“Afraid to Reflect”
Chapter 1
of
Toward an American Revolution
Exposing the Constitution and other Illusions
by
Jerry Fresia
You
can read he entire book is on line here:
http://cyberjournal.org/cj/authors/fresia/index.shtml#toc
Table of Contents
Chapter 1:
Afraid To Reflect
Part I: A Constitution that Disrespects its People
Chapter 2:
Counterrevolutionay Tendencies
Chapter 3:
The Constitution: Resurrection of an Imperial System
Part II: A System of Injustice
Chapter 4:
The Lie
Chapter 5:
The Constitution and Secret Government
Part III: A Song Without Knees
Chapter 6:
When Protestors Become Police
Chapter 7:
The Need for Revolutionaries
Appendix A: Constitution of the
Appendix B: Federalist Paper #10
Afraid to Reflect
What I relate is the history of the next two centuries.
I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism.
This future speaks even now in a hundred signs; this destiny announces itself
everywhere...For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as
toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to
decade: restlessly, violently, headlong like a river that wants to reach the
end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.1
- Frederick Nietzsche, 1888
Consider certain features of the lives of three men. The
first was a very wealthy man. In l787, many considered him the richest man in
all the thirteen states. His will of l789 revealed that he owned 35,000 acres
in
The second man was a lawyer. He often expressed his admiration of monarchy
and, correspondingly, his disdain and contempt for common people. His political
attitudes were made clear following an incident which occurred in
The life of the third man was more complex, more filled with contradiction than the other two. He was wealthy. He owned over 10,000 acres and by 1809 he had enslaved 185 human beings. States one biographer, “He lived with the grace and elegance of many British lords; his house slaves alone numbered twenty-five.” Yet slavery caused him great anxiety; he seems to have sincerely desired the abolition of slavery but was utterly incapable of acting in a way which was consistent with his abolitionist sympathies. He gave his daughter twenty-five slaves as a wedding present, for example. And when confronted with his indebtedness of $107,000 at the end of his life in 1826, he noted that at least his slaves constituted liquid capital. He had several children by one of his slaves and thus found himself in the position of having to face public ridicule or keep up the elaborate pretense that his slave children did not exist. He chose the latter course and arranged, discreetly, to have them “run away.”4
Who are these three men? We know them well. They are among our “Founding
Fathers,” or Framers as we shall call them. They are the first three presidents
of the
The brief sketches of these men are but glimpses into their personal lives,
but some of the details are significantly revealing. They suggest that the
Framers, far from champions of the people, were rich and powerful men who sought
to maintain their wealth and status by figuring out ways to keep common people
down. Moreover, I shall present additional evidence about the lives of the
Framers, the Constitution, and the period in which it was written which
supports the contention that the Framers were profoundly anti-democratic
and afraid of the people. Some of the information may be surprising. In 1782,
for example, Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris believed that a stronger
central government was needed to “restrain the democratic spirit” in the
states. Eric Foner tells us that Morris's private
correspondence reveals “only contempt for the common people.” 5 Benjamin
Rush, “the distinguished scientist and physician” from
It is contrary to everything we've been taught about the Framers to hear
that they felt contempt for common people and that their Constitutional
Convention was profoundly undemocratic. Indeed such accusations sound even less
familiar in the context of the late 1980s when celebrations of the Constitution's
bicentennial have brought adulation of this country's political origins to new
and even more mindless heights. In its issue celebrating the bicentennial, Newsweek
gushed, “The educated men in post-Revolutionary
Books and celebrity television specials packed with familiar myths and
illusions have been churned out by the dozens. The Constitution itself is “the
greatest single document struck off by the hand and mind of man” we are told by
the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. Thus on the 200th
anniversary of the completion of the Constitution, former chief justice Warren
Burger, on national TV, led the nation's school children and teachers in a
recitation of the Preamble (“We the people...”) and President Reagan led the
country in a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. One of the many books
honoring our Constitution, We The People by Peter Spier,
begins by stating that the “U.S. Constitution is the oldest and most
significant written document of our history.” He goes on to say that the
Constitution “has come to symbolize freedom, justice, equality, and hope for
American citizens as individuals and as a collective, democratic nation. For
two hundred years the Constitution has provided its people with rights,
liberties, and a free society that people of other nations can only dream of.”
