The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic - Softcover

Sitaraman, Ganesh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1101973455 ISBN 13: 9781101973455

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

In this original, provocative contribution to the debate over economic inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that a strong and sizable middle class is a prerequisite for America’s constitutional system.
 
For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable—and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America’s republic. Over the next two centuries, generations of Americans fought to sustain the economic preconditions for our constitutional system. But today, with economic and political inequality on the rise, Sitaraman says Americans face a choice: Will we accept rising economic inequality and risk oligarchy or will we rebuild the middle class and reclaim our republic?
 
The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution is a tour de force of history, philosophy, law, and politics. It makes a compelling case that inequality is more than just a moral or economic problem; it threatens the very core of our constitutional system.

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GANESH SITARAMAN is Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He has been a longtime advisor to Senator Elizabeth Warren, serving as her policy director and senior counsel. Sitaraman has commented on foreign and domestic policy in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, and The Christian Science Monitor and is the author of The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars, which won the 2013 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where he was an editor on the Harvard Law Review.

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Chapter One

From Athens to America: The Two Traditions

By the time the Constitution was ratified, John Adams was out of touch with the mainstream of American constitutional thinking. He was perhaps the deepest thinker, the most thoughtful, and the best read among the revolutionaries, and his Thoughts on Government in 1776 guided them as they drafted state constitutions. Adams himself drafted the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. But in 1787, his tome titled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America appeared to come from a bygone era. Adams himself recognized this, writing to a friend, “This Book will make me unpopular.”

What made Adams an outlier wasn’t the structure of the government he proposed. His suggestion looked similar to the Constitution drafted at Philadelphia that summer. He, too, proposed a system of separated powers, with an executive branch and a bicameral legis­lature. The difference was his justification for that structure. By 1787, Americans firmly believed in popular sovereignty, and they saw both the House of Representatives and the Senate as rooted in the will of the people. Two houses in the legislature simply served as a check on the exercise of power by slowing the legislative process and cooling passions. In the Defence and in his other writings, Adams justified the two houses based on social class. He believed, in the words of the historian Gordon Wood, that “government bore an intimate relation to society and unless the two were reconciled no state could long remain secure.” While America seemed like an egalitarian society without “distinctions of ranks,” Americans would be driven to “better their condition [and] advance their fortunes[] without limits.” This natural desire to acquire more wealth would cause social divisions between “the rich and the poor, the laborious and the idle, the learned and the ignorant.” The task of constitutional government was to “regulate and not to eradicate” such divisions, which would invariably be reduced to two—­the rich and the poor. No society, Adams thought, could be truly equal. There was “no special providence for Americans,” who were just “like all other people, and shall do like other nations.” And so John Adams, a hero of America’s democratic Revolution, argued that there needed to be one house for the “rich, the well-­born, and the able” and another for the common people of the country. Each class would serve as a check on the other because “[n]othing but Force and Power and Strength can restrain” groups of people against “their Avarice or Ambition.” Adams thought he was protecting against oligarchy by confining the rich to one house of the legislature. It was an “ostracism,” he said. But critics at the time found Adams’s position surprising. America did not have an aristocracy, they said. So why create one? Decades later, John Taylor (“of Caroline,” as he was known) called Adams’s Defence a “caricature or travesty” of American constitutional thinking. It made a “radical errour” in envisioning “our division of power, as the same principle with his balance of [social] orders.”

It might seem puzzling that the man who would become the first vice president of the United States thought the American Constitution should align economic classes with the branches of government. But it is only puzzling when compared with the democratic tendencies unleashed by the American Revolution and by our own modern commitment to an egalitarian democracy. To understand why Adams was such an outlier—­and how radical the American Constitution was—­we have to go back in time, to the intellectual traditions that Adams and the founding generation inherited.

For much of the history of constitutional thought, political theorists and statesmen believed economic inequality was inevitable in society and was one of the central challenges, if not the central challenge, of constitutional design. Either the rich would tyrannize the poor, or the poor would oppress the rich. The result would be oligarchy, mob rule, or constant strife. The way to create a stable government was to build economic classes directly into the structure of government, thereby creating a balance between wealthy and ordinary citizens. These class warfare constitutions mirrored the economic inequality in society and mitigated its deleterious effects. For political theorists, the Roman republic, with its patrician senate and tribune of the plebs, served as a detailed case study in this tradition of constitutional design.

But there was a second response to this problem as well, albeit one that was much more speculative. Political theorists in this second tradition recognized that societies might not be divided only into rich and poor. There could be a third group—­a middle class. In these societies, if the middle class was large enough and strong enough, it could hold the balance of power between rich and poor. The middle class would govern wisely, without any of the vices that afflict the impoverished or the affluent. Middle-­class constitutions would not need to be defined by structures mirroring economic inequality. A different kind of governmental structure—­a democracy or commonwealth—­might be possible.

The intellectual history that undergirds these two traditions is obscure today, and it requires an in-­depth exploration into history from ancient Greece through the eighteenth century. But it provides the baseline for understanding what made the American Constitution exceptional and for seeing the connection between political power and economic conditions. If economic power and political power became mismatched, the result would be instability, strife, and even revolution.

Athenian Exceptionalism

Around 600 b.c., economic tensions in Athens were running high. Overseas colonization meant greater wealth for the already wealthy landowners, in addition to access to foreign luxuries. At the same time, poorer families were at risk of being sold into slavery or forced to sell their labor to pay off their debts. “The disparity between the rich and the poor had culminated, as it were, and the city was in an altogether perilous condition,” the historian Plutarch wrote. “It seemed as if the only way to settle its disorders and stop its turmoils was to establish a tyranny.” But the Athenians did not establish a tyranny. Instead, they called forth one of their more distinguished citizens, Solon, who “was neither associated with the rich in their injustice, nor involved in the necessities of the poor.”

In 594 b.c., Solon adopted two major reforms that fundamentally changed the relationship between the rich and the poor in Athens. First, he abolished debt bondage and forgave existing debts. The poor could never be truly equal citizens if they were at risk of needing to sell themselves into slavery. Ending debt bondage meant that over time poverty would not lead to political inequality. The second reform was a significant revision of the political and legal system, particularly an expansion of the scope of who could hold office. Instead of relying on birth status as a qualification for holding office, Solon shifted to a wealth requirement, based on agricultural production. Here, too, the reforms had longer-­term significance: they expanded political mobility. With the shift from birth to wealth, even the poor could potentially raise their economic standing and attain political leadership. As part of his legal reforms, Solon also created a popular law court in which anyone who was injured—­rich or...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1101973455
• ISBN 13: 9781101973455
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 432
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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