Review: The Genius of America

Book review time!

No, I don't plan to do every book review as a vlog. A little vlog goes a long way in my opinion, exactly as gasoline doesn't.

Anyway, I read The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved America -- and Why it Can Again by Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes.

The uber-long title kind of explains it all. The first half of the book goes into the first 11 years of the United States, the period between 1776 and 1787 when we were governed by the Articles of Confederation, the struggles of the Constitution drafters, and how the Constitution has worked, been amended, and undermined over the last couple of centuries.

The U.S. had declared independence from Britain in 1776 and was humming its way through the war until it ended in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris. Everyone thought things were peachy. Unfortunately, they weren't. It didn't take long until the Articles of Confederation -- based on the idea of each state as a sovereign power, loosely federated with the others under an incredibly weak national government -- began to show some serious problems. The problem, as the framers saw it, was that the Articles were written based on an assumption of "public virtue." This was the idea that people would, on their own, look out for the good of society as a whole over their own self-interest.

The states, being human constructs made up of human beings -- which are self-interested creatures on general principle -- immediately fell to squabbling and jockeying for power, wealth and territory among themselves. The federal government, limited as it was by the Articles of Confederation, couldn't do much, and so it began to look as though the new United States was about to fall apart only a decade after its founding. A Constitutional Convention was called, and the writers of the Declaration of Independence and delegates from the states attended, one hot summer in Philadelphia.

Long story short, it took the entire summer for the Convention attendees to agree on the basic points of federal governance in relation to the states. James Madison, commonly considered the father of the Constitution, proposed what became known as the Virginia Plan (he was a Virginia delegate) -- a three-part government, with a very powerful executive who would have actually been a monarch. It sounds funny today, but some of those delegates were seriously considering the possibility that the best thing to do would be to return to governance by royalty. With some obvious adjustments to weaken the executive and turn the legislative branch into a two-house Congress defined by differing metrics, that plan became the Constitution and is the government we know today.

The interesting thing is that the system those attendees set up and enshrined in our founding document is completely different from the Articles of Confederation. The Articles assumed that people would do what was good for society; the Constitution assumed the exact opposite and created a whole new governmental system based on people's self-interest. In this system, nobody would get their way; they'd be forced to go through a strenuous legislation process in order to buy time to deliberate, argue, and compromise. In fact, compromise -- what often seems to be the "C" word these days in our polarized politics -- is the foundation of the system. Even if both houses of Congress pass a piece of legislation, it still has to avoid a presidential veto. If it manages to squeak through that, it could still be challenged -- and struck down -- by the Supreme Court.

In other words, the system created ample opportunity to tweak. And that's why the system's survived so well for so long. It survived the Civil War, which is the closest our country has ever come to fracturing completely and permanently; it survived the Great Depression, which could have killed the country altogether, regardless of any unifying sensibility, if it hadn't been for an executive who was willing to do what it took to get the country back on its feet; it survived Richard Nixon, who claimed the Supreme Court couldn't subpoena his documents because it had no authority over the President, but eventually capitulated and resigned.

It's flexible because of that exact thing everyone hates: Congress. Passing things through Congress and forcing consensus through compromise is what makes the government work.

Unfortunately, our Congresscritters refuse to compromise these days, so things are locked up, the deficit and debt are ballooning, important programs are being cut, and people are beginning to say that maybe it's time to throw the Constitution out with the bathwater.

One manifestation of this inclination in recent years is the initiative-and-referendum process, which was discussed in a part of the book I reached the day Proposition 8 was declared unconstitutional -- a miracle of good timing, as it turned out. The process was introduced into the California Constitution in the 1920s, then forgotten until the 1970s when, angered by the fact that they had to pay taxes, the Californian people revived it. Essentially, what this process does is allow initiatives to be introduced on the state ballot if those initiatives gather enough signatures in support. Then, on Election Day, the initiative is subjected to a referendum, and if the majority of people who vote that day vote "Yes" on it, it becomes law. The state constitution can be amended this way -- by the direct voice of the people. It's called direct democracy, and it's something the founding fathers wanted to avoid.

This is how Proposition 8, a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, was passed in 2008. This is a classic illustration of why the founding fathers built the system the way they did: they wanted to avoid tyranny, whether by the majority or a vocal minority. The system is designed to prevent a group's rights from being taken away by another group. If same-sex marriage must be banned, it should be done through the usual legislative process so that a consensus can be achieved through compromise. At this point, as far as Proposition 8 is concerned, it's now up to the courts.

In general, the authors are saying that people are growing frustrated with the government pretty much because they've started expecting way too much from it. Every time something bad happens, they expect the government to intervene, regardless of whether or not it actually has a Constitutional mandate to do so. Part of this stems from the social programs that were established in the New Deal, like Social Security; people just sort of got used to the idea that the government should take care of them. The rest stems from the fact that the part of the system that can meet specific needs is nearly unable to do so because of the lack of compromise in Congress.

In general, according to the authors, the government has never been, and never will be, able to meet every single demand. As I've said elsewhere, it was in fact designed to do the opposite: to frustrate those demands and force people to give up some of them in exchange for the rest. The authors state a few times that the two branches of government elected by the people -- the executive and legislative branches -- tend to reflect society as a whole. When a refusal to compromise occurs on all sides, things stop working, and it takes some willingness to sacrifice to get things going again.

I think it's a fantastic book and should be required reading for everyone, especially if you didn't pay attention in your Civics or American Government classes in high school. It lends a new perspective on our political system regardless of your actual party affiliation, and you start to see the hallmarks of the Constitution everywhere, in a gridlocked Congress and in court decisions, in federal silence and presidential statements on controversial mosques. You learn to be amazed by our system, and that's as it should be. Highly, highly recommended.