Because your life is good and it’s easy and it’s soft.
But for most of the history of the human race, most people, most of the time, have lived as slaves or as subjects to other people. And they lived lives that were short and desperate and where they had very little hope. And the primary breakthroughs have all been historic. It was the Greeks discovering the concept of self-governance, it was the Romans creating the objective sense of law, it was the Jewish tradition of being endowed by God—those came together and fused in Britain with the Magna Carta, and created a sense of rights that we take for granted every day. Because we have several hundred years of history protecting us. And the morning that history disappears, there’s no reason to believe we’ll be any better than Beirut or Baghdad.”
On keeping the republic
“Be responsible, live out your responsibilities as a citizen, dedicate some amount of your time every day or every week to knowing what is going on in the world, be active in campaigns, and if nobody is worthy of your support, run yourself. . . . The whole notion of civil society [is] doing something as a volunteer, doing something, helping your fellow American, being involved with human beings. America only works as an organic society. . . . We’re the most stunningly voluntaristic society in the world. And so if voluntarism dries up, in some ways America dries up.”
Source: Newt Gingrich spoke with Christine Barbour on March 21, 2005.
The political elite in the new country started to grumble about popular tyranny. In a monarchy, one feared the unrestrained power of the king, but perhaps in a republican government, one had to fear the unrestrained power of the people. The final straw was Shays’s Rebellion. Massachusetts was a state whose legislature, dominated by wealthy and secure citizens, had not taken measures to aid the debt-ridden population. Beginning in the summer of 1786, mobs of musket-wielding farmers from western Massachusetts began marching on the Massachusetts courts and disrupting the trials of debtors in an attempt to prevent their land from being foreclosed (taken by those to whom the farmers owed money). The farmers demanded action by a state legislature they saw as biased toward the interests of the rich. Their actions against the state culminated in the January 1787 attack on the Springfield, Massachusetts, federal armory, which housed more than 450 tons of military supplies. Led by a former captain in the Continental Army, Daniel Shays, the mob, now an army of more than 1,500 farmers, stormed the armory. They were turned back, but only after a violent clash with the state militia, raised to counter the uprisings. Such mob action frightened and embarrassed the leaders of the United States, who of course also were the wealthier members of society. The rebellion seemed to foreshadow the failure of their grand experiment in self-governance and certainly challenged their story of what it was about. In the minds of the nation’s leaders, it underscored the importance of discovering what James Madison would call “a republican remedy for those diseases most incident to republican government.”19 In other words, they had to find a way to contain and limit the will of the people in a government that was to be based on that will. If the rules of government were not producing the “right” winners and losers, the rules would have to be changed before the elite lost control of their narrative and the power to change the rules.
popular tyranny the unrestrained power of the people
Shays’s Rebellion a grassroots uprising (1787) by armed Massachusetts farmers protesting foreclosures
In Your Own Words
Explain the competing narratives under the Articles of Confederation.
The Constitutional Convention: Division and compromise over state power and representation
State delegates were assigned the task of trying to fix the Articles of Confederation, but it was clear that many of the fifty-five men who gathered in May 1787 were not interested in saving the existing framework at all. Many of the delegates represented the elite of American society—wealthy lawyers, speculators, merchants, planters, and investors—and thus they were among those most injured under the Articles. Members of the delegations met through a sweltering Philadelphia summer to reconstruct the foundations of American government (see Snapshot of America: Who Were the Founders?). As the delegates had hoped, the debates at the Constitutional Convention produced a very different system of rules than that established by the Articles of Confederation. Many of them were compromises to resolve conflicting interests brought by delegates to the convention.
Constitutional Convention the assembly of fifty-five delegates in the summer of 1787 to recast the Articles of Confederation; the result was the U.S. Constitution
How Strong a Central Government?
Put yourself in the founders’ shoes. Imagine that you get to construct a new government from scratch. You can create all the rules and arrange all the institutions just to your liking. The only hitch is that you have other delegates to work with. Delegate A, for instance, is a merchant with a lot of property. He has big plans for a strong government that can ensure secure conditions for conducting business and can adequately protect property. Delegate B, however, is a planter. In Delegate B’s experience, big government is dangerous. Big government is removed from the people, and it is easy for corruption to take root when people can’t keep a close eye on what their officials are doing. People like Delegate B think that they will do better if power is decentralized (broken up and localized) and there is no strong central government. In fact, Delegate B would prefer a government like that provided by the Articles of Confederation. How do you reconcile these two very different agendas?
The solution adopted under the Articles of Confederation basically favored Delegate B’s position. The new Constitution, given the profiles of the delegates in attendance, was moving strongly in favor of Delegate A’s position. Naturally, the agreement of all those who followed Delegate B would be important in ratifying, or getting approval for, the final Constitution, so their concerns could not be ignored. The compromise chosen by the founders at the Constitutional Convention is called federalism. Unlike a confederation, in which the states retain the ultimate power over the whole, federalism gives the central government its own source of power, in this case the Constitution of the people of the United States. But unlike a unitary system, which we discuss in Chapter 3, federalism also gives independent power to the states.
federalism a political system in which power is divided between the central and regional units
Compared to how they fared under the Articles of Confederation, the advocates of states’ rights were losers under the new Constitution, but they were better off than they might have been. The states could have had all their power stripped away. The economic elite, people like Delegate A, were clear winners under the new rules. This proved to be one of the central issues during the ratification debates. Those who sided with the federalism alternative, who mostly resembled Delegate A, came to be known as Federalists. The people like Delegate B, who continued to hold on to the strong-state, weak-central-government option, were called Anti-Federalists. We return to them shortly.
Federalists supporters of the Constitution who favored a strong central government
Anti-Federalists advocates of states’ rights who opposed the Constitution
Large States, Small States
Once the convention delegates agreed that federalism would provide the
