    
cheetah
Citizen
Username: Cheetah
Post Number: 38
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 10:51 am: |     |
Please circulate the following to as many people as possible, originally appearing in the August '03 The Atlantic:
In "Founders Chic" (September The Atlantic), the historian H. W. Brands offers a reality check to a Founders-obsessed nation. Not only were the Founders anything but deified in their own time, they were also held responsible by later generations for some of the young nation's most severe problems—and the questions they left unresolved did have serious ramifications, most notably the contradictions over slavery that eventually led to the Civil War. Through all this, the Founders have emerged as heroes, particularly in times demanding national unity; they have served as symbolic anchors of nationhood during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, the World Wars, and again today.
Although Brands admires the Founders, he argues that their most remarkable quality was their boldness in the face of great risk and uncertainty—the very quality that excessive reverence for previous generations stifles. Through their impressive feat of creating a structure of stability for their political descendants, the Founders created a leadership class with a genuine respect for the status quo, and bequeathed to these new leaders a complicated set of problems, both ideological and practical. Today's leadership class, Brands suggests, would do well to take a page out of the Founders' book and apply all their ingenuity to the nation's needs, reworking the Constitution when necessary to address the issues of the day. He argues that the confidence to do this would be a more important inheritance from the Founders than the particulars of the Constitution, a document produced by a small group of men during three months in 1787. It would also, paradoxically, provide a new opportunity for the kind of leadership for which the Founders have been remembered so reverently.
Q: If too much love for the Founders is a bad thing, what do you think the right attitude toward them is?
H. W. Brands: I think that we should respect and admire them for the things they accomplished that really were outstanding. The decision for independence in 1776 was a remarkable thing. I try to imagine anybody in this country, any members of the political leadership class today, taking such a bold step. I think that the strongest criticism that can be made of politicians today is that they look for the safe middle ground, and they look to get re-elected. They look for the sort of thing that's not going to alienate too many people. Well, good heavens—launching a revolution is about as alienating as you can get. And there was a lot at stake. When they talked about their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, they weren't kidding. Certainly their lives and fortunes were at risk. As for their sacred honor, that was something that history would have to debate.
As I say in the article, there are all sorts of debates over important issues today, issues of money in politics, gun control, affirmative action, immigration, all sorts of hot-button issues. The most remarkable thing is that the political system prevents any really open and honest discussion of these issues. One of the things that strikes me as mind-boggling is this timid reverence toward the Constitution, as though it would violate the spirit of the Founders to rewrite the Constitution. My God—they tore up their connection with Britain and waged a war to terminate it, and then they sat down and in three months wrote this Constitution anew. None of them would have thought that something they had written over the space of three months was supposed to last for all time. And I think they would have been appalled at our timidity in taking on issues that are as important to us as those issues were to them. It seems to me that if we want to be in the spirit of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin and all, we ought to have a constitutional convention about every twenty or thirty years. Times change. The Founders were willing to make drastic changes in the governance of America, yet we're not willing to make even the smallest changes. That's what I would like people to think about when they think about the Founders. They were a group characterized by courage and boldness. I don't think they were any wiser than we are, but they were a whole lot more willing to take risks on behalf of what they believed in.
Q: What do you think should be the mechanism for this rewriting of the Constitution? Are you imagining that it would be rewritten within the existing process of amendments?
H. W. Brands: Well, that would certainly be a start. If we were really in the spirit of the Founders, people would just get together and call an utterly extra-legal convention, because that's what the convention of 1787 was. They had no authorization to do anything. They said they were going to get together and amend the Articles of Confederation, but they very quickly wrote a new constitution. And their work wouldn't have meant anything if the various states had refused to ratify it. Now, actually, I think that's beyond all hope, and that's probably a good thing, because on the whole our system works reasonably well. But for people to say, for example, that we can't do anything about gun control because the Second Amendment prevents it—well, let's just rewrite the Second Amendment. If the First Amendment says we can't control political spending, let's rewrite the First Amendment. At least let's have an honest debate about it. Now, I'll admit that the First Amendment's a pretty good thing, and I would certainly hope that most of it would survive. But it's two hundred years old. It might need a little tweaking.
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