I did…this morning. At the edge of a pond, a long-beaked bird (don’t know what kind) had something – a piece of moss, a clod of turf, or maybe a small fish – and was throwing it up in the air and catching it with its beak – over and over and over!
Today – juggling…tomorrow – ???
Monte-who, you ask?
Why would I read a political treatise of an 18th-century French baron, you ask? Two main reasons:
Montesquieu’s best material is in the first 100 pages, and his greatest contribution to political theory is in Book XI: the separation of powers. He divides the ideal republic into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. (This should start to sound very, very familiar!) He issues this somber warning: “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty… Again, there can be no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. …There would be an end of everything, were the same man or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals.”
Less than half a century after Montesquieu’s death in 1755, men like Madison and Franklin and Washington took his blueprint and created just such a republic – our republic.
I also noticed, as I read The Spirit of Laws, how many other, lesser of Montesquieu’s ideas made their way directly into the U.S. Constitution: the national legislature meeting regularly, the power of impeachment of the executive invested in the legislature, the executive being the commander of the military, the need to provide for amending a constitution, the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, etc.
Montesquieu had a very realistic (i.e., Biblical) view of human nature and the political temptations to which fallen men are prone. Here is a sampling of amazingly relevant thoughts, ideas, and warnings…
“The real wants of the people ought never to give way to the imaginary wants of the state. Imaginary wants are those which flow from the passions and the weakness of the governors, from the vain conceit of some extraordinary project, from the inordinate desire of glory, and from a certain impotence of mind incapable of withstanding the impulse of fancy.” Doesn’t this sound like politicians who promise their constituents that they’ll “bring home the bacon” so that they get bridges-to-nowhere, highways, and libraries named after them?
“Nature is just to all mankind, and repays them for their industry: she renders them industrious by annexing rewards in proportion to their labour. But if an arbitrary [government] should attempt to deprive the people of nature’s bounty, they would fall into a disrelish of industry; and then indolence and inaction must be their only happiness.” Congressional extension of unemployment to 99 weeks (nearly two years), anyone?
“To say that there is nothing just or unjust but what is commanded or forbidden by positive laws, is the same as saying that before the describing of a circle all the radii were not equal.” Yet this is exactly what Elena Kagan recently said in her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee: that she didn’t have any theory of natural, unalienable rights (that is, those which are granted by God) outside of those contained in the Constitution (that is, those which are granted by the government).
“In all magistracies, the greatness of the power must be compensated by the brevity of the duration.” Is it too late for term limits for Congress?
“Ambition is pernicious in a republic.” Enough said!
“As education in monarchies tends to raise and ennoble the mind, in despotic governments its only aim is to debase it.” This explains why liberals and progressives have been dumbing down American schools for the past 150 years. As we move in this country from a soft tyranny toward a hard tyranny, they need a more and more docile populace – easily duped and easily led.
“An equal division of lands cannot be established in all democracies. There are some circumstances in which a regulation of this nature would be impracticable, dangerous, and even subversive of the constitution.” The redistribution of wealth, so dearly regarded and tenaciously held by the leaders of our current government, will “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”
“Is it to be imagined that the laws which abolish the property of land and the succession of estates will diminish the avarice and cupidity of the great? By no means. They will rather stimulate this cupidity and avarice. The great men will be prompted to use a thousand oppressive methods [to retain their wealth].” The Marxist class warfare propaganda (“soak the rich”) never works; it never has. It merely creates the “crony capitalism” that we are seeing in America today, in which corporations and their lobbyists suck up to the government to get favorable treatment.
“In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.” Do you feel like our current politicians consider you to be “everything” or “nothing”? That tells you under which kind of government you are living.
The last 2/3 of the book meanders in the very tall weeds of ancient history (Rome, Greece, Egypt) and 18th-century jurisprudence (such arcane laws as trial by combat [duels]), and Montesquieu spends a lot of time on European (and especially French) political debates, but the first 1/3 is worth the price of admission. What Montesquieu could only dream of, we have actually enjoyed in this country, and if we are going to remain free, we have to recover our political moorings. That means getting reacquainted with the founding fathers, and when we follow the footnote trail in their writings, it often leads us to…Baron Charles de Montesquieu.
This is a brilliant analysis of the import of the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court…
Lincoln or Kagan?
by Tony Blankley
Abraham Lincoln: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” Lincoln address in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Feb. 22, 1861:
“That sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty … to the people of this country … Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? … if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.”
