Most often, crises do not come out of the blue. Their causes may go back a long, long time. Today, the US is in a political crisis concerning the identity and functioning of its political system. Is the US a genuine democracy? Do political minorities have too much power? Is the right to vote secured and unabridged? These questions pop up daily with frequency not seen before in our life-times.
Naturally, when such questions arise people look at the foundational law of the country, that is, the Constitution, and its Framers. There is no denying that despite its endurance through time, judged by the moral and political standards of our times, the American Constitution was a flawed foundational document.
The gravest of its flaws was that it sacrificed the abolition of slavery to the interests of founding the new Republic. And consistent with the times, it denied women the voting right. It took a bloody civil war and a long popular movement to cast these flaws away. There are though other provisions which are still with us and very much at the center of our political crisis. No direct vote to elect the President; equal State representation in the Senate regardless of population size; and granting the States the right to set voting laws and the selection of Electors in a manner of their choosing.
Collectively, these latter constitutional provisions compromise the principal feature of democratic governance: that in a democracy it is the majority that rules. Of course, the drafters of the Constitution were aware of this principle. So, why didn’t they incorporate it in the Constitution? Mostly because they had to stich a country out of thirteen states with divergent interests. But also because they were engaging in an innovative nation-building effort with no contemporary examples to guide them, and thus they were destined to commit errors. To their credit, however, they tried hard to come up with a durable political system. Actually, their effort in that regard stands in stark contrast to our own inability to address the current political crisis which threatens to jeopardize the future of the country as a democracy.
A lot has been written about the motives, frames of mind, and the imperatives on the ground that went into the writing of the Constitution. One book that tries to illuminate what informed the design of the Constitution is First Principles by Thomas Ricks. It reviews the intellectual background of the major protagonists of the American Revolution and explains how that shaped their ideas that gave us the Declaration of Independence and more importantly the Constitution. We do know that most of the Founding Fathers were intellectual products of the Enlightenment with its reliance on Reason as the guiding force of human behavior. Less known is their study of and fascination with Greek and Roman history, and especially, with political figures of honor and courage and the political workings of Greek city-states and the Roman Republic.
In their romanticized and idealized understanding of classical antiquity, the first thing that impressed the Founding Fathers was virtue and commitment to the public good. “There must be a positive Passion for the public good, and the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republic Government, nor any real Liberty.” is what John Adams wrote to a friend.
The second great concern of the Framers was the rise of an autocratic leader. Cincinnatus, who withdrew to his farm after saving Rome in 458 BCE, was the role model of a patriotic disinterested public figure whereas Caesar was the dreaded role model of a would-be autocrat. Cato and Cicero, two Romans who sacrificed their lives to save Roman Republicanism, were exactly the type of citizens Adams had envisioned in the above quote.
However, as soon as the arduous and challenging task of drafting the Constitution started, reliance on personal virtue gave way to the practicality of checks and balances. One vexing issue was how to balance the interests of the national government with those of the States. Madison believed that the interests of the States were less divided by size and more by other factors, like their stance toward slavery. How prescient he was! Today, large and small states coalesce under the Blue and Red banners, respectively.
Nonetheless, other delegates to the Constitutional Convention had a different model in mind as they argued for equal representation in the Senate. Their model was the Amphictyonic League, a loose Confederation of Greek city-states, which granted equal representation to all member cities. Of course, one cannot help but suspect that those delegates were using that ancient system to mask their desire to protect the particular economic stakes of their States, especially the preservation of slavery in the South. In the end, the argument for a stronger central government, espoused by Madison and Hamilton, gave way to more robust State rights.
We know that many of the Founding Fathers were distrustful of direct election of officials. On that, they had no other contemporary democratic government to draw from. The excesses of the French Revolution and Aristotle’s view that democracies can turn to tyrannies of the mob would not help them either in this connection. The generally low education of their contemporary fellow Americans also contributed to the elitist bias that better-informed notables had to mediate the people’s choices. The result of these apprehensions was a system of rules that have often frustrated the will of the majority.
In the end, the Constitution was a balancing act in the face of competing interests and above all a product of its time. As such it served more as a treaty between States than a national charter. Instead of fully enshrining power with the people, its many safeguards against abuse have often proved to be counterproductive. Whether they knew it or not, the Framers of the Constitution had created a constitutional order that in the end relied more on personal virtue than institutional structure. In 2020, it all came down to the honor of a limited number of citizens to uphold the constitutional order.
There is no guarantee though this will always save us. We should rather heed Hamilton’s admonition that “Reliance on patriotism has been the source of many of our errors.” Although good citizenship will always be the keystone of good governance, American democracy will survive only if the votes of the people count without disenfranchisement or partisan interference.
Let's Reason 
Right George, it was great for its time and necessary to form the union. Unfortunately, they were so careful to avoid a tyranny of the majority that we have ended up with a tyranny of the minority. For the past twenty-five years only one Republican presidential candidate has gotten a majority of the national vote. They got three presidential terms and they made very good use of those years for appointments to the federal courts.
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