Where did the Framers go wrong?
One of the continuing puzzles I come back to is the separation of powers: Where did the Framers go wrong?
Political scientists often claim that it is norms that undergird the Constitution, but this is not at all the view of the Framers. If anything, the idea that norms underpin the Constitution, and maintaining its delicate balance of separated and limited powers, is an almost pre-Founders, naive, view of things.
If you read Madison—whom nobody would accuse of having a rosy view of human nature—in the Federalist Papers, he makes it clear that what preserves liberty and constitutionalism more generally is the separation of powers, and what preserves the separation of powers is…the ambition of individual politicians. Madison makes constant, and fairly smirking, references to moralists who would rely on the “better motives” of men to constrain power. “If men were angels,” he famously writes of such moralists, “no government would be necessary.”
No, the Madisonian solution is to rely on the “private interests”— more particularly the “ambition”—of politicians. Self-interested, ambitious men of politics will want, first and foremost, to have power. The genius of the system, thought Madison, is that it harnesses men’s self-interest and ambition to their exercising of a power that is specific to an institution. To be powerful, you have to be an institution man. If you’re an ambitious, self-interested member of the House, you’ll see that your interest and ambition will rise or fall on your exercising your constitutionally delegated power to initiate bills for taxes and spending or to impeach government officials. If you’re an ambitious senator, you’ll see that your interests and ambition rise or fall on your exercising your constitutionally delegated power to appoint judges and specific members of the executive branch or to approve or veto treaties.
Ambitious men are self-interested men. They seek power, and seeking power, they maintain the power of their institutions. Maintaining the power of their institutions, they check the overweening ambitions and power of men in other institutions. Thus are liberty and constitutionalism secured.
So now we come to our moment. Are members of Congress self-interested and ambitious? I would have thought so. They certainly don’t seem altruistic or careless about their careers. But their self-interest and ambition seem to lead them to do the exact opposite of what Madison—and generations of political scientists and historians—taught us they would do. Instead of maintaining their own power and checking that of others, they submit to other people’s power, they comply, and in the process completely bargain away their power. For what?
Makes me think the Framers got it completely wrong. Ambition does not lead to exercising power against someone’s overweening designs. It leads one to cooperate with that overweening design. Perhaps, then, it was Rousseau of all people who got our system right: “Citizens only allow themselves to be oppressed to the degree that they are carried away by blind ambition.”
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10 Comments
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William Roark
Hi Corey,
Is there anything about the US’s political system that might lead to this submission? The duopoly character of the two political parties as stemming from a “first-past-the-post” winner-take-all election structure? The rigged incumbency as had through jerrymandering? The money corrupting politics? Combinations of things?
It seems, maybe, that if the US were a more vigorous democracy (something that the Founders helped to blunt), where earning votes were much more competitive (in contrast to Pres. elections that ignore most of the country in favor of just “swing states”), ambitious officeholders might be more ambitious? Maybe?
(I’ve felt for a very long time that US democracy is very moribund if not a sham, despite very formal appearances, if, but, rather weak to empty on substance.. Our current nightmare has far deeper US institutional roots than the facile and glib appeals to European fascism in trying to diagnose the problem)..
What do you perceive as being the fix? Any other (democratic) countries or polities stand out to you that might offer a better example of the ambitious actually separating powers? Is the latter may be just wrong (parliamentary systems more typically fuse or overlap powers and seem more vibrant than the presidential system here). Thank you.
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Mel
At this point, Madison’s view has a terrible, tragic irony, and Rousseau is spot-on. As Sinclair Lewis was when he said:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
I would add when his status depends on his not understanding it.
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Have you considered that members of congress may have just gotten lazy?
Somebody in a gerrymandered district can count on being re-elected whether they do anything or not, so why should they do anything? After all, what is the next step up for them? Making decisions and taking responsibility are big lifts, when the president really just wants you to agree.
I have trouble figuring out why anyone without ambition would want to be in that job, but I felt the same way about college administration and there are people who would give their teeth to be permanent vice-presidents of academic affairs (shudder). -
George Richardson
“After decades of suffering under populist autocrats, Latin Americans have a message for the Gringos: Welcome to our world”.
In 1997, Ecuador elected Abdalá Bucaram as the presidency.
Known as “El Loco”, the ill-fated president was a populist sensation. He danced onstage with teenage girls on the street. He recorded a rock album during his short stint in office.Bucaram himself brandished “El Loco” with pride.
After serving for eight months, the Ecuadorian Congress declared him mentally incapable to rule.
In 2016, Santiago – a Bucaram’s nephew – during a telephone interview said “Trump and uncle were very similar”.
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Daniel Pope
Interesting commentary on Madison. At the same time, others were preaching that self-regarding ambition had to be stamped out–notably Benjamin Rush in “Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic” (1786) where he says that Americans have to be trained to be “republican machines”. He wants the education to be specifically Christian: “Next to the duty which young men owe to their Creator, I wish to see a SUPREME REGARD TO THEIR COUNTRY inculcated upon them.” (He also has guidance about everything from diet and exercise to Bible reading.) Rush was highly influential in post-Revolutionary America and he wasn’t alone in wanting to inculcate civic virtue.
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Albert Randy Calleros
The Founding Fathers DID NOT possess the foresight to prevent the phenomenal political ascendancy of a far-right demagogic populist by failing to adequately fortify the ‘constitutional guardrails’ when they devised the extraordinarily cumbersome system of ‘checks-and-balances,’ which has never excelled at the fostering of an enhanced level of both accountability and transparency. I would highly recommend a thought-provoking book that was authored by a political theorist – and Robert M. Beren Professor of Government – at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA named Eric Nelson, Ph. D. aptly titled The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding, in which Dr. Nelson expounds on the Founding Fathers’ rationale for opposing the British parliament in their quest to create an all-powerful chief executive. That is why I strongly feel that the United States ought to undertake the monumental conversion from the presidential-congressional régime to the parliamentary régime.
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Jesse A.
I wonder if Madison could have been right? It’s just that the institution through which people gain power isn’t their branch of government, it’s their political party.
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> Makes me think the Framers got it completely wrong.
This his been a frequent topic on Chapo Trap House over the years, including in their series Hell of Presidents, and on Matt Christman’s Grillstream discussions. According to Christman (I’m unsure of the reference now, but I think it’s in the Federalist papers somehwere), the framers themselves believed that their scheme could _only_ work as designed so long as “factionalism” did not emerge — which it immediately did.
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Roquentin
I think it’s just the old Iron Law of Institutions, that inevitably people will care more about their own position within an organization over the good of the organization itself when the two come into conflict with one another. Madison certainly doesn’t seem to have recognized it, but you always end up in a sort of “who will police the police” kind of infinite regress.
What I find hilariously naive is that we are supposed to believe that you could have the kind of highly concentrated wealth disparity we have in the US (which translates into a power disparity) and that the people on winning side of this disparity weren’t going to use that same wealth and power to tilt the table like a crooked carnival game during the legislative and electoral process. Of course they would. I’m sure this isn’t controversial on this blog, but the free market is a contradiction in terms. 2008 was black comedy gold. I was barely out of college, but everyone had this idea that the rules of the market reigned supreme…until they didn’t. Any and all rules can and will be suspended the minute too much pain was going to be imposed on the people with wealth and power. The idea that the legal and political system exists independently of this should be seen as a punchline.
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Well reasoned and persuasive except for the asterisk of Citizens United and the threat of being “primaried”. Before institutional loyalty comes egotistical loyalty. I spent my professional life in Washington (have happily moved on) and see the common denominator among the power elite the deep belief in being personally irreplaceable so however you can hang on serves the greater good.
