American Perfectionalism: The Constitution

Today, we observe Constitution Day. While the Constitution itself is quite old, Constitution Day is not--as a federally recognized celebration, it only dates back to 2004. The law passed that year requires federally-funded educational institutions to mark the day by paying some formal attention to the document. Given the regularly exposed ignorance of many American citizens about what is actually in the Constitution, this generally seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

All good ideas, however, end up becoming political footballs. In South Carolina last week, Constitution Day became a pretext to attack President Obama's alleged lack of dedication to the document.

At a "Take Our Country Back" rally in Greenville, Rep. Trey Gowdy said "Is it OK for me too say 'God bless you?' Is it OK for me to say 'God bless the United States of America?'" Evidently Gowdy has been spending time in some alternate universe in which this is not OK. He must have missed the endless repetition of those words by speakers at the Democratic convention in Charlotte.

At that same rally, one of the sponsors said that he is often asked where he wishes to take the country back to, and the answer was "all the way back, right back to the Constitution." Another, Rep. Mick Mulvaney, said when they are criticized for wanting to go back, conservatives need to reply "you need to have more faith in a 223-year-old document called the Constitution than you do in the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

It should go without saying that no one should want to go all the way back to the version of the Constitution that existed 223 years ago. That document explicitly protected slavery: it allowed the unrestricted importation of slaves for another 20 years, it provided for the return of runaway slaves, it treated slaves as 3/5 of a person for purposes of representation.

Do they want to go back to the Constitution that did not guarantee the right to vote to freedmen in 1865? Do they want to go back to the Constitution that did not require the states to recognize the Bill of Rights? Do they want to go back to the Constitution that did not guarantee women the right to vote well into the 20th century?

No doubt they would answer that of course they don't want to go back to those parts of the Constitution. But they also do not offer those qualifiers. If asked, they'd say no. But they don't volunteer that information. To do so would be to admit that the Constitution was, from its beginnings, flawed. And that's a problem for them.

For reasonable people, it is easy both to respect the Constitution and its strengths, while bemoaning its failings. That is what adults do: they see complexity, they see shades of grey.

Far too many American conservatives, however, have elevated the Constitution to the status of Holy Writ. Some even claim that it is divinely inspired. How can the Constitution be divinely inspired if it is also flawed?

I realize that saying that the Constitution is not perfect is sacrilege to some ears. But that is precisely the problem.

When we take the work of fallible men and transform it into a sacred text, and argue that all we need to do to return the nation to a state of grace is to "go back to the Constitution," we convert political debate into theological dispute. That is what is wrong with the increasingly religious language that today's conservatives employ when discussing the Constitution.

We hear a lot these days from Republicans about "American exceptionalism." But in fact, that's not what they mean. What they really are insisting on is American perfectionalism.

That is the inevitable consequence of turning American history into a Bible story. It is not enough that the arc of the story be a positive one. It must have a creation story in which the hand of God is explicitly credited with establishing the nation. God's creation is not just exceptional--it cannot be questioned. It is not merely striving (in the actual words of the Constitution) to "create a more perfect Union." It is, in some fundamental sense, already perfect.

While its leaders may be wrong--as conservatives insist Obama almost always is--America never is. Its ideals are perfect, and there is never any reason to "apologize" for anything. There is never any reason to doubt.

We do not honor the Constitution by distorting it. If we wish truly to honor the Constitution on this Constitution Day, we should remember the humility of the men who wrote it and their explicit recognition that it was--from the beginning--assumed to be a flawed instrument.

Part of the Constitution's genius is that it contains within it a mechanism to change it. I can think of no more eloquent statement of imperfection. The very people who wrote it took its imperfections for granted, and provided the means of correcting them.

The amendment process was an invitation to improve, an invitation we the people have exercised 27 times in our history in our quest to become "more perfect." That phrase is our challenge. It does not ask of us smug self-satisfaction at our own perfection. It demands that we always ask how we can make our Union more perfect.

For people who insist on America's perfection, there is only one answer to our current problems: "go back." For those who know that no work of man has ever been perfect, the answer is "go forward."

Michele Bachmann and the Frozen Founders

Michele Bachmann's insistence that John Quincy Adams was one of the Founders produced a lot of sniggering last week.  As many people have pointed out, the younger Adams was all of eight years old when the Declaration was signed 235 years ago.

The George Stephanopoulus interview was not the first time.  Speaking in Iowa back in January, Bachmann said

we know there was slavery that was still tolerated when the nation began, we know that was an evil, and it was a scourge and a blot and a stain on our history. But we also know that the very founders who wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. And I think it is high time we recognize the contribution of our forbearers [sic] who worked tirelessly, men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.

Whenever a political figure insists on defending such a self-evidently wrong statement, it makes me wonder what lies beneath it. This isn't just ignorance. There is an ideological imperative she's obeying.

First, let's give Bachmann her due. John Quincy Adams was indeed an opponent of slavery. The problem is that his truly "tireless" activity on the subject came during his post-presidential career in Congress in the 1830s and 1840s. He was a figure of the second generation of American political leadership, not the first.

