DiogenesTheWiser
Well-Known Member
Sooo many right wingers on the internets, TV, and in person have some really silly viewpoints on the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps this goes back to Glenn Beck or David Horowitz and some of those other media personalities that give really shitty history lessons.
But too many conservatives are asserting that the Constitution is a document that checks the power of the federal government. To point out the error contained in such a worldview, we have to point out the origins chicken and the egg.
The Constitution came first, then the federal government. Not the other way around. Before the Constitution was being drafted, after it was drafted up until 1789, there was no federal government. Rather, the United States had been governed from 1776 by the Articles of Confederation--a military/mutual defense pact--that set up only a congress, which set up a military (that it disbanded in 1781-82 while refusing to pay soldiers their pensions). Every locality in every state had a militia to guard against Indian attacks and slave rebellions, or the possibility of British attacks from Canada or Spanish attacks from Florida or Louisiana. There was no need for a standing army, and many of the Americans of that generation didn't believe that a federal government was even necessary.
The Constitutional convention was an attempt to make the Articles more workable. The new nation needed a system for conducting international relations. They needed to make conflicting state laws more consistent. They needed a better system of taxation, especially given all the trade going on in the early years of the American nation.
What the convention created was the U.S. Constitution--the very document that sets up the framework of the American government. That framework is a republic with several different branches of government, executive, judicial, legislative, and states. The Constitution was written in a language that makes the republic perpetual, so the Constitution also sustains the federal government.
This is basic level American civics taught in the ninth grade in most schools in America. To claim that the Constitution limits the federal government implies that the federal government existed before the Constitution was drafted and ratified. That's ahistorical. The branches of the federal government have limited power--limits set up at the time the federal government was created.
Anyway, I hate to break it to right wingers, but the Constitution is a liberal system. The whole idea of three branches of government with certain and specific powers serving as a check on each branch's power is an idea borne out of liberal philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.
Here's historian Gordon Wood's brief take on the federal government: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/creating-new-government/essays/creating-new-government
But too many conservatives are asserting that the Constitution is a document that checks the power of the federal government. To point out the error contained in such a worldview, we have to point out the origins chicken and the egg.
The Constitution came first, then the federal government. Not the other way around. Before the Constitution was being drafted, after it was drafted up until 1789, there was no federal government. Rather, the United States had been governed from 1776 by the Articles of Confederation--a military/mutual defense pact--that set up only a congress, which set up a military (that it disbanded in 1781-82 while refusing to pay soldiers their pensions). Every locality in every state had a militia to guard against Indian attacks and slave rebellions, or the possibility of British attacks from Canada or Spanish attacks from Florida or Louisiana. There was no need for a standing army, and many of the Americans of that generation didn't believe that a federal government was even necessary.
The Constitutional convention was an attempt to make the Articles more workable. The new nation needed a system for conducting international relations. They needed to make conflicting state laws more consistent. They needed a better system of taxation, especially given all the trade going on in the early years of the American nation.
What the convention created was the U.S. Constitution--the very document that sets up the framework of the American government. That framework is a republic with several different branches of government, executive, judicial, legislative, and states. The Constitution was written in a language that makes the republic perpetual, so the Constitution also sustains the federal government.
This is basic level American civics taught in the ninth grade in most schools in America. To claim that the Constitution limits the federal government implies that the federal government existed before the Constitution was drafted and ratified. That's ahistorical. The branches of the federal government have limited power--limits set up at the time the federal government was created.
Anyway, I hate to break it to right wingers, but the Constitution is a liberal system. The whole idea of three branches of government with certain and specific powers serving as a check on each branch's power is an idea borne out of liberal philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.
Here's historian Gordon Wood's brief take on the federal government: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/creating-new-government/essays/creating-new-government