THE GREAT EXPERIMENT

Part VI: The Experiment Continues

The Questions Are Still Ours

We began this story with a question.

Could people govern themselves?

Not kings.

Not hereditary rulers.

Not a distant authority governing people who had no meaningful voice in its decisions.

The people themselves.

It was an extraordinary idea.

But after six parts of this story, something else should be clear.

The Founders never discovered a simple formula for making self-government work.

They argued.

They disagreed.

They compromised.

They changed their minds.

They worried about government becoming too powerful.

They worried about government becoming too weak.

They worried about factions.

They formed factions.

They worried about concentrated power.

They disagreed about where power should be concentrated.

They debated taxation.

Property.

Commerce.

Banking.

Debt.

Agriculture.

Manufacturing.

Roads.

Canals.

Federal authority.

State authority.

Representation.

Individual rights.

And the meaning of the Constitution itself.

They were not one person.

They were not one ideology.

They did not leave us one answer.

They left us a system for continuing the argument.

And more than two centuries later, the argument continues.

We Should Be Careful Asking What the Founders Would Do Today

It is tempting to take a modern question and ask:

What would the Founders do?

What would Jefferson think about this law?

What would Hamilton think about this tax?

What would Madison think about this regulation?

What would Washington think about this federal program?

Those questions can be interesting.

But there is a problem.

We cannot know.

The Founders lived in a world without automobiles.

Without airplanes.

Without electricity.

Without modern medicine.

Without computers.

Without the internet.

Without multinational corporations operating at today's scale.

Without modern financial markets.

Without interstate highways.

Without modern metropolitan areas.

Without a federal government resembling the size and complexity of the one that developed over the next two centuries.

Their America contained fewer than four million people at the first federal census.

Ours contains hundreds of millions.

Their technology was different.

Their economy was different.

Their society was different.

Their understanding of political participation was dramatically narrower.

Their world was not ours.

So rather than pretending we know how an eighteenth-century Founder would vote on a twenty-first-century bill, perhaps history gives us a better approach.

Ask the questions they actually asked.

Understand the arguments they actually made.

Study the powers they actually created.

Study the limits they actually demanded.

Understand where they agreed.

Understand where they disagreed.

And then accept something the constitutional system has always required:

Our generation has to make its own decisions.

The First Question: Who Decides?

This question has followed us through every part of this series.

Who decides?

The individual?

The family?

The community?

The city?

The county?

The state?

Congress?

The President?

The courts?

Some combination of them?

The Founders did not place every decision in one location.

That was intentional.

The Constitution gave the national government significant powers.

The states remained governments in their own right.

Within states, local institutions continued governing matters closer to individual communities.

The federal government itself was divided into branches.

The result was not a simple hierarchy where every question automatically traveled to the top.

It was a system of divided authority.

That means one of the first questions surrounding any modern government action remains remarkably old:

Which government has the authority to act?

That question does not tell us whether the policy itself is good or bad.

It tells us where the constitutional conversation begins.

Housing

Consider housing.

The Founders did not debate modern zoning codes.

They did not know suburban subdivisions, skyscrapers, thirty-year mortgages, building codes, homeowners associations, federal mortgage programs, or today's housing markets.

It would therefore be misleading to claim that they left instructions for solving modern housing costs.

But they certainly understood questions involving:

Property.

Land.

Contracts.

Debt.

Local authority.

State authority.

Taxes.

Economic independence.

And government power.

So a history-first approach does not ask:

What would Jefferson's housing policy be?

We cannot know.

Instead, it asks:

Who possesses the authority to make a particular rule?

What property interest is involved?

What public interest is the government attempting to protect?

What costs does the rule impose?

Who receives the benefit?

Who bears the burden?

Is the decision local, state, or national?

What legal protections apply?

What happens when one person's use of property affects another person's property or community?

Those questions do not give us an automatic answer.

They force us to think about the problem more carefully.

That is much closer to the spirit of the debate we have been studying.

Transportation

Now consider transportation.

Cars would have been unimaginable to the delegates in Philadelphia.

Interstate highways would have been unimaginable.