Lincoln’s inaugural address of March 4, 1861: “The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was ‘to form a more perfect Union.’ ”
Elena Kagan: “To be honest with you, I don’t have a view of what are natural rights independent of the Constitution, and my job as a justice will be to enforce and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”
Elena Kagan, June 30, 2010, in Senate testimony: “… I’m not saying I do not believe that there are rights pre-existent (to) the Constitution and the laws. But my job as a justice is to enforce the Constitution and the laws. You should not want me to act in any way on the basis of such a belief (in an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) if I had one (said on being asked if she disagreed with the Declaration of Independence’s enunciation of inalienable rights).”
Justice John Marshall, Fletcher v. Peck, Supreme Court (1810): “(It is not simply) the particular provisions of the Constitution of the United States (that nullified the Georgia statute but also) those general principles which are common to our free institutions.”
Apparently unbeknownst to Ms. Kagan, from the very beginning, it was the inalienable rights of the people that made the people sovereign and thus permitted the people to form the Constitution and continue to guide its application.
The very reason for the American experiment was — and is — to establish the principle and the reality that no man or government may alienate a person’s life, liberty or pursuit of happiness.
Anyone who has experienced the expectation of the imminent loss of any of those conditions knows profoundly their value — and thus the value of our form of government, which exists to protect those rights.
It does not take a legal scholar to know that. But it could be said that no one can rightly be called an American legal scholar who does not understand that the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the animating purposes of all our laws — of the law. They are the soul of our Constitution. Without those rights, the body of law is a corpse — a soulless, purposeless, manipulable, disposable, dead, material thing. If Ms. Kagan does not know that, then she knows nothing of our law.
Even more to the point, the right to remove those conditions from a man must always lie exclusively in the power of Him who gave them. The judge or politician who does not understand the source of those rights is ever likely to presume — at some useful moment — that a mere man or woman or government may act to deny such rights. Indeed, they are not rights if they are not so created — but mere temporary grants of privilege from an all-powerful state.
We have seen in the current congressional session how indifferent our government is to even the formalities of positive law and procedure. Less than two weeks ago, the House decided to “deem” a federal budget passed — though it has not been passed. A few months ago, it was prepared to “deem” a transforming socializing health services scheme passed without voting on it.
Our Founders, in the opening decades of our national life, built into our governing fundamentals many redundancies — fail-safes — to protect us from tyranny, either of the creeping or of the sudden kind. First, a Congress of the people, two branches to check each other, an executive branch itself in check with the others, and the states in sovereign balance with the federal powers. And all those powers subordinate to the undergirding sovereignty of the people.
The very power of the Supreme Court to exercise judicial review derives precisely from the court’s being empowered by the pre-constitutional sovereignty of the people in their inalienable right to protect themselves from any undue state restraints on such sovereign rights (see “Empire of Liberty,” Gordon S. Wood, pages 443, 448-451).
And now, proposed to be intruded into that temple of justice — that last fail-safe of freedom — comes the form of Elena Kagan. Cold to the passion of our Declaration of Independence. Ignorant of its animating powers. Insentient of its still-governing force. And — thankfully — oblivious even to her need to attempt to hide her true scorn and indifference to our founding unalienable rights.
It is a dead certainty that, if she is admitted to the high court, the day will come when she will cast aside — carelessly, indifferently and without pause, but with a leering smile and chuckle on her lips — our sacred birthrights as so much nuisance and interference with the government’s right to direct our lives as it — or she — sees fit.
She must be barred from the court.
Forty-one filibustering senators can save the Republic this week. Or all 99 will surely be condemned by history for their failure to act when they had the legal power to do so.
The senators have had their warning: Side with Abraham Lincoln and the republic or with Elena Kagan. Which will it be?
Copyright 2010, Creators Syndicate Inc.
We keep hearing that “corporate America is sitting on 2 trillion dollars.” It’s just sitting there on their balance sheets, not being invested for fear of new taxes and regulations. Everybody’s taking a “wait and see” approach, playing it close to the vest.
Charles Krauthammer declared that it’s a “capital strike.”
He’s right.
Atlas is shrugging…
Found in an email: “Calling an illegal alien an undocumented immigrant is like calling a drug dealer an unlicensed pharmacist.”
