gracchusdixit

The shameful defeat of even the most modest proposals for gun control in the Senate of the United States says less about the scandalous power of the NRA or the callous indifference of those who voted “nay” than it does about the fundamental flaws in our system of government.

Our system is revered by some for its “checks and balances” and lauded as if it had been divinely inspired.  Its inspiration was anything but divine.  It was the creation of entirely mortal men who were born nearly three hundred years ago, many of them men of wealth and privilege, and profoundly suspicious of democracy.   For all their talk about “the people” and their “rights,” much in the Constitution they bequeathed to us was designed, not to further democratic government, but to contain it.

The system these men devised no longer serves the needs of the large, sprawling, diverse democracy we have become.  Instead of protecting vulnerable minorities by checking the power of potentially oppressive majorities, our system does the reverse.  It is the minorities—the zealots, the bigots, the self-interested and the well-funded—that wield oppressive power now.  Not only is this morally wrong, it is no longer workable for the age in which we live.

And if the truth be told, our system of government has never worked particularly well.  In fact, by any rational calculus, the Constitution the Founders created is a bust.

Those who choose to see things through the foggy lens of sentimentality blame “partisan politics” for our current problems and tell us that things once were different, that our system of government was, once-upon-a-time, guided by gentlemanly compromise and common sense.  This is a fairy tale.

The first 75 years of the Republic were bitterly partisan, and they culminated in a murderous Civil War.  If you think Donald Trump’s attacks on Barack Obama are crazy or extreme, then I would encourage you to read what was said about Abraham Lincoln.

The next 75 years were mired in sweeping corruption and dysfunction, leading, in 1929, to the near collapse of global capitalism.  The only form of “consensus” that governed our public life in those days was the almost universal agreement that public officials should wink and take the money that was being handed out by the robber barons of Wall Street.

The truth of the matter is that our system has functioned effectively only when we have been prepared, or forced, to put it aside.

That is what happened during the Great Depression when Franklin Roosevelt became, in effect, our first democratically elected monarch.  He didn’t get everything he wanted, but he got most of it—in part because he was so overwhelmingly popular, in larger part because the economic crisis was so dire that nobody else was able to offer any plausible alternatives.

That is what happened again during the Second World War, with first Roosevelt and then Truman in the White House.  “Checks and balances” went out the window, and the economy was all but nationalized, with a regime of central planning and steeply progressive taxation that would today be called “socialism.”

And that is what happened yet again during the Cold War, which set in even before the Second World War ended.  This is one of those eras of “compromise and consensus” that are now remembered so fondly.  It was in fact a time of fear and intimidation.  We rallied around the national mission to “fight Communism,” because we weren’t given a choice.   “Compromise and consensus” came from conformity, not good will.

For better or worse, these three eras of crisis made us the country we are today:  a modern industrial nation,  with needs and problems that cannot be dealt with by the quaint pre-industrial system of federalism invented by our Founders.  In such a nation, real democracy is the only possible form of decent and effective government.

The main obstacle now standing in the way of real democracy is the Constitution’s anachronistic regard for “states’ rights.”  This may have made sense when the nation first came together as a loose confederation of formerly independent colonies.  But that time passed long ago.   To be sure, cultural differences still separate one state or region from another—you won’t find many people north of the Maxon-Dixon line eating grits or very many people south of it eating hoagies.  But such differences do not constitute “rights” or “sovereignty.”   They certainly do not justify the denial of democracy to the nation as a whole.  To treat California with its thirty million people and Iowa with its three million as separate and sovereign entities, having an equal say in how the nation is governed, is simply absurd.

If ever we needed proof of this absurdity, we just got it when a group of Senators representing a small fraction of the nation defied the will and wishes of the overwhelming majority of the American people by voting down gun control.

It is tempting to focus the blame on those who voted “nay,” and they do indeed have much to answer for.  Whether their motives were cowardly or craven, self-interested or sincere, their behavior was shameful.  But blaming them, even punishing them at the ballot box, will not be enough.  We need to change the system that allows, indeed encourages, them to do what they did.

It is time to realize that our Constitution was written in an altogether different era, for an altogether different kind of country.  It is time to “check” the undemocratic power it created.  It is time to bring real “balance” to the Constitution of the United States.