Commercial aviation would have been unimaginable.

Modern freight networks would have been unimaginable.

But transportation itself was not.

Washington thought deeply about connecting different parts of the country.

Jefferson considered roads, rivers, and canals.

Gallatin envisioned enormous transportation improvements.

Madison believed internal improvements could be valuable while questioning the constitutional authority behind particular federal approaches.

States built projects.

Private companies built projects.

The federal government participated in others.

So the useful historical question is not:

Would the Founders support this highway project?

We cannot know.

The useful questions are:

Does the project primarily serve a local, state, interstate, or national purpose?

Who has constitutional authority?

Who should pay?

Should users pay?

Should taxpayers generally pay?

Should private investment participate?

Who benefits?

Who bears the cost?

Does the project facilitate interstate commerce?

Does federal involvement require federal control?

Could states accomplish it themselves?

Could several levels of government work together?

Those questions sound modern.

They aren't.

We have been asking versions of them from the beginning.

Taxes

Taxes may provide the clearest connection of all.

The American Revolution was deeply shaped by disputes involving taxation and representation.

Then independence created a different problem.

The national government needed revenue.

Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress lacked a reliable independent taxing power.

That weakness helped produce the Constitution.

The Constitution therefore gave Congress substantial taxing authority.

Almost immediately, Americans began arguing about how it should be used.

The Whiskey Rebellion demonstrated that representation did not eliminate disagreement over taxation.

And Americans have continued arguing about taxes ever since.

Again, history does not hand us the correct tax rate.

Hamilton cannot tell us what an income-tax bracket should be in the twenty-first century.

Jefferson cannot calculate today's corporate tax structure.

Madison cannot design a modern tax code for an economy he could never have imagined.

But their world leaves us questions worth asking.

What legitimate public purpose requires revenue?

How much revenue is necessary?

Who bears the burden?

Is that burden distributed as intended?

What level of government is imposing it?

What authority permits the tax?

How transparent is it?

How accountable are the people imposing it?

What consequences might follow?

And perhaps the most basic question:

What are the people receiving in exchange for the money government requires them to provide?

Those questions belong to us now.

Property

Property remains another enduring question.

Land.

Homes.

Businesses.

Savings.

Investments.

Ideas.

Contracts.

Personal possessions.

The forms of property have evolved enormously.

The underlying questions remain.

What may a person own?

What may government regulate?

Under what authority?

When can property be taken for public use?

What protections are owed to the owner?

What happens when one person's property use harms someone else?

What happens when economic power becomes highly concentrated?

How should contracts be enforced?

How should bankruptcy work when obligations cannot be met?

How do we protect property without pretending property rights are the only rights that matter?

The founding generation itself demonstrated why that last question is so important.

The legal system of their era treated enslaved human beings as property.

That was not a defense of liberty.

It was the destruction of liberty for the person being owned.

History therefore teaches us something essential:

Invoking a principle is not enough. We must also examine how that principle affects actual human beings.

Economic Independence

Jefferson worried about independence.

Hamilton worried about national economic strength.

Madison worried about competing property interests.

Washington worried about keeping different regions connected.

Those concerns took different forms.

But they point toward another enduring question:

What allows people to build independent lives?

Work.

Property.

Opportunity.

Education.

Markets.

Infrastructure.

Stable money.

Reliable contracts.

Access to capital.

Government rules.

Government restraint.

All can affect economic independence.

And reasonable people can disagree over how those pieces should fit together.

That disagreement existed at the founding.

It exists now.

The American system does not require us to pretend otherwise.

Commerce

Commerce has changed almost beyond recognition.

An eighteenth-century merchant might wait weeks or months for information to cross an ocean.

Today money and information can cross the world almost instantly.

A business can sell to customers it never meets.

A company can operate simultaneously across dozens of states and countries.

A person can conduct economic activity through a device carried in a pocket.

Yet the old constitutional question remains:

When economic activity crosses political boundaries, who has authority over it?

The Constitution gave Congress authority over interstate and foreign commerce.

States retained substantial authority of their own.

