Founding Fathers Day

Maybe renaming the Fourth of July could revive some of its historic relevance. I get the sense that the holiday has become completely untethered from the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the nation, so that most Americans associate the day with drinking margaritas outside and setting off explosives, but not with the act of treason which got us going. For years on the Fourth of July I used to read the first paragraph or so of the Declaration, along with its stirring call to action at the end, often out loud, sometimes with an audience. It never failed to choke me up. It is without doubt one of the truly great political manifestoes of anytime, anywhere.

It is said, without fear of much contradiction, that every 100 years the Earth is populated with all new people. The United States has thus cycled through about 2.3 complete turnovers. No one who witnessed the Revolutionary War was around to see the Spanish-American War. No one who rode with Roosevelt on Cuba likely watched the impeachment proceedings of Bill Clinton on C-SPAN. The continuity of America, such as it is, resides in the institutions of the country and in its collective memory and adherence to certain salutary traditions.

I sometimes muse about what the Founding Fathers would think about modern America. I suppose it would be generally recognizable to them; they would be pleased that the three-branch system of government was still more or less intact, that the state/federal scheme was still around, and that an indirect method of electing presidents, the electoral college, survived.

I think they would be most surprised that the system ossified into a two-party colossus that cannot be budged or dislodged by any competing political factions. As smart as they were, they couldn't think of everything. Their careful system of checks and balances begins to break down when only two parties always control everything. If, on top of this, one party is almost always in the position of appointing all the judges, as the Republicans will have been for 20 out of the 28 years between 1980 and 2008, then the Supreme Court, that classically neutral arbiter of power, will become another political arm of the entrenched party. I don't think the Founding Fathers foresaw their delicate machine being thus traduced. They also could not have foreseen that the lasting hegemony of just two parties, who have held unchallenged sway over American politics now for at least 100 years, would be reinforced by modern media, and its tendency to reduce consumer choices to one or two dominant brands.

I imagine Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and the rest of the Big Thinkers envisioned something more fluid and responsive than a huge bureaucracy of career politicians, elected for life, insulated from and capable of manipulating the general electorate, and skilled at co-opting the small number of Big Media companies by rationing access to the rulers. They set up a system that worked at the level of the town hall, where the elected had to justify and defend themselves in front of the people who knew them, who elected them on condition they got the job done, on time and on budget. Thirteen small states spread over a manageable territory.

It is now what it is. The forms, the rhetoric, the ideas still exist. The career politicians intone the principles of the Founding Fathers at every turn, especially when the heat is on. Whether that old system still really works under modern conditions is a different question, but it is academic. The powers that be have learned to use it, and they're not going to vote themselves out of power. If big changes come again, they will not result from volitional development, but thrust upon an intransigent body politic.
Link