How familiar Spier's words sound to those of us who
have grown up in the
As citizens we are supposed to be like the nation's school children who are given no choice but to stand by their desks and mindlessly recite a pledge of allegiance to a flag, a pledge that was introduced into schools at the turn of the century to counter the influence of ideas that immigrant school children had received from their parents and from distant lands. The fundamental purpose of bicentennial ideology, then, is to encourage us not to explore competing ways of thinking or to ask hard questions about our heritage. We are not encouraged to think because it is understood that thinking sometimes leads to disagreement, or worse, to the challenging of some sacred text. Instead we are encouraged to believe. Efforts to transform thinking citizens into believing citizens, we should point out, really began at just about the time that the Framers were planning the Constitutional Convention. Disturbing symptoms that common people were ignoring customs of social deference and were beginning to think for themselves led some Framers such as John Dickinson to urge that political instruments be devised to protect “the worthy against the licentious.” Benjamin Rush, in a proposal entitled “The Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” stated: “I consider it possible to convert men into republican machines. This must be done, if we expect them to perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the state.” And so it must be done today, if people are to “perform their parts properly.” The aim of the ideological manager is, in effect, the creation of millions of “republican machines.”9
Common sense tells us that people who spend a good deal of time either acquiring or protecting a vast personal empire or defending a king's soldiers against the dispossessed would also have believed that the possession of enormous privilege was just and that protection of that privilege ought to be sought and maintained at considerable cost. Common sense should further compel us to wonder whether such people could write a constitution that would effectively transfer power from their few hands into the hands of the many, that is, into the hands of the poor, the debtors and people without property. Brian Price, an American historian who has spent countless hours studying early American elites' rise to power, asks a similar question: “Is it possible for a class which exterminates the native peoples of the Americas, replaces them by raping Africa for humans it then denigrates and dehumanizes as slaves, while cheapening and degrading its own working class - is it possible for such a class to create democracy, equality, and to advance the cause of human freedom?” The implicit answer is, “No. Of course not.”
There is a more specific purpose to all of this, however. If we do accept the illusion - the Constitution as sacred, a “shrine up in the higher stretches of American reverence” as Time magazine put it, then the serious problems that we face today would have to be aberrations, or deviations from the sacred text. The fundamental principles embedded within the Constitution, because it is “the greatest single document struck off by the hand and mind of man [sic]” and probably ordained by God at that, are intrinsically good. Only the sins of inept bureaucrats and politicians or the zealotry of ideologues ever get us into serious trouble. It follows from this mythology that there are no fundamental connections between the Constitution and the current crisis. Solving our problems always means going back to the Constitution and, not coincidentally, to the power relationships and privilege in the private sphere (or economy) which the Framers sought to protect.
For example, as Constitutional celebrations were unfolding in the summer of
1987, so too was the tale of government drug-running, assassination, secret
government, and private control of foreign policy known as the Iran-Contra
affair. A documentary produced for the public broadcasting system, “The Secret
Government: The Constitution in Crisis,” and which aired in the fall of 1987,
broke new ground by revealing to a mass audience some of the facts regarding
the role that the federal government has played in assassinating foreign
leaders and in over-throwing democratically elected governments. Yet the
documentary was quite explicit in stating that this “secret government,” rather
than possibly having its roots in the distrust and fear of common people
expressed by the Framers or in their protection and elevation of private power,
is a violation of Constitutional principles. Of course, the Constitution was
never critically examined. Instead, the sense of empowered citizenship was
invoked as the hallowed words “We the People” were dragged slowly and
dramatically across the screen, patriotic music provided the backdrop of
sanctification, and Bill Moyers intoned, “Our nation
was born in rebellion against tyranny. We are the fortunate heirs of those who
fought for
So what is missing? Moyers said not a word about corporate power, which the Framers chose to insulate from popular accountability and which has since grown and become concentrated and arbitrary in ways unimaginable to elites of the eighteenth century. The failure of the Constitution to provide checks against corporate (private) power can be directly linked to the private control of foreign policy. This defect, so obviously undemocratic, has become increasingly exposed. Moyer's revelations divert our attention away from this essential flaw and thus serve as a quite sophisticated, albeit ineffective, cover-up. Nor did Moyers tell us that some government officials such as the Director of Central Intelligence, who may spend money “without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds,” are not obligated to uphold certain laws as are the governed. Could it be that by design the Constitution requires that a few “considerate and virtuous” citizens check and balance the “interested and overbearing” majority? Perhaps, but such subtleties tend to complicate, if not contradict, what must be among the greatest stories ever told, namely that the Constitution begins with the words, “We the People.” Stop there, we are told. Do not go any further. For to go beyond the grade-school version of our founding is to raise the possibility that the Constitution might be defective in some fundamental way. Viewers might conclude that U.S.-sponsored terrorism may not be a deviation from Constitutional principles but rather the logical consequence of a system which protects the freedom of a handful of Americans to control a good deal of the earth's resources and, correspondingly, the lives of millions of people scattered around the globe. Similar connections between our founding ideas and the virulent racism that now exists, the subordination of women, the massive inequality that marks our society, and what some are pointing to as irreversible environmental degradation could also be made. To move beyond the history constructed for us, then, would be to admit the possibility that one could expose and call into question the legitimacy of the Framers and the system of elite rule they established through the Constitution. It would be permitting citizens of today to become more intimately familiar and identified with the lives and values of the people - a majority - one must emphasize, who opposed the Constitution at the time it was given to the states for ratification. Of course, if the ideological managers were to permit an honest reassessment of who the Framers really were and what they really did, nothing might come of it. But it is the very intensity itself of the ideological stranglehold over our own history which suggests that it is ruling elites, not you or I, who are afraid that if a candid assessment of the Framers and the Constitution were to become common knowledge, it would help citizens to explain their sense of political powerlessness and invite the kind of self-discovery that underlies effective radical politics. “The monopoly of truth, including historical truth,” states Daniel Singer, “is implied in the monopoly of power.”
