countries were based on a favored few, booted and spurred, claiming their authority to saddle, ride, and rule the mass of mankind. This is not to say that citizens everywhere had no rights. England, for instance, granted rights to citizens in a tradition stretching back to the Magna Carta. The operative term, however, is “granted.” In England, as in other countries, it was the king or the ruling class that conferred rights and privileges from above. If the people enjoyed rights and protections, those were the king’s to give, and were granted out of his magnanimity. In England the Crown was also considered the owner of all real property in the realm, and property rights were simply temporary grants of use conferred by the monarch. By themselves—and absent this bestowal of royal title and privilege—the people had no rights and owned nothing.
The American Revolution inaugurated the first government in the world that was based on the principle that sovereignty and rights are in the people and not in the king or the ruling class. It is sometimes said that while European countries located sovereignty in “divine right,” America located sovereignty in “the consent of the governed.” But this is not correct. Consider Jefferson’s famous proclamation, in the Declaration, that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unaliena
ble rights.” Notice that Jefferson—who was a man of the Enlightenment, and by no means an orthodox Christian—nevertheless locates the source of equality and rights in a single source: the Creator. Why does he not locate the doctrine of equality in the people, in the consent of the governed? Because never have “all men” or all people ever given their consent to such a proposition. Moreover, even if they did, all people don’t become equal—any more than they become tall or intelligent or morally good—by mutual or common agreement!
What Jefferson means is that all people are equal in having a shared human nature. Being human, they are of equal moral value in the eyes of their Creator. And it is because of this equality that legitimate government derives its authority to rule from the consent of the governed. Far from denying divine right, Jefferson appeals to it. In the American case, however, God sanctions a system in which sovereignty or ultimate authority derives not from the king but from the people. Royal sovereignty under God gives way to common sovereignty under God. America establishes the first government in history that is based on “We the people.”
This is a momentous change. Instead of rights and privileges flowing “down” from the king to the people, they now flow “up” from the people to the government. In the old case the king granted limited authority and power to the people; in America, the people grant limited authority and power to their rulers. Elsewhere, the people are subjects and thus subjected to the laws, possessing rights only at the behest of the government. In America, there are no subjects, only citizens. Citizens are subject only to laws that they themselves make through their elected representatives. The representatives possess this power at the behest of the people, and they must obey the same laws as the rest of the people.
So the government that controls the people is, through majority rule, selected by the people. But who controls the government? The American answer to this question is: the Constitution. Once again, the American solution can be contrasted with English practice. England has no written constitution; instead, English law is based on a common law that has evolved over the centuries. The American Founders, however, adopted a Constitution which is a “higher law,” a law that trumps even majority rule. Why is such a law necessary? When governments are given power through a democratic process, why do they need to be restricted and over-ridden by a higher law? The reason is that the American Founders recognized the limits of majority rule.
It may seem odd, in a democracy, that there should be any limits on majority rule. The reason for the limits is that the people as a whole have created the government, and the government must rule on behalf of the whole people. In the American context, of course, there are complications with the concept of the “whole people.” The states, not the people directly, approved the Constitution. And even today, in presidential elections, the people choose their leader through the states. (“The state of Virginia goes for Barack Obama.”) Even so, the point remains that government gets its moral legitimacy from the whole people, and in a sense, the only fully legitimate government is one that rules by consensus: the people decide as a whole. The problem is that, in practice, consensus is nearly impossible to achieve. So majority rule is the next best substitute. Still, majority rule must be set up in such a way that the majority rules on behalf of the whole. Madison writes that “the will of the majority” must be a “plenary substitute” for “the will of the whole society.”6
Another way to put it is that the majority must not use its power to trample on minority rights. The Founders were very concerned about this. What if the majority decides, for instance, to confiscate the property of the minority? The Founders insisted that “tyranny of the majority” is just as dangerous as having a one-man tyrant. In some ways, it’s more dangerous. It’s bad enough to be oppressed by one man—even worse to be oppressed by the bulk of your fellow citizens. In Notes on Virginia Jefferson declared that “an elective despotism was not the government we fought for.”7
Consequently the American Founders implemented multiple mechanisms for limiting the power of the central government—even an elected government—and for ensuring that this government did not become oppressive to all or even some of its citizens. The Constitution is a charter for limited government. Basically it says that the federal government can do this, this, and this. And beyond this, the federal government has no power to act. When Thomas Jefferson and later James Madison proposed that a Bill of Rights be added to the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton objected. In Federalist No. 84, Hamilton said enumerating such rights was “not only unnecessary” but could “even be dangerous.” He asked, “Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” He added, “Why, for instance should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?” Hamilton was concerned that specifying a list of restraints on federal power might encourage the government to claim unwarranted authority in areas where no specific restraints were listed.8 But others wanted it in writing that government could not abridge certain fundamental rights, and so the Bill of Rights was adopted in the form of amendments to the Constitution.
