July 4th celebrations in America in recent years have been tinged by the suspicions of a growing number of citizens that their independence has long been revoked.
Independence means more than having one’s own government on native soil and no longer being considered a ‘colony’ of another power; it also means that one’s own government is in full subservience to the will and the liberty of its people.
It is with such convictions that writings such as Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense became widely considered to have been influential in the decision on the part of American colonists to declare their independence from Britain.
Condemnation of The English Constitution
In his pamphlet, Paine characterizes government as a necessary evil, not a boon or device for human liberty in any iteration. Governments arise by necessity when a population gets to a certain size wherein rule by the collective becomes too unwieldy.
The implementation of government by a people, which was the task ahead of American colonists who sought independence, were informed by analyses of the form of government that Americans had suffered under, namely the English Constitutional Monarchy. Paine’s brief comments on it begin to reveal its shortcomings:
I know it is difficult to get over local or long standing prejudices, yet if we will suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the English constitution, we shall find them to be the base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new republican materials.
First.—The remains of monarchical tyranny in the person of the king.
Secondly.—The remains of aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the peers.
Thirdly.—The new republican materials, in the persons of the commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England.
The two first, by being hereditary, are independent of the people; wherefore in a constitutional sense they contribute nothing towards the freedom of the state.
To say that the constitution of England is a union of three powers reciprocally checking each other, is farcical, either the words have no meaning, or they are flat contradictions.
To say that the commons is a check upon the king, presupposes two things:
First.—That the king is not to be trusted without being looked after, or in other words, that a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy.
Secondly.—That the commons, by being appointed for that purpose, are either wiser or more worthy of confidence than the crown.
But as the same constitution which gives the commons a power to check the king by withholding the supplies, gives afterwards the king a power to check the commons, by empowering him to reject their other bills; it again supposes that the king is wiser than those whom it has already supposed to be wiser than him. A mere absurdity!
There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.
Some writers have explained the English constitution thus; the king, say they, is one, the people another; the peers are an house in behalf of the king; the commons in behalf of the people; but this hath all the distinctions of a house divided against itself.
What we see here, and this is common to just about every government in the world, is that those who have power (in this case, the monarchy) wish to retain their power, but under severe pressure from awakening people, are forced to accede some of the power to a branch of government that purportedly represents the people (i.e. the House of Commons).
In actual fact, the way the structure plays out almost always allows the powerful to maintain power, mainly through the deception that the people (here the commons) actually have a say in important matters. It’s really a big show, whereby small loopholes and backdoors always exist or are surreptitiously created to allow the powerful (the King and the Aristocracy, in this case) to maintain the ability to eventually get exactly what they want in all but the most trivial matters.
The American Constitution
It is with the foreknowledge of all these hazards of government that the founding fathers crafted the American Constitution. But it was not immediately after declaring independence from Britain that the constitution was made. It must be understood that the 13 States at that time were acting as fundamentally independent countries, only loosely tied together by virtue of having a common oppressor they had just escaped from.
There didn’t seem to be any rush for the individual States to bind themselves more firmly into a joint constitution, mainly because they didn’t want to give the central government more power, fearing it would endanger the rights of states and individuals. However, soon after America won its independence from Great Britain with its 1783 victory in the American Revolution, it became increasingly evident that the young republic needed a stronger central government in order to remain stable. According to this History Channel article on the constitution, this is what happened when planners met and fiercely debated policy through the summer of 1787:
They developed a plan that established three branches of national government–executive, legislative and judicial. A system of checks and balances was put into place so that no single branch would have too much authority. The specific powers and responsibilities of each branch were also laid out.
Among the more contentious issues was the question of state representation in the national legislature. Delegates from larger states wanted population to determine how many representatives a state could send to Congress, while small states called for equal representation. The issue was resolved by the Connecticut Compromise, which proposed a bicameral legislature with proportional representation of the states in the lower house (House of Representatives) and equal representation in the upper house (Senate).
The Degradation Of Liberty
Without getting into details, one could say that the history of America since the signing of the Constitution, while dotted with many great achievements, is a testimonial to the slow degradation of the liberty of its citizens. Those very things that the founding fathers were so gravely aware, and tried to safeguard against–the influence of the wealthy and powerful, the dangers of centralized power and the frailty of individuals within those seats of power–have swooped in over time and, like the English monarchy and aristocracy, have managed to maintain and even far increase their own power and control at the expense of individual liberty.
In fact, it could even be argued that the commons of the late 18th century in England had more sway when it came to governmental policy than American citizens today. A 2014 study done by Martin Gilens of Princeton University entitled ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens’ came to the following conclusions:
What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it… if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
There Is A Resistance
Despite all this, I believe things are not all doom and gloom. There are and always have been citizens in America who are aware that the country is not living by the original dictates of the constitution, and have been speaking out to take the power from the central authorities and the elites and restore it to individuals. For it is a natural right, not only for Americans but for all of humankind, that each individual is sovereign and self-determining, and any government set up by self-determining people is tasked with serving those people.
In this way, the creation of America has always been our best hope, an experiment in the emancipation of human individuals that has not yet run its course. Note the words of Thomas Paine:
The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested. The laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling.
We are, then, all in this together, trying to create a society and a world which protects and honors our natural right to sovereignty and individual self-determination. The more we equip ourselves with the knowledge and prudence the founding fathers had in putting together the safeguards that a properly adhered-to Constitution would provide, the more likely we will be able to guide this experiment to a successful outcome.