As technology changed, Americans repeatedly had to decide how old constitutional language applied to new forms of economic activity.

The Founders could not answer those future disputes.

They could only establish the framework in which the disputes would occur.

Regulation

The word regulation can itself hide several different questions.

What is being regulated?

Why?

By whom?

Under what authority?

At what cost?

For whose benefit?

What problem is the rule intended to solve?

Does the rule actually address that problem?

What unintended consequences might result?

Does the rule protect one person's liberty by restricting another person's conduct?

Could the same objective be achieved another way?

Should the decision be national?

State?

Local?

The founding generation lived with government rules.

The Constitution itself gives Congress power to regulate certain commerce.

States exercised regulatory powers of their own.

Early Americans also fiercely debated the boundaries of government authority.

So history does not support a simplistic conclusion that all regulation is contrary to the founding—or that every regulation serving a claimed public purpose is justified by it.

The harder question has always been:

What power is being exercised, for what purpose, and within what limits?

The Common Good

This brings us to another difficult question.

What does government owe the public as a whole?

The Constitution's Preamble speaks of establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty.

Those purposes can point in different directions.

Security can require governmental power.

Liberty can require limiting governmental power.

Public projects can benefit many people while imposing costs on others.

Rules can protect people while restricting choices.

Taxes can finance necessary government while reducing what citizens keep for themselves.

There is no mathematical formula that permanently balances those interests.

That is why politics exists.

And that is why constitutional structure matters.

Federal Power

The Founders strengthened the national government because experience under the Articles convinced many of them that the existing system could not reliably perform essential national functions.

That is part of the history.

So is the other side.

Anti-Federalists worried that the new national government might grow too powerful.

The Bill of Rights emerged partly from demands for stronger protections.

The Tenth Amendment reaffirmed that powers not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited to the states, are reserved to the states or the people.

Those concerns exist beside one another.

The historical record therefore does not leave us with:

Federal power is always the answer.

Nor does it leave us with:

Federal power is always the problem.

It leaves us with something more demanding:

What problem requires action, which government possesses the authority to address it, and what limits apply to that authority?

Local Power Deserves the Same Questions

There is another lesson worth carrying forward.

Government does not become harmless merely because it is local.

A state can misuse power.

A county can make poor decisions.

A city can impose unnecessary burdens.

A local majority can violate individual rights.

Federalism divides power.

It does not guarantee that every decision made closer to home will be wise.

So the same questions should follow power wherever it goes.

What is the authority?

What is the purpose?

What are the limits?

Who is accountable?

Who is affected?

What rights are involved?

The constitutional system distributes government.

It does not eliminate the need to question government.

Rights Belong to People We Disagree With

This may be one of the hardest principles of constitutional government.

Rights matter most when they protect someone unpopular.

Freedom of speech is easy to defend when we agree with the speaker.

Religious liberty is easy to defend when the religion is our own.

Due process is easy to support when we already believe the accused is innocent.

The real test comes when the person exercising a right says something we dislike, believes something we reject, belongs to a group we oppose, or stands on the other side of a political argument.

The Bill of Rights was not written as a reward for agreement.

Its protections place boundaries around government power.

That means constitutional liberty cannot depend entirely upon whether the majority likes the person claiming it.

If rights disappear whenever they become inconvenient, they are not very strong rights.

Disagreement Is Not the Failure

After everything we have studied, perhaps we should stop treating political disagreement itself as evidence that America is failing.

The Founders disagreed.

Federalists and Anti-Federalists disagreed.

Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed.

Adams and Jefferson disagreed.

Madison disagreed with Hamilton.

Mason disagreed with the finished Constitution.

Patrick Henry opposed ratification.

Washington worried about the political factions developing around him.

The first generations of Americans fought fiercely over the meaning of their new government.

Disagreement has been present from the beginning.

The important question is not whether disagreement exists.

It is:

What do we do with it?

Do we argue through constitutional processes?

Do we listen?

Do we vote?

Do we petition?

Do we organize?

Do we challenge ideas?

Do we change laws?

Do we use courts where legal rights are at issue?

