Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Answer:

How well does the American Constitution work? Specifically, compare its initial promise to its current form and assess the impact both of the changing rules and the changes in the broader society. Should we be pessimistic or optimistic about the nation’s

Consider the following two quotations. First, from Winston Churchill’s Thoughts and Adventures (a 2009 reprint of the 1932 first edition), we have this comment from his essay “Mass Effects on Modern Life,” from a section describing the wide availability of newspapers:

All this is but one part of a tremendous educating process. But it is an education which passes in at one ear and out at the other. It is an education at once universal and superficial. It produces enormous numbers of standardized citizens, all equipped with regulation opinions, prejudices and sentiments, according to their class or party. It may eventually lead to a reasonable, urbane and highly-serviceable society... (2009, 272).

But, of course, Churchill doubts as much. Instead he goes on to worry that this trend may be a shadow, though a lesser shadow of course, of Soviet society:
The communist theme aims at universal standardization. The individual becomes a function: the community is alone of interest: mass thoughts dictated and propagated by the rulers are the only thoughts deemed respectable. No one is to think of himself as an immortal spirit, clothed in the flesh, but sovereign, unique, indestructible (2009, 272).

A comment, I believe, which says much about what Winston Churchill thought about Winston Churchill.* But is this a legitimate concern about democratic society?

Now turn your attention to an 1878 quotation from a historian named Francis Parkman, cited in Alexander Keyssar’s The Right to Vote (2009 reprint of the 2000 edition):

A New England village of the olden time – that is to say, of some forty years ago – would have been safely and well governed by the votes of every man in it; but, now that the village has grown into a populous city, with its factories and workshops, its acres of tenement-houses, and thousands and ten thousands of restless workmen, foreigners for the most part, to whom liberty means license and politics means plunder, to whom the public good is nothing and their own most trivial interests everything, who love the country for what they can get out of it, and whose ears are open to the promptings of every rascally agitator, the case is completely changed, and universal suffrage becomes a questionable blessing (2009, 98).

This is a slightly different complaint about the perils of democracy. In my reading, in Churchill’s case, he worries about the social implications of mass society and mass politics; certainly, great public debates in the modern era of expanded suffrage tend to lack

* “We may all be worms,” he once reportedly said, “but I do believe I am a glow worm.”

intellectual quality.† Parkman’s comments are a bit more biting; it’s not only that the masses lack the sophistication to make sound judgments but also that they lack the commitment to the community to desire sound policy. That is: “politics means plunder,” plunder for the class of individuals without property from the class of individuals with it.

I think it is evident that the founding generation gave these ideas some thought, although they never could have fathomed the mechanisms of modern mass politics. As Keyssar points out in his book, voting requirements are absent from the Constitution itself – largely left to states to determine (and then fixed via the requirement for the lower house of the legislature). Nevertheless, many offices were shielded from direct election – the U.S. Senate (through state governments) and the U.S. President (through the electoral college). Furthermore, luminaries like John Adams had a long record in opposing extensions of the franchise; Keyssar opens his book with an Adams quotation opposing expanded suffrage because “it tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level” (Keyssar 2009, 1).

Nevertheless, we tend to treat universal adult suffrage as a defining mark of democracy and an unambiguous good. Is this not, in truth, the core assumption of democracy? That having everyone vote on an issue or for candidates is a good way to make decisions? Or is it merely, as Churchill said upon some other occasion, that democracy is the “worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried”?‡ Is it even possible to have a limited suffrage democracy; and, if so, is it defensible to give some people the vote and not others?

In some sense, as Ellis writes in Founding Brothers, the Constitution (and, explaining on its behalf, The Federalist Papers) promised to do a great deal which may, in some lights, be impossible. We are to believe that the Constitution would produce a government at once both responsible to the people and yet shielded from the perceived excesses of democracy.

And then, of course, the Constitution has changed. Voting rights, once quite restrictive, are now broadly available, even if some would dispute the notion that we have “universal” suffrage (due to large numbers of excluded felons and undocumented or, if you prefer, illegal immigrants). We elect more offices directly (US Senate and, in effect, US President). The Supreme Court has established (or, if you prefer, “invented”) the existence of further rights by interpreting changes to the Constitution and existing law.

† It would be easy to dismiss this as an example of elitism or, in the parlance of the modern university, “privilege.” No champagne? No cigars? No expensive education? No opinion worth listening to! But take this point seriously. For example, consider this column in the NYT from this last week’s news cycle: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/opinion/paul-krugman-california-tax-left-coast-rising.html?_r=0. 

Dr. Krugman has a Nobel Prize in economics. Many people read the NYT. Is the article’s argument is correct? Who has the ability or the time to evaluate it? Is this “proof”? And, of course, this is written in one of the most sophisticated newspapers in the country, read by the small proportion of the electorate that still gets newspapers instead of relying on “things I once saw someone say on Twitter.” You can disagree, if you’d like, but I think this point requires more than just the “he was born in a palace!” argumentum ad hominem.
‡ To be fair, I have no idea if Churchill said this or not. This is “proof via google.” This is the great principle of “Do as I say, not as I do.”

So that is all by way of introduction to your essay question. Answer, in 5 pages, double spaced, with considerable documentation and references to the materials from the course and any outside reading you so choose, this:
How well does the American Constitution work? Specifically, compare its initial promise to its current form and assess the impact both of the changing rules and the changes in the broader society. Should we be pessimistic or optimistic about the nation’s government as we head deeper into the 21st century? 

Course Reading: Try to use some as sited sources. 

Joseph M. Bessette and John J. Pitney, Jr., American Government and Politics: Deliberation, Democracy, and Citizenship, election update (Boston: Wadsorth, 2012). 

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York: Signet, 2003 [1788]). 

William Strunk and E.B. White, The Element of Style, 4th ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999). 

Alexis deTocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, [1835/40]. Any of several printings of this translation. 

Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2002 [2000]). 

Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). The 2003 vintage books edition is the best – but any edition works. 

Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960. (New York: Harper Collins 2009 [1961]). 

Daniel Okrent. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. (New York: Simon and Schuster 2010).