With the current conflict surrounding the proposed Muslim mosque at Ground Zero in New York – supposedly to promote peace and reconciliation and healing – has anybody asked: “How many churches and synagogues have been built in Mecca and Medina lately?”
What would Moses, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther, Osama bin Laden, and Josef Stalin have in common?
They were all leaders of mass movements comprised of The True Believer, as described in Eric Hoffer’s 1951 provocative classic.
Impossible, you say? Insane, you say? Not if taken merely in the psychosocial terms that Hoffer lays out in his book. He sets forth his working hypothesis and presuppositions in the preface (you should always read the preface!): “All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them…breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance. …There is a certain uniformity in all types of dedication, of faith, of pursuit of power, of unity and of self-sacrifice. There are vast differences in the contents of holy causes and doctrines, but a certain uniformity in the factors which make them effective. …However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.”
Quick critique: One of Hoffer’s basic presuppositions is the moral equivalency of all mass movements. Again, from the preface (you should always read the preface!): “The book passes no judgments, and expresses no preferences. It merely tries to explain…” Of course, this is self-referentially absurd: not judging is itself a judgment, and not preferring is itself a preference. Complete objectivity and absolute neutrality are myths. Leveling all mass movements is a reductive fallacy of the first order (I call it “nothing buttery’): reducing Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Communism, and National Socialism all to “nothing but” fanaticism may account for some of their similarity, but it fails to take into account not only the obvious differences in their doctrines, but also the stark differences in their outcomes.
However, on a strictly human level (akin to Solomon’s view of life “under the sun” in Ecclesiastes), Hoffer’s analysis is fascinating. As I read, I found myself applying his characteristics of the true believer to various political, cultural, and religious leaders in the news today. See if this reminds you of anything in our recent experience: “…extravagant hope, even when not backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring. For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power – a slogan, a word, a button. …As for the hopeful…they all proceed recklessly with the present, wreck it if necessary, and create a new world. …When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”
How and why do people become fanatical? Said another way: what kind of person is susceptible to fanaticism? This is what Hoffer is trying to explain most of all. Basically, his answer is: those who are unhappy with their lives as they are and have no hope of changing their situation. “The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness, meaninglessness and shabbiness of his individual existence.” The two greatest needs of the human psyche – a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose – are unfulfilled in this person, until the mass movement offers them both to him. Part Two of the book devotes a chapter to each type of potential convert: the poor, misfits (including youth, unemployed college graduates, and immigrants), the inordinately selfish, the ambitious, minorities, the bored, and sinners (more on that last one later). Do we know any of these in America today?
What kind of society is a breeding ground for a fanatical movement? “The milieu most favorable for the rise and propagation of mass movements is one in which a once compact corporate structure is…in a state of disintegration. …Where the corporate pattern is strong, it is difficult for a mass movement to find a footing.” So where families, churches, communities, and nations are strong and vibrant, people are satisfied with life, and they are resistant to being radicalized, but where these institutions and cultural bonds are in decay, mass movements may be fomented. Do we know anything like this in America today?
Hoffer maintains that the two outstanding marks of a mass movement are “united action” and “self-sacrifice.” He deals with these two dynamics in detail in Part Three. Techniques and tools used by movement leaders to unify their followers include: hatred, imitation, persuasion and coercion, action, and suspicion. Factors promoting self-sacrifice include: identification with the group, make-believe (rituals, symbols, etc.), a coherent system of doctrine (plausible worldview), deprecation of the present in favor of a better future. On the latter: “Possessed of a vivid vision of past and future, the true believer sees himself part of something that stretches endlessly backward and forward – something eternal.” Of the fanatical self-discipline and self-sacrifice that these movements demand (and get!), Hoffer, consistent with his premises, gives a psychological explanation: “The self-mastery needed in overcoming the appetites gives [the true believers] an illusion of strength. They feel that in mastering themselves they have mastered the world. …It is a device to camouflage their shortcomings.”
There are several types of leaders who generate, expand, and sustain mass movements. One type is “the man of words.” Observes Hoffer: “It is easy to see how the faultfinding man of words, by persistent ridicule and denunciation, shakes prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and familiarizes the masses with the idea of change. …For it is a remarkable fact that the militant man of words…often prepares the ground not for a society of freethinking individuals but for a corporate society that cherishes utmost unity and blind faith.” Does this sound familiar?
Here are a few more random but quality soundbites. Think about our current religious/political/social milieu and you will find these immensely and intensely relevant.