Three Obstacles to Effective Radical Politics
The central theme of this book can be summarized as follows:
We live in an undemocratic system that is a major source of terror and
repression, both at home and around the world. In large measure this is due to
the tremendous concentration of unchecked corporate power. Our responsibility,
as citizens and as a people, is to challenge the structure of power within our
society, particularly the private power of the corporate-banking community. The
Constitution prohibits this. In fact, the Constitution was intended to ensure
that only a few people would run the government and that they would be the few
who would run the economy. The crisis confronting us, in other words, demands
effective radical politics and a departure from many Constitutional values,
assumptions, and principles. Effective radical politics, however, is inhibited
by our acceptance and glorification of the Constitution and the Framers who
engineered its ratification. It is as if we believe the IBM ad which stated,
“The Constitution is a political work of art...and...It's also the most
important contract of your life.” We shouldn't have to depend upon or live by
IBM's conception of justice today anymore than we should have to depend upon or
live by the conception of justice articulated by rich and powerful white men,
many of them slaveowners, who lived 200 years ago.
Our values are not their values. The government of the
Ideologically, then, there are three obstacles to effective radical
politics. They are 1) respect for the Constitution as a fair and equitable and
democratic document; 2) the underlying belief that the
A Constitution That Disrespects Its People
I have been suggesting that at the very heart of our political institutions, at the very core of our way of doing politics is fear and distrust of the political activity of common people. As we explore more deeply the vision of the Framers and the historical context of their work, we shall find that the Framers repeatedly expressed what they felt was the need to check and balance the political expression of people who were not like themselves, who were not involved in the market economy, who did not own much property, and who were not very rich. John Adams believed that “Men in general...who are wholly destitute of property, are also too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent on other men to have a will of their own.”10 In fact, when the Framers used the term “the people” they had in mind the “middling” property owning people or, generally speaking, the middle class. It is the political expression of this middle class which they also distrusted but which they felt they had to permit if property owners were to be free from government interference. The Framers were thus willing to permit the limited participation (through the House of Representatives - remember that the Constitution did not permit the direct election of the Senate and we still do not elect the president directly) of white males who met state property qualifications.
The political expression of classes below the middle class property owners, women, or people of color, indentured servants, or people with no property - in short, the “people in the first instance” as Charles Pinckney called them, or the majority, was simply “nonsense” and “wrong.” Political expression by these groups was not permitted and as we shall note, the Constitution was purposefully made to be anti-majoritarian in several ways. Representatives were to be of and among “the better people” who would have a material stake in society, who would be less given to some common impulse of passion, and who would be able to tell us what our real needs and interests are. Amendments have broadened the definition of “the people” to include most of those who were excluded in 1787. But the Constitution's very design, its processes, and its structure still gives life to the eighteenth century elitist belief that rich and powerful people ought to rule. The Constitution still disrespects the political wisdom of most people, of workers, particularly people of color, of women, and of those who happen to be poor.
