gracchusdixit

For more than 200 years, Americans have venerated our “founding fathers” as if they were demigods, endowed with superhuman wisdom and foresight.  There is no doubt that some of them were extraordinary people and more than a few were exceptionally courageous.  Those of the founders who signed the Declaration of Independence, pledging to one another “Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor,” weren’t posturing for posterity.  Had their rebellion against the British Empire gone the other way, they might well have ended up on the gallows.

The fact remains that even the most brilliant of the founders thought they knew far more than they actually did, and, because of their ignorance, bequeathed to us a system of government so ill-conceived and deeply flawed that it has never worked well and barely works at all today.  Because our reverence for the founders is so reflexive, we are not only blind to their failings but politically paralyzed, unable to confront the obvious dysfunction of our governing institutions and incapable of correcting them.  

This dysfunction began a mere 70 years after the Constitution was ratified, when the nation descended into a savage civil war that cost 600,000 lives.   A mere 20 years later, the noble aim of that war—the abolition of slavery—was undone by “Jim Crow,” a regime of de facto slavery that legalized segregation of the races in the putatively defeated South.  Today, a mere two generations after “Jim Crow” was supposedly abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the old evil has come roaring back.  In one Republican-controlled state after another, the voting rights of minorities are being squashed and democracy itself is being systematically undermined.  

None of this is accidental.  It is, instead, the direct result of what the founders thought they knew about government—but didn’t.  

Nowhere is their ignorant conceit more evident than in the pages of the Federalist Papers, a series of essays written between 1787 and 1788 by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, with the purpose of persuading skeptical voters to ratify the Constitution.  Next to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself, no document holds such biblical status in the mythology of our nation.   Yet, the Federalist Papers are riddled with nonsense, and Federalist Number 10—revered as holy writ by right-wing conservatives—is the most nonsensical of them all.

Number 10 was penned by James Madison, under the pseudonym Publius, which was adopted to honor an ancient Roman aristocrat for his role in establishing the Roman Republic.  The authors of the Federalist Papers looked to that republic as their model, all the while they rejected true democracy, which had been invented by the Greeks.   To quote Publius himself:

…democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths. 

Historically speaking, this is utter and complete rubbish.  In the 2,000 years that ensued between the invention of democracy in ancient Greece and the advent of the American Revolution, not a single polity in the western world governed itself democratically.  Even the famous city states of the Italian Renaissance—Venice, Florence, Genoa, and the rest—were in every case ruled by oligarchs, autocrats, or monarchs.  For Madison and his confrères to have generalized about the failings of democracy from the experience of one small, ancient nation was absurd enough in the 18th century.  For us to accept that generalization today, when we know so much more about the classical world, would be ludicrous.

Even within the confines of ancient Greece, democracies were few and rare.  Of the thousand or so Greek city states, only 50 were ever governed democratically, and we know next to nothing about most of them. The only Greek democracy about which we have substantial direct knowledge is that of Athens.  

Far from being a “spectacle of turbulence and contention” or “short” in its life, Athenian democracy lasted three hundred years and bestowed upon western civilization many of its greatest glories.  It was democracy that built the Parthenon, inspired the exquisite artistry of Phidias and Praxiteles, and produced the incomparable dramatic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.  One is left to to wonder why the founders attacked this democracy with such ignorant fervor.  

One reason may be that they simply didn’t know what they were talking about.  The first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t published until the year the Declaration of Independence was signed, and the last volume didn’t see the light of day until the American Revolution was long gone.  The towering achievements of classical scholarship lay far in the future.  What the founders thought they knew about the politics of Greece and Rome was therefore grounded entirely in the unfiltered testimony of ancient sources whose agendas were—to be charitable—suspect.  Foremost among those were the philosophers Plato and Aristotle and the historians Thucydides and Xenophon.  All had ideological axes to grind; all loathed democracy; all had prejudices that neatly aligned with those of the founders.

Plato was an embittered aristocrat who believed that only men like himself—wealthy, well-connected, and well-educated—were fit to govern.  He despised Athenian democracy for executing his teacher, Socrates, and didn’t hesitate to abandon his native land when offered a chance to mentor the tyrant who ruled the rich Sicilian city of Syracuse.  Aristotle was generally more moderate than his intellectual master but shared his contempt for democracy.  Moreover, he had close connections with the Macedonian royal house of Alexander the Great, which was determined to extinguish that democracy.

Thucydides and Xenophon were, like Plato, disgruntled aristocrats who deemed themselves to have been ill-treated by the democratic government of Athens.  The former led a failed military expedition during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, was exiled, and never got over the slight.  The latter was another student of Socrates, who blamed the great man’s death on the “turbulent” Athenian mob.  Xenophon’s loathing for that mob was so all-consuming that he too betrayed his country and went over the Spartans, on whose authoritarian constitution he showered lavish and sycophantic praise.

If ignorance were the only cause of the founder’s misconceptions, it would be as unfair to blame them as it would be to condemn the men of the Middle Ages for thinking that a flat earth was the center of the universe.  There is, alas, ample evidence to suggest that their motivations were neither completely ignorant nor entirely innocent. 

The founders embraced the testimony of Plato and Aristotle, Thucydides and Xenophon, precisely because they themselves were rich, entitled, and deeply afraid of what might happen if “the mob” were ever able to exercise political power and govern.   In its seven  letter-sized pages, Federalist Number 10 mentions the “rights of property” no fewer than ten times, more than any other “right” or liberty.   

It’s time we stopped kidding ourselves.  The system the founders bequeathed to us was primarily designed to thwart democracy for the purpose of protecting property rights, and for more than 200 years, it has succeeded in achieving precisely that.  The problem is that it has achieved little else.

On some deep, inchoate level, millions of Americans know this.  They sense, if they do not explicitly understand, that “representative government” is a duplicitous euphemism for “the fix is in”.  Donald Trump was able to con his way into the White House, despite the obvious reality that he wasn’t even remotely capable, because he successfully peddled a false hope:  the hope that the aspirations of ordinary people might somehow be achieved if only he were given total power.

That Trump came so close to achieving total power was the direct result of the ignorance and prejudices of the founders.  They feared democracy so much, they put so many insurmountable obstacles in its way, that the only alternative left for the American people, when our system crumbles under the weight of its own failings and contradictions, is to embrace an autocrat who promises to give them what they need and want.  That is how the Roman Republic died.  That is how the Caesars came to power.  

Our only chance of escaping a similar fate is to acknowledge the ignorance and prejudices of the founders, to consign their political ineptitude to the dustbin of history, and to create a true democracy.  The electoral college must be abolished.  The filibuster must be abandoned.  The Supreme Court must be stripped of its entirely self-anointed power to frustrate the wishes of the majority.  States’ rights must be subordinated to universal human rights and the interests of the nation at large. 

If we fail in this, if we continue to pretend that the founders were not the ignorant and prejudiced men they actually were, if we drag our feet and convince ourselves that all will be well in the end, another, smarter, more malevolent Trump awaits us.