The Founding Fathers vs. The People: Paradoxes in American
Democracy
By Anthony
King
(Harvard University Press, 242 pages, $35)
Some of the more cherished American articles of faith take
a real beating in a new critique of U.S. institutions by a Canadian
professor now teaching in Britain. Anthony King pulls no punches in
his The Founding Fathers vs. The People: Paradoxes of American
Democracy as he squares off against the U.S. system of
government.
Foreigners such as himself, he asserts, are amazed,
astonished and puzzled by Americans’ ability to run a country with
such outdated and contradictory mechanisms — especially the musty,
dusty old Constitution and the unelected private club called the
Supreme Court. He predicts trouble ahead, and believes the Tea
Party may be the first tremor.
King begins with a rather haughty disclaimer: His book is
“merely intended to provoke Americans into thinking about aspects
of their political system that they themselves might wish to
criticize if they did pause and think about them.” His text is
non-judgmental, he says, but is dotted with qualifiers such as
“quite strange,” “very curious,” and “peculiar.”
In a word, King wonders when “they” can’t be more liked
“us.” He also seems to be saying, “Wake up, America!”
King is a professor of government at the University of
Essex, Colchester, England, and a media-friendly commentator for
British newspapers and the BBC. He has never lived in the United
States but he believes a foreigner “may notice important features
of a society — any society — that the native overlooks.” There is
a grain of truth in that. I see considerable strangeness in U.S.
culture every time I fly in for a visit. Everyone does. I get the
same cultural jolts when I go to Germany or Japan.
That said, King rather sheepishly acknowledges that
despite a Constitution that seems, in part, undemocratic or even
anti-democratic, such as the Electoral College, and “remarkably
resistant to change,” the “overwhelming majority of Americans … are
reasonably content with the [political] system as a
whole.”
He attacks our alleged conflicts and contradictions by
first lecturing the U.S. reader on how other countries do it and
second by what can only be described as a taunt — claiming
European institutions are generally more democratic than American
ones. These claims will be hard for most Americans to digest even
if they manage to swallow his rather laborious
argumentation.
Seeking safety in numbers, he quotes extensively from
other authors who have criticized the U.S. system, carefully
picking books that agree with him and excluding others.
King chooses the potential earthquake metaphor as the
unstable force underlying the U.S. system. One of the tectonic
plates, he says, is those who believe in constitutional government
and who live by an 18th-century document that needs more than
amendments — it needs to be rethought and rewritten.
The primary opposing force is what he calls “radical
democracy,” a concept “all but unique to America.” That strain is
partially exemplified by the Tea Party and holds that only “the
people” should rule, “not an in intellectual elite, not a body of
aristocrats, not some bunch of political appointees, but the
people.” What matters to these radical democrats, he says, is not
an Ivy League education but “knowledge acquired in the school of
life.”
King believes that the tension in American political life
between these two groups accounts for most, though not quite all,
the puzzling features of America’s current political system. His
reasoning, even if flawed, is worth considering as these opposing
forces become more active in an election year.
King is no impartial observer, however. In one of his more
condescending asides, he asserts that the Tea Party overlooks the
fact that one of the principal aims of the Philadelphia
Constitutional Convention of 1787 was to create a federal
government with greatly enhanced powers. “Most Tea Party activists’
manifest ignorance of their own country’s early history strikes a
foreigner as really rather touching.”
More to the point, he believes, “America’s two ideological
tectonic plates strain constantly against each other, slipping,
sliding and grinding, often yielding paradoxical
results.”
Some of his objections will seem odd to American citizens.
He takes issue with restrictions on who can run for president,
citing the age minimum of 35 and the proviso that candidates must
be born in the United States. He writes approvingly of an essay in
the Chicago-Kent Law Review labeling these points as
“decidedly un-American,” “blatantly discriminatory,” and the
Constitution’s “stupidest provision.” By requiring a U.S.
birthplace, the talent pool for candidates is substantially
reduced, he believes.
Still on the subject of the presidency, King says he looks
forward to the day when the U.S. follows the examples of the United
Kingdom and Germany and many other liberal democracies in choosing
a woman to be their head of government.
He goes on to cite the lack of a mechanism in the
Constitution for national referendums, which he interprets as
“democracy thwarted in democracy’s home.” The Founding Fathers, who
mistrusted excessive consultation with the people, would be
delighted, he adds. On the other hand, maybe national referendums
are a bad idea in such a big country, because they would be
divisive and create an “enormous body of losers, many of whom…
might well feel deeply aggrieved.”
The unelected, unaccountable, and secretive Supreme Court
gets the harshest treatment, for what he calls its anti-democratic
powers. He calls up the outcome of the 2000 Bush-Gore election as a
fresh example. Although the uncertainty in the vote count concerned
only Florida, “the people of Florida were not given the opportunity
— as they would have been in most other countries — to vote
again. A supremely political decision… was not taken by the people
but by unelected judges.”
He is “amazed” that the people, “seemingly reverentially,”
accepted the Court’s decision without question.
And yet, to help balance his theme of strangeness in the
American system, he concludes with some kind words. “Some
Americans, probably the great majority, are relaxed, tolerant,
easygoing… comfortable with diversity and have a generally
live-and-let-live approach to life.”
He even attempts to explain why the 18th century
Constitution still sort of works. “It brings together what
otherwise might fall or fly apart. It is an object of worship
because Americans badly need a solid core of institutions and
objects which they all feel that they can worship
together.”
King’s somewhat second-hand opinions on the U.S. system
might seem less peculiar if he tried two things: first, compare
American shortcomings with British or other European shortcomings.
(I live in France and wouldn’t know where to start, the strangeness
is so omnipresent.) And second, go see how the U.S. hodge-podge
actually works. He just might like it enough to do a Christopher
Hitchens and take up naturalization.
