Federalism
Some arguments never seem to die, no matter how much we’d like them to. Is it less filling, or does it taste great? Did God make us, or did we make Him? How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood? Which is better, Federalism or Republicanism?
The forward to Joseph Ellis’ Founding Brothers doesn’t answer this last question, but it does make a fascinating claim about why we can’t ever seem to settle it. These two conflicting ideologies have ruled our country since its founding: the Republicans talk up individual and states rights at the expense of federal power, while the Federalists assert that a strong federal government endowed with certain powers to regulate the states is necessary to keep a country as large and diverse as ours from spinning out of control.
Ellis’ contention is that the framers chose to build this debate, which has bedeviled our country from the very beginning, right into the system of government that emerged from the Constitutional Convention of 1789:
What distinguishes the American Revolution from most — if not all — of subsequent revolutions worthy of the name is that, in the battle for supremacy, for the true meaning of the revolution, neither side really triumphed. Here, I don’t just mean that the American Revolution did not devour its own children and lead to blood-soaked scenes at the guillotine or the firing squad wall — though, that is true enough. Instead, I mean that the revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialog that was eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by the creation of political parties. And the subsequent political history of the United States then became an oscillation between new versions of the old tension. Which broke out in violence only on the occasion of the Civil War …
But the key point is that the debate was not resolved, so much as built into the fabric of our national identity. If that means the US is founded on a contradiction, then so be it. With that one bloody exception, we have been living with it successfully for over 200 years. Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776 We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.
Is this a form of political genius, an acknowledgement by the framers that there can be no reconciliation between the two schools of thought, and that any attempt to pick one over the other would either lead to the immediate dissolution of their fledgling country (in the case of pure Republicanism) or a monarchical/totalitarian/fascist system that violates the principles for which the Revolution was fought (in the case of pure Federalism)? Or is it just the very first instance of our leaders putting something off because they didn’t want to deal with it?
I suppose that persuasive arguments could be made for either case, but my (egregiously underinformed, I’ll grant you) belief is that they did the right thing. With one caveat: that the system they created depends for its survival on two opposing parties on either side of the issue, in a sort of everlasting tug of war that neither can ever fully win. This country can — and has, many times — survived temporary lists to one side or another; but if the shift lasts too long, if one of the combatants loses the will or the ability or the desire to fight, then the ship of state could capsize.
I wonder if this is already starting to happen. According to Ralph Nader, our neglected knight in rumpled armor — who has been has been tilting at the windmills of government and corporate corruption since before I was born — it is increasingly difficult to tell the two parties apart. They continue to differ on their signature issues, like as abortion and school vouchers, but have taken up substantially similar positions on the issues that Nader considers core elements of our country and our democracy. During his doomed run for the presidency in 2000, he claimed that Bush and Gore “are both so marginal on the great issue of the distribution of power and wealth, and the corruption of cash register politics, that whatever real differences they are willing to fight for pale in comparison to the major subjects they are exactly on the same page on.”
Hyperbole? Probably, to an extent. I, for one, would have far preferred to have seen Gore — despite his myriad shortcomings — shepherding us through our current crisis.
Or would I? My faith in the Democrats has been severely tested, lately. Witness the seeming inevitability of the success of the Bush Administration’s Iraq resolution. This egregious document is much more than a request to attack Iraq; it is the declaration of a new strategy of preemption that will allow our commander-in-chief and his coterie of belligerent cold-war hawks to attack anyone who they judge is a threat to our country. It is also, in its current form, an attempt to wrest control of the power to declare war from its rightful owners — the House and the Senate.
Nevertheless, it now appears that both houses will go ahead and approve this creature, and overwhelmingly. It is one thing to say that the Democrats need to grow a backbone and fight for something more than political position — but it may be that we’re seeing something much more serious than simple political cowardice here. This could be the first stages of the fusion of our two parties, a single political creature with two heads.
This scenario sounds far-fetched and alarmist, and it probably is. Our dilemma, however, is that we’re far too close to the situation to make any objective assessment of what’s happening. Will we know when our improbably republic beings to die? Can we know? Did the citizens of Rome understand what was happening to their empire as it slowly folded under the weight of its own unchecked expansion?
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