In addition to limiting the size and power of the federal government, the Founders divided power between the federal government on the one hand, and states and local governments on the other. This principle is called “federalism.” They also divided the federal government between a legislature, executive, and judiciary, which we know as a “separation of powers” and they instituted a system of “checks and balances” giving different branches of government (say the House and the Senate, or the president and the Congress, or Congress and the courts) authority to exercise competing authority on the same issue. This is a way of blocking schemes that don’t enjoy broad support from going through.
In Federalist No. 51, Madison gave the underlying rationale for all this. Governments become oppressive, he writes, because of the infirmity in human nature. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” But this is not the case: in place of angels, we have people like George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Such people have their own agenda; competing agendas form what Madison terms “factions.” Each faction is likely to try and usurp the whole government and promote its own program. Consequently, factions must be thwarted, not by abolishing them, but by setting them against each other. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison writes. This amounts to a “policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives.” This way the only projects that get approved are ones that serve the public good. The whole objective is to ensure that “the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”9
I mention all this because many of these carefully devised safeguards have been brazenly ignored in recent decades, with presidents and the federal government usurping authority reserved to the states, ignoring the Constitution when it limits the scope of governmental action, getting into wars without proper congressional authority, politicizing the courts, and so on. These offenses have been committed by Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives, although the most flagrant violations are by Democrats and progressives who increasingly don’t even pretend to feel inhibited by the Constitution. As a result, we now have a Leviathan state, far from the limited government the Founders envisioned. The government that was set up to protect our rights has in many cases become a danger to our rights. I will say more about this in a later chapter.
If one unique principle of the American founding was the idea that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, a second unique principle is the creation of a free market society with business as the national vocation and the innovator and entrepreneur as the embodiments of the American dream. Marx understood this. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, he termed the United States “the most modern example of bourgeois society.”10 Yet America’s commercial emphasis may seem unfamiliar to ma
ny today, because progressives have been attempting to redirect the energy of the American people—especially young people—away from the private commercial sector toward the government sector. When I first came to the United States in the late 1970s, the tone had been set by John F. Kennedy. Kennedy said to Americans: If you are young, if you are idealistic, then do what? Join the Peace Corps! Become a public servant. For JFK, there were nobler things to do with your life than work for a profit-making corporation. If you did that, you were a greedy, selfish guy. But if you became a bureaucrat, or went on a Peace Corps mission and lived in a hut in Africa, you were a morally wonderful person. We hear the same thing from Obama, who routinely tells young people in his graduation speeches: don’t go for the brass ring, the corner office, the big promotion.11 Presumably, he wants Americans to become community organizers or union bosses or go to work for the federal government. In the progressive lexicon, “business” is a term of derision and becoming a political activist or a federal bureaucrat is what the American dream is all about.
Not for the Founders. The Founders knew that, historically, in most cultures, business and trade were reviled. For nearly two millennia, across the world, the merchant and entrepreneur have been regarded as low-life scum. Confucius says, “The virtuous man knows what is noble. The low man knows what is profitable.” In Japan, the social hierarchy placed the imperial family and the lords at the top, the warriors or samurai below them, then the farmers and artisans, and finally the merchants lowest of all. In the Indian caste system, the top rung is occupied by the priest, the next rung by the nobility, the next by the warriors, and down the list we go, until one step from the bottom, just above the hated untouchable, we find the merchant and the trader. Historian Ibn Khaldun, one of the great Islamic thinkers of the Middle Ages, has an essay arguing that looting is a morally preferable way to trade to acquire wealth. Why? Because trade is based on exploitation of the needs of others and is therefore base and shameful. Looting, by contrast, is courageous and manly, since you have to defeat a rival in open combat and take his stuff.12 Even today in Europe, it’s better to have inherited money than earned money. Inherited money is seen as innocent, like manna dropping from heaven, while earned money is seen as the result of some sort of exploitation.
Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her Page 5