A System of Injustice
The vision of the Framers, even for Franklin and Jefferson
who were less fearful of the politics of common people than most, was that of a
strong centralized state, a nation whose commerce and trade stretched around
the world. In a word, the vision was one of empire where property owners would
govern themselves. It would be a nation in which ambitious industrious (white
Anglo-Saxon) men would be finally free from the Crown and from the Church to do
with their property as they pleased and as their talents permitted. It would be
a nation organized around private power where there would be freedom to acquire
wealth and the function of the state and of its executive would be to protect
these freedoms and opportunities, defined as natural rights. Meanwhile, it was
perceived that the only real threat, to paraphrase
There is a tension, then, between the elite who privately own productive resources and the multitudes who are made dependent, who, as Karl Marx noted, must sell their lives in order to live. Within this relationship of power, the Constitution protects the power of the more powerful. It does this because the Framers believed that it was the right of a few “better” people to own and control much of the earth's resources. And it does this because the Framers believed that the lives of women, people of color, and the poor ought to be defined in terms of the desires and interests of the rich. Resistance to this tyranny, from the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 to the revolutionary leaders of today who are genuinely committed to directing meager resources to the majority poor in the Third World, are and have been brutally repressed because the national army created by the Constitution is directed by that document to preserve these relationships of disparity. Of course, relationships of disparity are not referred to as such by elites. They would prefer to call them “our rights” and “our freedom.” Thus “our” concepts of rights and of freedom are interwoven with the Framers' vision of conquest and empire and privilege.
A “Song Without Knees”
Eric Foner writes that in the minds of the “founding fathers” was a “view of human nature as susceptible to corruption, basically self-interested and dominated by passion rather than reason. It was because of this natural `depravity' of human nature that democracy was inexpedient: a good constitution required a `mixed' government to check the passions of the people, as well as representing their interests.” We should add that the “founding fathers” were less worried about checking their own passions. They did not see themselves as depraved. Only common people were depraved.11
We are the legacy of that warped view. Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers point out that none of the major initiatives of the Reagan administration (tax cuts for the rich, budget cuts in social programs, and increased militarism, particularly increased funding for nuclear weapons and the sponsorship of terrorist armies such as the Contras) followed popular initiatives. Instead they were initiated by business elites.12 Ours is a system, as Noam Chomsky regularly reminds us, of elite decisionmaking with occasional ratification by an irrelevant public. When one studies the views of the Framers, one discovers that it was never intended to be otherwise. The larger problem, however, is that we have become used to playing a subservient role. We live, politically, on our knees.
Martin Luther King, Jr. at times stated that perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments
of the Civil Rights movement was that blacks, who had been brought to
For her and the others who participated, the movement of
1965 became the central event of their lives, a time of self-liberation when
they stood and marched to glory with Martin Luther King. Yes, they were
surprised at themselves, proud of the strength they had displayed in
confronting the state of
In so many ways all of us live in chains and darkness. Writes Starhawk, “Women, working-class people, people of color, and people without formal education, are conditioned to think of their opinions and feelings as valueless. They are taught to listen to an inner voice that murmurs, `You shouldn't say that. You only think that because something is wrong with you. Everybody else knows more about things than you do.' ”14 We have yet to learn to straighten our backs. We wish to believe that confronting those who disrespect us is somehow bad or itself disrespectful. But we need to learn that proper confrontation is a source of dignity and a necessary first step to politics. Otherwise politics becomes draining. For without a sense of confidence and purpose we play by the rules the Framers set down, rules that were designed for the “depraved.”
In
[Chapter One ends with a brief examination of the
thirty-five most important members of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It
becomes clear that they all are rich men who are concerned about protecting
their wealth from the common people in
See also: (Not Required)
"Completing the American Revolution" by Norman D. Livergood
"[The Framers of the Constitution] . . . had no wish to usher in democracy in the United States. They were not making war upon the principle of aristocracy and they had no more intention than had the Tories of destroying the tradition of upper-class leadership in the colonies. Although they hoped to turn the Tories out of office, they did not propose to open these lush pastures to the common herd. They did believe, however, that the common people, if properly bridled and reined, might be made allies in the work of freeing the colonies from British rule and that they--the gentry--might reap the benefits without interference. They expected, in other words, to achieve a 'safe and sane' revolution of gentlemen, by gentlemen, and for gentlemen."
John C. Miller. (1943). Origins of the American Revolution
"In a very real sense, the Constitution was a coup d'état by the bankers and other 'moneyed interests' who were trying to protect their investments in the collapsing post-Revolution economy."
Michael Hasty, "Uncommon Sense: 21st Century American Revolution," Online Journal, Dec 4, 2004
An
Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
by Charles
A. Beard
To
Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States
Constitution
by Robert A. McGuire
A
People's History of the United States 1492-Present
by Howard Zinn
Cracks in the Constitution
by
Ferdinand Lundberg
Review of Cracks
in the Constitution