Due to his methodological atheism, Hoffer gets a lot wrong – e.g., he asserts that fanaticism actually originated with Judaism and Christianity, he claims that Christianity was originally radically anti-family, he considers all religions to be irrational at their core, etc. – but he gets enough right that 60-year-old classic is worth a read, for as he says in the preface (and you should always read the preface!), “It is necessary for most of us these days to have some insight into the motives and responses of the true believer. For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.”
Today I saw a guy walking – shirtless (that’s important) – north along 56th Street.
Because he was shirtless, his hairy shoulders were on display for drivers and pedestrians alike. Why did he do that to the rest of us? It was like an auto accident: you don’t want to look but you can’t turn away…
If I were going to walk along 56th Street – shirtless – I think I’d shave…
This 800-page book is not recommended for individuals with heart conditions, pregnant women, or short people.
That said, The Making of America should be on the bookshelf of everyone who calls himself a student of American history and every citizen who cares what’s going on in American politics today.
I spent part of my vacation reading MOA mainly because it will form the basis of the next Tampa 9-12 Project study course, which I will help to teach this fall. It’s written by the same man who wrote The 5,000 Year Leap: W. Cleon Skousen. Like a commentary on the Bible, MOA is a line-by-line explanation of the entire U.S. Constitution, including – and this is the best part! – copious notes and quotes from James Madison’s journal record of the Constitutional Convention. You actually get to read who was for or against each of the provisions, and why they either prevailed or failed. If you have ever wondered about the meaning of such obscure terms as “habeus corpus” of “ex post facto laws,” MOA will enlighten you. If you have ever glossed over such throwaway provisions as “bills of attainder” or “letters of marquee and reprisal,” MOA might cause you to take a second look. Everything – everything – in the Constitution is there for a reason, and many legal protections we now take for granted were things under which they themselves had suffered and vowed to change for posterity’s sake. We are the posterity for whom they suffered and labored.
When I finished MOA, I went back and read through the Constitution. I felt that I understood it for the very first time.
MOA has some fascinating and little-known information about the background, meaning, and applications of the various provisions in the Constitution. For instance, did you know…
Another value of MOA is that it demonstrates the close conceptual ties between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. I had never realized how many of the “long train of abuses” listed in the Declaration against King George were legislated against in this new country: bills of attainder, quartering troops, titles of nobility, the legislative branch of government (e.g., a parliament) essentially neutered by the executive branch (a king), and many, many more. I had also never realized how the worldview of the Declaration, including the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and the “unalienable rights…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” laid the groundwork for the Constitution. In other words, not just in an historical sense, but also in a political philosophical sense, without the Declaration, there would be no Constitution.
From the “So what?” department, it’s more important than ever for American citizens to have a working knowledge of this foundational document…
Perhaps the most important feature of MOA is how it highlights the fact that this precise form of federal republic was (at that time) new, radically innovative, and unique among nations in the history of the world. It was truly “the American experiment.” The liberty and prosperity that we count our birthright is rare in history, and even in the world today. The founding fathers themselves were astounded at what came out of the convention, and they considered it a miracle of the first order. James Madison observed: “They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society. They have reared the fabrics of government which have no model on the face of the globe…which it is incumbent on their successors to improve and perpetuate.”
The torch of American liberty has now been passed to us, and only time will tell whether future generations will bless us or curse us for our actions or our inaction. I dare say that most of us don’t value our freedom nearly enough, or appreciate the high price our ancestors paid to provide it for us, or what it will take for us to keep the torch burning – but I can think of few books more important or more helpful than The Making of America to open our eyes to the preciousness of our past heritage, the precariousness of our future legacy, and the urgency of our present task.
The brouhaha over the Arizona anti–illegal-immigration law (people will have to produce their papers on demand!) seems strange.
We all – including natural-born American citizens – have to “produce papers on demand.”
Case in point: My wife Cindy lost her driver’s license. (She didn’t lose her driving privileges due to traffic violations; she misplaced the little plastic card.) In order to replace it, she had to produce the following papers on demand for the DMV: birth certificate, marriage license, Social Security card…and maybe one or two others. (A Catch-22 footnote: When she called the McLean County Clerk’s office to request a copy of our marriage license, they said she would need to send them…a government-issued photo ID – namely, a driver’s license – which is what she was trying to replace!)
Anyway, we all have to produce papers on demand at one time or another…
So, what’s the big deal…?