Doug Wilson's Letter From America

An Inept Farmer With a Dull Knife

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, May 27, 2011

The (US) Constitution was the work of a corporate body, and that corporate body had different men and various factions in it. The Constitution was ratified by 13 states (eventually), but only with the proviso that the Bill of Rights be attached to it. These states ratified with varying degrees of enthusiasum and/or nervousness. And so we cannot say, "The Constitution was . . ." without adding a clause indicating what it was to whom.

The Federalists wanted to ratify the Constitution the way it came out of the convention. The Anti-federalists didn't want to. Under pressure from the Anti-federalists, who had a lot of good arguments, the Bill of Rights was added. This means that the Constitution, as it was adopted, was a moderate Anti-federalist document. The Tenth Amendment made it staunchly Anti-federalist. The moderation came in because there were Anti-federalists who believed that language like that found in the Tenth Amendment was explicit and clear enough not to get somehow ignored. The event has shown that this optimistic take was wrong.


Now, consider (libertarian)  Ron Paul. What he is after is limited government. The Constitution is a document which, as it stands, as it is written, also stands for limited government. But whether it is actually useful toward that end or not, it was intended as nothing more than an instrument toward the end. In other words, if we have the document, as we do, but also have a federal government that tells me when, where, why, and how I am permitted to buy my cough medicine, we have a standing hypocrisy. If we lost the document, but somehow attained to a form of limited government, that would be fine. We would have the reality. The ideal, obviously, is to have both -- for the sake of future generations.

Now when the Constitution was adopted, as soon as it was adopted, you had different men with different visions for America pushing and pulling in different directions. The Constitution, because of widespread acceptance, became the instrument they all had to use. Men like Alexander Hamilton, and the internal improvement Whigs after him, wanted to ride roughshod over the Constitution, as they galloped toward national greatness. Men like Jefferson leaned in the opposite direction, but in the grip of some kind of utopian agrarianism. Men like Patrick Henry leaned the same direction Jefferson did, but for Christian reasons. Men like Madison thought the Bill of Rights would be more than enough to prove men like Henry wrong.

In short, the men who pushed the Constitution in a centralizing direction, as far as it would go, and who then topped everything off with the true American Revolution, the War Between the States, were the men who established the Constitution as a statist document. Those who want to go back to the original intent of the Bill of Rights are those who want to reinterpret the Constitution contrary to the judicial highjinks of the last century, are doing so in the name of limited government -- and it is no inconsistency to do so.

The 19th century was the century of statist revolutions, bracketed on either end by revolutions just outside that century. It began with the French Revolution, the harbinger of all statist terrors. It culminated with the Russian Revolution, at the beginning of of the 20th century. Within the 19th century, the principal revolution was the American war (1861-1865). Those who want to pretend that the war was over slavery, and that those who point out the real import of the war are just trying to reintroduce racism as a public virtue, are doing to the records of history what they have already done to the Constitution. I am not exactly sure what that is, but the words mangle and twist do come to mind.

In short, given the level of federal aggrandizement that has occurred, driven by one group of men who are honored by having their pictures on our money ($5 and $10), and opposed by other men who also have their picture on our money ($1 and $2), we have to recognize what will happen to anyone who attempts a serious rollback of overweening government. The sounds you hear are not those of an inept farmer slaughtering his pigs with a dull knife, it is rather what passes for political discourse in this, our former republic.

You see, the aggrandizers have successfully lumped all our forefathers into one group that built us what they call "the American way." The right wing aggrandizers say that the villainy started with LBJ. But the villainy started with Hamilton, was established by Lincoln, was accelerated by both Roosevelts, and is now a grotesque parody of itself in the days of Obama.

And when the standard historical airbrush job is challenged (a very easy thing to do, provided you are courageous), people start to get really worked up. When someone argues for an approach to constitutional law that characterized our polity for a half century after the founding, he is dismissed as a frothing lunatic. I myself have been accused in just this fashion. But it troubles me not . . . for I have a copy of the Constitution. And I know how to read.