Do we amend constitutions when sufficiently broad agreement exists?

Do we accept that our neighbors possess the same political rights when they disagree with us?

That is the difficult work of self-government.

Washington's Warning

George Washington worried deeply about political faction.

By the end of his presidency, organized political divisions had already become impossible to ignore.

In his Farewell Address, he warned about party spirit becoming so powerful that loyalty to faction could overwhelm concern for the country as a whole.

Washington did not succeed in preventing political parties.

They became permanent features of American politics.

But his warning still raises an important question.

What happens when winning becomes more important than the system in which we are competing?

A constitutional republic requires disagreement.

But it also requires something underneath that disagreement.

A willingness to continue sharing the system.

A willingness to recognize lawful political opposition.

A willingness to accept that no political faction permanently owns the country.

Without that, competition can become something else entirely.

No Party Owns the American Experiment

Political parties appeared early.

They changed.

They disappeared.

New parties formed.

Coalitions shifted.

Issues changed.

Regions changed.

Voters changed.

The constitutional system outlived all of those transformations.

That should remind us of something important.

America is larger than any political party.

The Constitution is not the property of one faction.

The Declaration is not the property of one ideology.

The Bill of Rights does not belong only to people whose speech we like.

The institutions of self-government do not exist only when they produce our preferred outcome.

The American experiment belongs to generations of people who will never completely agree about how the country should be governed.

That was true at the beginning.

It remains true now.

Your Voice Is Part of the Structure

The Constitution creates institutions.

But institutions do not govern themselves.

People do.

Citizens choose representatives.

They communicate with government.

They petition.

They assemble.

They speak.

They publish.

They organize.

They challenge policies.

They advocate changes.

They serve in public office.

They participate in state and local government.

They sit on juries.

They vote.

They persuade their neighbors.

And sometimes they lose an argument and return another day to make it again.

The First Amendment protects speech, press, peaceful assembly, and petition.

Those are not decorative ideas.

They are mechanisms through which people participate in public life.

The government may have institutions.

But self-government still requires people willing to use them.

Voting Is Part of It—but Not All of It

Voting matters.

It determines who occupies many positions of governmental authority.

But self-government does not happen only on Election Day.

Citizens can communicate with representatives.

Attend public meetings.

Read legislation.

Follow local government.

Write.

Speak.

Organize.

Petition.

Support causes.

Challenge causes.

Ask questions.

Request public information where the law provides access.

Participate in community organizations.

Run for office.

And engage peacefully with people who disagree.

The Founders did not create a country in which citizens were expected to remain silent between elections.

Representative government depends upon an ongoing relationship between people and the institutions exercising authority in their name.

But Voice Comes With Responsibility

Having a voice does not mean possessing the right to never be challenged.

Other people have voices too.

They may disagree strongly.

They may vote differently.

They may believe another policy would work better.

They may interpret history differently.

They may value competing interests differently.

Self-government requires room for those disagreements.

That means participating without demanding that everyone else surrender their own voice.

It means distinguishing disagreement from disloyalty.

It means challenging power while recognizing lawful processes.

It means remembering that today's political minority may become tomorrow's majority—and today's majority may become tomorrow's minority.

The rules matter precisely because nobody controls the future forever.

The Founders Were Not Finished—and Neither Is the Constitution

The original American system contained enormous injustices.

Slavery remained.

Women were largely excluded from formal political participation.

Voting rights were restricted.

Native peoples suffered displacement, warfare, and loss of land and sovereignty as the country expanded.

The political community described by the founding ideals was much broader in principle than it was in practice.

Later generations changed the Constitution.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for crime after conviction.

The Fourteenth transformed constitutional citizenship and protections against state action.

The Fifteenth prohibited denial of voting rights on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The Seventeenth changed how senators are elected.

The Nineteenth prohibited denial of voting rights on account of sex.

Other amendments continued changing the system.

Those developments demonstrate something fundamental.

The Constitution was built to be changed through constitutional means.

The Founders did not receive the last word.

They created a process through which future generations could speak too.

That May Be Their Greatest Act of Humility

Think about that.

