US Constitution

 Here is a view of the founders of the US, maybe more objective than what one usually gets.  Every country seems to want to deify its founders.  The American Founding Fathers were, except for Franklin, white male aristocratic wealthy landowners (Franklin was probably America's first millionaire and was a self-made entrepreneur).  They were fairly spread over the political spectrum, from the extreme right (Hamilton) to the center right (Washington and Adams) to the extreme left (Paine and, slightly less extreme, Jefferson).  The actual constitution was written mainly by folk in Washington's camp, the Bill of Rights by folk in Jefferson's (Jefferson opposed the original Constitution).

They were of course all well-educated gentlemen, and, with but a couple of exceptions, only nominal Christian, sharing the common Enlightenment Deism of the time. None, however, expressed antipathy to Christianity in public (except Adams in some limited cases).

Many of them owned slaves and to my knowledge only Adams ever expressed any dislike of this; being from Massachusetts that would not be surprising.  Jefferson appears we now know from DNA evidence to have been a hypocrite on that subject, having had a slave woman for his mistress (this was rumored and even in some newspapers then, but he adamantly denied it), and not freeing any of them until his death (such manumissions for slaves close to the master were common).

The political system they created was in my opinion not very good, involving several undemocratic and unfortunate compromises.  Its Constitution cannot be listed among the reasons the US has been so successful.  Presidential systems are inherently subject to gridlock, something that at one point led to the Civil War and which has always, except in a few periods of one-party rule (reconstruction), hindered American political action.  After the Founders passed, very few men of genuine distinction made it up the latter, the system being heavily political.  The political election system and general franchise fosters non-intellectual and emotional and, well, politicians rather than statesmen.  Read that as people good at winning elections rather than people good at governing.

There is a good deal in that assessment that historians would recognize, but I think some parts need qualification.

The founders were indeed overwhelmingly elite white men. A few, such as Franklin, came from relatively modest backgrounds, but the leadership of the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention was dominated by property-owning gentlemen. The notion that they were representatives of the average American farmer or laborer is largely a later patriotic myth.

On religion, "nominal Christian" may go a bit too far. Several founders were conventionally Christian, though often in a broad eighteenth-century sense. Adams remained a Christian of a Unitarian sort. Washington attended church regularly but was notably reserved about doctrine. Jefferson famously edited the miracles out of the Gospels. Franklin was a self-described deist. The common thread was less disbelief than the influence of the Enlightenment, which encouraged religious toleration and skepticism toward ecclesiastical authority.

Your political classification would puzzle most modern political scientists because "left" and "right" did not yet mean what they do today. Hamilton favored a strong central government, a national bank, and close ties to commerce and finance. In modern American language, some of those positions sound almost centrist or technocratic rather than "extreme right." Jefferson championed agrarian democracy and distrust of centralized power, but he was also a slaveholding planter defending a highly unequal social order. Mapping eighteenth-century figures onto a twenty-first-century spectrum is difficult.

On slavery, Adams stands out because he never owned slaves. But he was not alone in expressing discomfort with the institution. Washington gradually became troubled by it and freed his slaves in his will. Franklin became president of an abolition society late in life. Hamilton had abolitionist sympathies, though his personal relationship to slavery remains debated. Jefferson is perhaps the most tragic and contradictory figure: he wrote some of the strongest condemnations of slavery in American political literature while remaining deeply entangled in the system throughout his life. The DNA evidence connecting the descendants of Sally Hemings to Jefferson is now accepted by the overwhelming majority of historians.

As for the Constitution, here I think reasonable people can disagree. Many of its compromises were undeniably undemocratic. The original Constitution tolerated slavery, created the Electoral College, gave every state equal representation in the Senate regardless of population, and originally left senators to be chosen by state legislatures. Those were political bargains, not democratic ideals.

Yet I would hesitate to say the Constitution cannot be counted among the reasons for American success. One could argue almost the opposite: that its durability, protection of property rights, relative stability of government, and mechanisms for peaceful transfers of power created an unusually favorable environment for economic growth. The question is whether those benefits outweighed the costs of gridlock and institutional rigidity.

Your criticism of presidential systems is one that many comparative political scientists share. Parliamentary systems often resolve deadlocks more efficiently because executive and legislative authority are fused rather than separated. The United States deliberately chose a system that makes action difficult. The founders feared concentrated power more than governmental paralysis.

