LIBERTY'S SECRETS
THE FOUNDERS DISTRUSTED THE PEOPLE -- FOR GOOD REASON
Exclusive: Joshua Charles explains their distaste for democracy, aristocracy, monarchy
We continue with our series on government, taken from clips from my latest book, “Liberty’s Secrets: The Lost Wisdom of America’s Founders.”
Clearly the Founders were very aware of the magnitude of what they had accomplished. But the question we must again ask is why and how they were able to do so. We have already outlined the large, more general concepts, but how did these actually make their way into the Constitution itself?
These were questions hotly debated at the Constitutional Convention. One thing was for sure: The longevity of the Constitution depended on the implementation of sound principles, for as Adams had noted, “If they set out wrong, they will never be able to return, unless it be by accident, to the right path.” While the great goal was to secure liberty upon a sound foundation, it was, as Madison observed, “a melancholy reflection that liberty should be equally exposed to danger whether the government have too much or too little power, and that the line which divides these extremes should be so inaccurately defined by experience.”
This sense of balance was necessary given the realities of human nature. Madison summed up the primary challenge in Federalist No. 51: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Thomas Paine famously noted that “when we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.”
As Alexander Hamilton queried, “What government ever uniformly consulted its true interest in opposition to the temptations of momentary exigencies? What nation was ever blessed with a constant succession of upright and wise administrators?”
Accordingly, the Founders knew that the structure of the new federal government itself, as well as how it related to the state governments, must be designed in such a way so as to prevent the rise of tyranny if just such a set of virtueless leaders were to arrive on the scene. To do this, it was necessary to divide power.
But contrary to what we are often taught, that the Founders were simply interested in dividing power between three branches, they were also concerned that no single group of citizens would ever have any such concentrated power either.
The Founders saw society in terms of the one, the few, and the many: the would-be dictator; the wealthy, powerful, and connected; and the mass of regular people. They trusted none of these, and therefore incorporated the power of each of them into the Constitution so as to arm all of them with the ability to counter the oppression of the others.
It is this lesser known aspect of the Constitution that will be the focus of this chapter. Jefferson spoke of the purpose of the Constitution as a means by which to “fortify us against the degeneracy of one government, and the concentration of all its powers in the hands of the one, the few, the well-born, or the many.”
By “one” government, Jefferson meant a government in which power was not divided, but concentrated in one body, one group, or one person. Other Founders often referred to this in every age the temptations of power had proved simply too alluring to resist.
Adams expounded the problem:
“No simple form of government can possibly secure men against the violence of power. … Monarchy [turns into] despotism, aristocracy [into] oligarchy, and democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes [an allusion to Judges 21:25], and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure and every one of these will soon mold itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit, and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.”
Notice that for the Founders, “democracy” was among the forms of government they most despised, for it put all power into the masses, “the many,” who had proven just as likely to abuse the rights of others as the one or the few.
Madison noted in Federalist No. 10 that it was precisely such unbounded power held by the masses that made it no surprise “that such democracies have proven to be as short in their lives as they were violent in their deaths, having been examples of turbulence and conflict, and thus incompatible with personal security or property rights.”
In this sense, our Founders did not worship the common man or think he was somehow less susceptible to the temptations of human nature than a rich or powerful man. Therefore, rather than a “simple” government, they sought to construct a “compound” government that mixed and matched various powers and sovereignties so that no one group, either in government or in society, ever became powerful enough to oppress the others.
Thus, the structure of the Constitution itself presupposes certain fundamental principles of liberty and human nature that are not subject to the whims of a majority. This would not be a Constitution in which a majority of society (“democracy”), or a majority of money (“aristocracy”), or a majority of power (“monarchy”) could always, and without opposition, dictate the course of government. It would be a finely tuned mechanism by which each would be prevented from attaining absolute supremacy, and thus the liberty of all would be secured.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/04/the-founders-distrusted-the-people-for-good-reason/#gypCYEcko4zux2pQ.99My comments: No Government can survive with out Faith in Christ Jesus and His Virtue. Chrsit and His Word is the Only Way that Works, by Design of the Creator God. That is why America is Failing, and will continue to Fail, as long as she Abandons God and His Word.
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