The people who wrote the Constitution created a mechanism by which people not yet born could alter their work.

They knew circumstances could change.

They knew experience could expose problems.

They knew they might be wrong.

They knew no generation could anticipate everything.

So the Constitution was made durable—but not untouchable.

Changing it requires broad agreement.

That protects stability.

But change remains possible.

That combination—continuity and correction—is part of the Great Experiment.

We Do Not Have to Agree With Every Founder

Understanding history does not require worshiping it.

We can admire Washington's leadership while examining his slaveholding.

We can study Jefferson's extraordinary language about liberty while confronting the contradiction between those words and his enslavement of other human beings.

We can appreciate Madison's constitutional thinking while recognizing the limits of the political system in which he participated.

We can study Hamilton's economic vision without accepting every policy he advocated.

We can take Anti-Federalist warnings seriously without concluding that every fear they expressed was realized.

History becomes less useful when we turn historical figures into saints.

It also becomes less useful when we flatten them into villains.

They were human beings.

Complicated.

Contradictory.

Capable of extraordinary insight.

Capable of serious failure.

And frequently capable of disagreeing with one another.

Understanding them requires allowing all of that to remain true at the same time.

We Don't Need to Choose One Founder

Perhaps that is one of the most useful lessons of this entire series.

We do not have to choose:

Hamilton or Jefferson.

Federalist or Anti-Federalist.

National authority or local authority in every circumstance.

History does not require us to inherit one Founder's entire worldview.

We can understand Hamilton's concern that a nation needs enough power and financial capacity to function.

We can understand Jefferson's concern about concentrated government and financial power.

We can understand Madison's concern about faction.

We can understand Mason's insistence upon explicit protections for rights.

We can understand Washington's concern about national unity.

We can understand the Anti-Federalists' suspicion of distant authority.

And then we can recognize that the American constitutional system contains traces of many of those concerns.

The argument itself helped build the country.

The Founders Didn't Give Us an Answer Sheet

They gave us something harder.

A framework.

A history.

A collection of competing ideas.

A constitutional structure.

A set of rights.

A method for changing the Constitution.

And an unfinished argument about liberty and power.

They left future Americans with questions.

When should government act?

When should government leave people alone?

Which government should act?

What should be national?

What should remain closer to home?

How should government raise money?

How should public burdens be distributed?

What protections should property receive?

What protections should individuals receive?

How should competing rights be reconciled?

How do we prevent concentrated power?

How do we prevent government from becoming too weak to perform the responsibilities assigned to it?

How do we protect minorities while allowing representative government to function?

How do we disagree without destroying the institutions that allow disagreement?

There is no eighteenth-century answer sheet hidden somewhere in Philadelphia.

There is only the responsibility to keep working through the questions.

That Responsibility Belongs to Us

Every generation inherits institutions it did not create.

It also inherits problems the previous generation did not solve.

The founding generation inherited a world shaped by monarchy, empire, colonialism, slavery, war, commerce, religion, property, and centuries of political thought.

They did not start with a blank page.

Neither do we.

We inherited their Constitution.

Their compromises.

Their successes.

Their failures.

And more than two centuries of American history layered on top of them.

Our responsibility is not to pretend we live in 1787.

We don't.

Our responsibility is to understand what happened there—and then govern the country that exists now.

That requires judgment.

History can inform that judgment.

The Constitution can structure it.

Rights can limit it.

Elections can influence it.

Institutions can channel it.

But ultimately, citizens have to exercise it.

The Experiment Was Never Supposed to Run Itself

A Constitution can establish Congress.

It cannot make every member of Congress wise.

A Constitution can create a presidency.

It cannot guarantee every President will make good decisions.

A Constitution can establish courts.

It cannot guarantee every judicial decision will be correct.

A Constitution can divide federal and state authority.

It cannot eliminate every jurisdictional conflict.

A Bill of Rights can protect freedoms.

People still have to defend the principle that those freedoms belong to others as well as themselves.

Elections can allow political change.

People still have to participate.

The amendment process can allow constitutional change.