The irony is that there are many examples of people during the founding generation working against slavery.  As Matt Yglesias has noted, actual Founders such as John Jay did fight slavery. The era of the revolution did see real progress on slavery--all of the northern states passed legislation for the gradual end to slavery within those states. So why not cite that actual history?

Because it is complicated, and Bachmann is looking for simplicity. To talk about the movement to end slavery in the northern states inevitably draws attention to the reality that the southern states not only did not follow, but over time grew more committed to maintaining slavery. The reason later generations had to work so "tirelessly" against slavery is that other Americans were working so tirelessly for it.

The reason the Founders did not end slavery in their new republic, one born with the phrase "all men are created equal," is that to insist on an end to slavery would have insured an end to the United States. As Robert Middlekauff writes in The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789, "white people in the North and South decided that for the time being at least the union that protected republican government was more important than a full-scale dedication to equality."

A truthful account of the Founders and slavery has to acknowledge this fact. They were something today's Tea Partiers say they abhor: compromisers. In the Constitutional Convention, they compromised on everything, most notably on slavery.

Another reason those later generations had to work so tirelessly to end slavery is that the Constitution so well ensconced slavery in the United States. Arguably the Constitution was the largest impediment to ending slavery. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a "covenant with death and an agreement with hell." He burned a copy of the Constitution in protest.

So to speak honestly and accurately of "the Founders" is to confront that messy reality.

Bachmann prefers her Founders simple, god-like, and unchanging. Since the Tea Party ideology deems the Constitution a sacred document, inspired by God (remember, it was Bachmann who enlisted the fraud David Barton to teach Constitution classes to Congress), those who wrote it must be responsible for all that is good. Thus she cannot be accurate. She cannot say some of the founders worked tirelessly against slavery while others defended it.

And since all good things must come from the Founders, she cannot note later Americans like Garrison who denounced the Constitution's compromises on slavery. No, abolition must trace back to "the Founders." All of them. She does not want real, fallible human beings. She wants icons, created in her own image and then frozen in time.

The alternative is simply not acceptable: she cannot admit that the Declaration, with its statement of great principles, was only imperfectly embodied in the Constitution. Because if we accept that the principles of the Founders expressed in the Declaration are renewed and reinterpreted by later generations, that the institutions we adopt to implement them change over time and are made "more perfect" in application, then the foundational idea of the Tea Party is nonsense.

Which, of course, it is. We cannot reflexively ask what "the Founders" would do or say, as if there is one objective answer to that question. The Declaration, whose adoption we celebrate today, is not only a gift to future generations. It is a burden. "The Founders" did not give us all the answers. They showed us the important questions, and challenged us to work out the answers for ourselves.

On this Independence Day, to truly honor their work, we should stop pretending we can lazily rely on them to tell us what to do, and instead take up the challenge of finding what it means in our times to strive for what "of Right ought to be."

Happy Fourth.

Read it? Yes. Worship it? No.

So they are reading the Constitution in the House today.  And Michelle Bachmann has enlisted Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia to teach new members of Congress about the Constitution.

It seems odd that anyone could run for and be elected to Congress without already being fairly well-versed in the Constitution, but let’s grant that there may be some value in a refresher course for some of these people.

What’s maddening about this is not any of these acts, but the motive: it is an attempt to claim the Constitution for one political party.  The Constitution does not belong to any ideology.  It is our common framework of government.

But the new Republican/Tea Party does not agree.  It believes that one and only interpretation of the Constitution is valid.  It maintains the fiction that there is something concrete called “original intent” which leads to an objective truth about the constitutionality of any proposal.

The right has tried to elevate the Constitution to the level of holy writ.  Cal Thomas, in his column this week, put it explicitly: “As with Scripture, the Constitution contains eternal truths.”  These people do not see the Constitution as a great but flawed work of men—for them, it is a divine document.  And only they really understand what it means.

This is a tremendously dangerous idea.  The Constitution is not scripture.  It is not something to be worshipped.  You would think people who say they take religion seriously would know to keep sacred only that which is truly sacred.

But since they believe the Constitution contains “eternal truths,” they think if they can monopolize its meaning they can render all opposition to their ideas as inherently false.

And what meaning do they find in it?  One simple idea: “limited government.”  Thomas asserts that its “principles—like limited government—transcend eras.”  But they never stop to ask what motive lies behind that principle.  Was it “limited government” as an end in and of itself?  No. 

The purpose of limited government is to protect liberty.  When the Constitution was written, there was only one real threat to liberty: government power.  But the key political insight of the post-Civil War era has been that there are other threats to liberty. 

Slavery showed that an individual could deny liberty in every sense of the word to another human being.  Segregation showed that local and state governments could be greater threats to liberty than the federal government.  The rise of big business showed that private economic power could be as great a threat to liberty as government ever was.

By seeing the only threat to liberty as government, these Tea Party people show that they remain stuck in the 18^th century.  Our problems are not the same, and our solutions cannot be the same.  Reading the Constitution and treating it as a sacred document gets us not one bit closer to solving the problems of the 21^st century.  It is simple-minded posturing that masks a reactionary social and political agenda, and no worshipful reading of its text will change that.