The Civil War is an especially interesting case. I would not attribute it primarily to constitutional gridlock. The deeper cause was the irreconcilable conflict over slavery. However, constitutional compromises postponed resolution of that conflict for decades and arguably made the eventual rupture more violent.

Your final observation—that electoral politics tends to reward campaigners more than governors—has been voiced since antiquity. One can find versions of it in the works of Plato, Aristotle, and later political thinkers. The founders themselves worried about demagogues. Ironically, they built a republic partly intended to filter popular passions through institutions, yet over time the system became far more democratic than they envisioned.

One point I would add is that Americans often speak of "the Founding Fathers" as though they were a single coherent group. In reality they were a coalition held together largely by a common desire for independence. The disagreements between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, or between John Adams and Thomas Paine, were profound. In many respects, the great debates of American politics began before the Constitution was even ratified. The founders were less a unified band of sages than the first generation of participants in a long-running argument about what America should be.

A lot here: as to the Constitution's role in US success, it held America back.  The success came from geography and culture.  My classification of how the founders would be seen on the political spectrum today is I think accurate; the fact that such a spectrum was not seen at the time isn't really relevant.  You are certainly right that slavery was becoming less and less acceptable in many circles over time, this led do the eventual eruption.  

Your view is actually fairly close to one of the major schools of historical interpretation. There has long been a debate between those who emphasize institutions and those who emphasize underlying conditions.

The institutionalists argue that the Constitution, the rule of law, protection of contracts, and stable government were decisive. The geographic and cultural school argues that America's success would have happened under almost any reasonably competent government because it inherited extraordinary advantages: vast navigable rivers, enormous agricultural land, abundant natural resources, relative security from invasion, a rapidly growing population, and a culture that encouraged enterprise and literacy.

If one compares the United States not to Europe but to much of Latin America, the institutionalists have a stronger case. If one compares it to Canada or Australia, which shared many of the same advantages and often developed parliamentary systems that arguably function more smoothly, then your criticism gains force.

I suspect the truth is that geography and culture supplied the fuel while institutions determined how efficiently it burned. One can imagine America prospering under a different constitution. It is harder to imagine America prospering without its geography.

As for placing the founders on a modern spectrum, I understand what you mean. If we ask not where they stood in 1787 but where they would fit today, then Jefferson does begin to look surprisingly far left on some issues. He distrusted concentrated financial power, favored broad political participation among ordinary white citizens, was suspicious of standing armies, and feared commercial oligarchy. Hamilton, by contrast, favored a strong central state, an activist economic policy, a national financial system, and rule by what he considered the most capable elite.

The difficulty is that modern "left" and "right" bundle together positions that were not bundled together then. Jefferson's hostility to centralized authority would place him closer to some modern libertarians, while his rhetoric about equality sounds left-wing. Hamilton's support for state-directed economic development sounds almost like something a modern center-left technocrat might advocate, yet his social outlook was decidedly aristocratic.

The slavery question is particularly revealing because it shows how much the culture was shifting beneath the founders' feet. By the 1770s and 1780s slavery was already on the defensive intellectually in many elite circles. What makes the Constitution remarkable is not that it protected slavery—that was politically unavoidable if there was to be a union at all—but that it never explicitly recognized a property right in slaves. Both sides later noticed this omission.

The tragedy, perhaps, is that the founders bought time without solving the problem. They constructed a system that could contain the contradiction for several generations. As long as slavery remained a regional institution and abolition remained a minority sentiment, compromise worked. Once large numbers of Americans came to regard slavery as morally intolerable while others regarded it as economically and socially indispensable, constitutional machinery could no longer paper over the disagreement.

That is one reason I hesitate to blame the Civil War primarily on constitutional design. Even a more efficient parliamentary system might eventually have faced the same collision. The underlying issue had become too fundamental. The question was no longer how the country should be governed, but whether millions of human beings could be owned as property. Once enough people answered that question differently, some kind of rupture became increasingly likely.

Oh no, the Civil War was because of slavery, not the Constitution.  It was just that the Constitution, creating gridlock, did not help.  As far as the benefits of rule of law and protection of property and so on, a lot of systems provide these.  This was hardly unique to the Constitution and in fact in it was a bit secondary.

I think that's a stronger and more defensible version of the argument.

There is a tendency in American civic mythology to treat the Constitution as a uniquely brilliant invention that created prosperity almost by itself. Historically, that is difficult to sustain. By the late nineteenth century, countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and several northwestern European states offered secure property rights, predictable courts, commercial freedom, and relatively honest administration. America did not have a monopoly on those virtues.