People still have to build the extraordinary agreement necessary to use it.

The framework matters.

But the people make the framework live.

“We the People” Was a Beginning

The Constitution begins with three extraordinary words:

We the People.

In 1787, the political reality behind those words was incomplete.

Many people living in America had little or no formal political voice.

The country's later history would involve enormous struggles over who fully belonged within the promise of American citizenship and self-government.

But the principle embedded in those words was larger than any individual officeholder.

Government authority ultimately rested not in a king.

Not in a hereditary class.

Not in one Founder.

Not in one political party.

But in the constitutional order created and sustained by the people.

That principle places responsibility in an uncomfortable place.

On us.

Our Money Matters

When government collects money, it comes from somewhere.

Taxes.

Fees.

Borrowing.

Public resources.

Every dollar represents a choice.

What should government fund?

What should it not fund?

What responsibility belongs to the federal government?

What belongs to states?

What belongs locally?

What belongs to individuals and private institutions?

Those are legitimate questions.

They deserve serious answers.

Because public money is not abstract.

Our money matters.

Our Choices Matter

Government decisions affect real lives.

So do individual decisions.

So do elections.

So do laws.

So do regulations.

So do constitutional limits.

So does participation.

A republic does not promise that every individual will get the outcome he or she wants.

It provides mechanisms through which people can participate in deciding what the outcome should be.

That means choices have consequences.

Our choices matter.

Our Voice Matters

The Founders argued.

So can we.

They criticized government.

So can we.

They published essays.

They wrote letters.

They petitioned.

They organized.

They debated.

They voted where the laws of their time permitted them to vote.

They ran for office.

They challenged one another.

They tried to persuade their fellow citizens.

Sometimes they succeeded.

Sometimes they failed.

Sometimes history proved their fears justified.

Sometimes history moved in directions they never imagined.

But they participated.

Self-government cannot mean government from the people if the people stop participating.

Our voice matters.

The Great Experiment Continues

The American experiment did not end when the Declaration was signed.

It did not end when Cornwallis surrendered.

It did not end when the Constitution was written.

It did not end when Washington became President.

It did not end when the Bill of Rights was ratified.

It did not end when Jefferson defeated Adams.

It did not end with Hamilton.

Madison.

Franklin.

Mason.

Henry.

Jay.

Sherman.

Or any of the people who helped shape the founding generation.

They eventually left the stage.

The experiment continued.

Other generations inherited it.

They argued over it.

Changed it.

Expanded it.

Failed it.

Defended it.

Challenged it.

And passed it forward.

Eventually, it reached us.

The Questions Are Still Ours

Who should govern?

How much power should government possess?

Where should that power reside?

What belongs to the individual?

What belongs to the community?

What belongs to the state?

What belongs to the nation?

Who pays?

Who benefits?

Who decides?

What protects liberty?

What protects the public?

What restrains power?

What allows government to function?

What happens when we disagree?

And how do millions of different people continue governing one country together?

The Founders asked versions of those questions.

They did not all give the same answers.

Neither will we.

Perhaps we were never supposed to.

The challenge of self-government is not creating a country in which everyone thinks alike.

It is creating and maintaining a country in which people who do not think alike can still govern themselves together.

That requires institutions.

It requires rights.

It requires limits.

It requires participation.

It requires disagreement.

It requires compromise.

And sometimes it requires standing firmly on opposite sides of an argument while still recognizing that the person across from us belongs to the same experiment.

The Founders built the framework.

They argued over how it should work.

They compromised where they could.

They failed where they could not.

They left future generations the power to change what needed changing.

And then they handed the experiment forward.

Now it belongs to us.

Not one party.

Not one politician.

Not one ideology.

Us.

We will not always agree.

Neither did they.

That was never the requirement.

The responsibility is to keep participating.

Keep questioning.

Keep learning.

Keep debating.

Keep protecting the right of others to do the same.

And keep remembering where the authority of American self-government ultimately begins.

With the people.

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT CONTINUES.

Our Money Matters.

Our Choices Matter.

Our Voice Matters.

The People. The Voice. The Future.

Politics 1776