Well, At Least the Tea Party Takes the Constitution Seriously
In Monday's Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz notes that the Federalist Papers remain an indispensable text for anyone seeking to understand the Constitution and the principles that underlie it--which is to say, of course, for anyone seeking to understand the American experiment in democracy.
Do our institutions of higher learning take the Federalist Papers seriously? No they do not.
An excerpt:
By the end of 1788, a total of 85 essays had been gathered in two volumes under the title The Federalist. Written at a brisk clip and with the crucial vote in New York hanging in the balance, the essays formed a treatise on constitutional self-government for the ages.
The Federalist deals with the reasons for preserving the union, the inefficacy of the existing federal government under the Articles of Confederation, and the conformity of the new constitution to the principles of liberty and consent. It covers war and peace, foreign affairs, commerce, taxation, federalism and the separation of powers. It provides a detailed examination of the chief features of the legislative, executive and judicial branches. It advances its case by restatement and refutation of the leading criticisms of the new constitution. It displays a level of learning, political acumen and public-spiritedness to which contemporary scholars, journalists and politicians can but aspire. And to this day it stands as an unsurpassed source of insight into the Constitution's text, structure and purposes.
At Harvard, at least, all undergraduate political-science majors will receive perfunctory exposure to a few Federalist essays in a mandatory course their sophomore year. But at Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Berkeley, political-science majors can receive their degrees without encountering the single surest analysis of the problems that the Constitution was intended to solve and the manner in which it was intended to operate.
Most astonishing and most revealing is the neglect of The Federalist by graduate schools and law schools. The political science departments at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Berkeley—which set the tone for higher education throughout the nation and train many of the next generation's professors—do not require candidates for the Ph.D. to study The Federalist. And these universities' law schools (Princeton has no law school), which produce many of the nation's leading members of the bar and bench, do not require their students to read, let alone master, The Federalist's major ideas and main lines of thought.
How can this be?
Particularly in the aftermath of the New Deal, according to the progressive conceit, understanding America's founding and the framing of the Constitution are as useful to dealing with contemporary challenges of government as understanding the horse-and-buggy is to dealing with contemporary challenges of transportation.
Berkowitz doesn't go into this, but his argument makes me love the Tea Party even more. As a friend who works in a bookstore told me not long ago, once the Tea Party movement got started a couple of years ago, books on the Constitution, the Founders, and, yes, The Federalist, really took off. Ordinary Americans--taking our founding principles seriously. Hamilton, Madison and Jay would have been delighted.
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May '11
Re: Well, At Least the Tea Party Takes the Constitution Seriously
Want to listen to the Federalist Papers while going to/from work?
http://archive.org/details/federalist_papers_librivox
Download them for free from Librivox. They provide audio books that are in the public domain at no charge. And not just stuffy classics. I downloaded Harry Harrison's "The Ethical Engineer" for a recent cross-country trip. It made the time and miles fly by.
Mar '12
Re: Well, At Least the Tea Party Takes the Constitution Seriously
Aaron Miller:
Which is to say that the Left is half-right. The history of our nation's founding and the Constitution are not entirely relevant to modern American government. Some parts of the Constitution survive, but other parts have become a conservative dream of paradise lost.
True. Conservatives need to understand the historical realities that have changed the Constitution (including most obviously, Constitutional Amendments). The original constitution that is the reference point for the Federalist Papers, particularly the relative relations of State and Federal powers, was changed irrevocably by the union victory in the Civil War and the post-Civil War and Progressive era amendments. Elimination of the threat of secession and direct election of Senators have irrevocably changed the federalist system in ways that make the views of the Founders on such questions less relevant. The extra-constitutional rise of the administrative state makes it vulnerable to attack on Constitutional separation of powers grounds, and the US Supreme Court appears willing to acknowledge some originalist limits on Commerce Clause powers. Even here, however, the broad income taxation powers of the 16 Amendment may allow future Democratic majorities to impose a health insurance mandate through the income tax code.
Aug '10
Re: Well, At Least the Tea Party Takes the Constitution Seriously
Grendel
William F. Buckley once noted how liberals could not truly be patriots. The only country they could love is some potential America.
Anybody know the text of the actual quote? I'd love to add it to the "favourite quotes" section of my Facebook profile.
Aug '10
Re: Well, At Least the Tea Party Takes the Constitution Seriously
Pilli: Want to listen to the Federalist Papers while going to/from work?
http://archive.org/details/federalist_papers_librivox
Download them for free from Librivox. They provide audio books that are in the public domain at no charge. And not just stuffy classics. I downloaded Harry Harrison's "The Ethical Engineer" for a recent cross-country trip. It made the time and miles fly by.
You can also download most of Librivox's stuff from iTunes in podcast form.
http://itunes.apple.com/artist/librivox/id343203429
Downloading the Federalist Papers (and the antifederalist papers) as a series of podcasts instead of managing the mp3 files one-by-one is inordinately convenient.
Feb '12
Re: Well, At Least the Tea Party Takes the Constitution Seriously
The Constitutional Law departments of law schools are largely overrun by postmodern Marxists (or Progressives, who are not so different). What goes on is not the dispassionate study of one case after another. There is a deliberate attempt, not always overt, to prevent students from taking the Constitution seriously.
Moreover, the case study method itself was promoted by Progressives, after being invented in 1870 by Prof. Langdell at Harvard. This approach to legal education favored, among other things, discarding the common law (and the Constitution) and replacing it with more "modern" statutory laws.
Edited on May 7, 2012 at 9:35pmMar '12
Re: Well, At Least the Tea Party Takes the Constitution Seriously
Leporello
Moreover, the case study method itself was promoted by Progressives, after being invented in 1870 by Prof. Langdell at Harvard. This approach to legal education favored, among other things, discarding the common law (and the Constitution) and replacing it with more "modern" statutory laws. · 2 hours ago
Edited 27 minutes ago
This is surely wrong. The case study method if anything highlights the common law (in the sense that it focuses almost exclusively on judicial opinion writing and analysis). As to Constitutional interpretation, the method itself is neutral. Of course, law professors applying "critical legal theory" render any text meaningless -- judicial, constitutional or statutory. But there is nothing in the case method that makes CLT or even realism inevitable.
In my experience Administrative Law and Tax Law were the only two areas in which court opinions (and the Constitution) took a back seat to statutory and regulatory law.