What America did possess, to an unusual degree, was room to grow. It had enormous expanses of fertile land, internal waterways, rich resources, relative insulation from foreign threats, and a population that was both highly literate and remarkably mobile. Those advantages would have favored economic growth under a wide variety of constitutional arrangements.

Where I might differ slightly is in saying that institutions still matter, but perhaps more negatively than positively. A mediocre constitution can squander great advantages; a brilliant constitution cannot create them from nothing. The United States may have succeeded despite some constitutional features rather than because of them.

Your point about gridlock fits into that framework. The Constitution was deliberately designed to make decisive action difficult. The founders feared concentrated power more than inefficiency. In some circumstances that caution may have been beneficial. In others it produced paralysis. The Senate, the Electoral College, federalism, separation of powers, judicial review, staggered elections—all create veto points. The system is exceptionally good at stopping things and often poor at doing things.

The interesting comparison is not with unstable countries but with parliamentary democracies. A country like Canada inherited many of the same cultural and geographic advantages as the United States yet generally experiences less institutional deadlock. That does not prove parliamentary systems are superior in every respect, but it does weaken the claim that America's particular constitutional design was indispensable to its success.

Regarding slavery and the Civil War, I think your formulation is exactly right. The cause was slavery. Gridlock was not the cause. Rather, constitutional arrangements made it easier to postpone confronting the issue. Compromises accumulated: the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska arrangements, and so forth. The machinery kept buying time while the underlying disagreement grew larger and more emotionally charged.

There is a broader irony here. The founders were exceptionally good at compromise, perhaps because they belonged to a relatively small political elite that shared a common educational and cultural background despite their disagreements. The constitutional system they created preserved the possibility of compromise, but it could not guarantee the existence of people willing to make one. Once Americans reached the point where many regarded slavery as a moral abomination and many others regarded attacks on slavery as an existential threat, no amount of constitutional engineering was likely to restore consensus.

In that sense, constitutions may be less important than political culture. A good constitution can help a society govern itself. It cannot make a society agree about fundamental questions when it no longer does. That seems fairly close to the point you are making.

Actually I hadn't gotten to my main point: the Constitution is not Holy Writ.

That is a point with which many of the founders themselves would probably have agreed.

One of the curiosities of American political culture is that the Constitution is often treated with a reverence approaching scripture. Schoolchildren memorize parts of it, politicians invoke "what the founders intended" almost as a theological argument, and constitutional debates sometimes resemble disputes over the interpretation of sacred texts.

Yet the framers themselves knew they were fallible. They disagreed constantly. The Constitution emerged from compromise, not revelation. It replaced an earlier governing document, the Articles of Confederation, because that document was judged inadequate. And it included an amendment process precisely because its authors expected future generations to improve it.

Jefferson made the point especially strongly. He argued that no generation has the right to govern future generations indefinitely and even speculated that constitutions should expire periodically and be rewritten. He never regarded the Constitution as a finished work.

The American tendency to venerate the Constitution may arise partly because the country lacks some of the other sources of national identity that older nations possess. Americans do not have a monarchy, an ancient church, or a thousand-year national history. The founding documents became, in a sense, civil scripture.

There is a difference between respecting a constitution and sanctifying it. Respect says, "This framework has served us reasonably well and should not be altered casually." Sanctification says, "This framework is inherently wise because the founders created it." Those are very different propositions.

The first is prudent. The second is historically difficult to defend. The founders were intelligent and accomplished men, but they were also eighteenth-century gentlemen working under severe constraints, making compromises with slavery, excluding women from political participation, and creating institutions that reflected the assumptions of their own era. They were statesmen, not prophets.

In fact, one could argue that the most faithful way to honor the founders is not to assume they were always right, but to treat constitutional arrangements as they did: as human inventions to be judged by their consequences. If an institution works, keep it. If it does not work, improve it. That is a very Enlightenment attitude, and arguably more in keeping with the spirit of the founding generation than constitutional worship is.

What is striking is that Americans often speak as if questioning the Constitution is somehow un-American. Historically, some of the most important Americans—including Jefferson, abolitionists, suffragists, Progressives, and civil-rights leaders—spent much of their lives criticizing parts of the constitutional order and arguing for change. The Constitution that exists today is already the product of those criticisms. It is not the same Constitution that emerged from Philadelphia in 1787.