David Horowitz on the Birth Certificate: An Anti-Federalist's Response

David Horowitz recently wrote an important Frontpagemag editorial that argued that conservatives should drop the birth certificate issue:

"64 million Americans voted to elect Barack Obama. Do you want to disenfranchise them? Do you think it's possible to disenfranchise 64 million Americans and keep the country? And please don't write me about the Constitution. The first principle of the Constitution is that the people are sovereign. What the people say, goes. If you think about it, I think you will agree that a two-year billion dollar election through all 50 states is as authoritative a verdict on anything as we are likely to get. Barack Obama is our president. Get used to it."

David and I exchanged several e-mails over this point last week. I disagree not so much with the possibility that the birth certificate may be ok (who knows?) but with David's claim that democracy ought to trump constitutional parameters and restrictions.

Majority rule was not contemplated when the nation was founded. The Progressives such as Herbert Croly argued for Rousseauean general will and unlimited democracy. Whether their agenda was this or whether Croly and his partner Walter Weyl were just re-processed Fabian socialists interested in furthering a Europeanized American elite is a matter for debate. But Croly's and the other Progressives' contempt for the founders together with their advocacy of unlimited, socialist-style state power reflected the essence of European statism and remain the essence of American P(p)rogressivism. Weyl's and Croly's Progressivism cannot be called conservatism in the American sense, yet the leadership of the Republican Party has discarded the last remnant of Jacksonian democracy, the "Reagan revolution", and adopted the Progressive platform. Thus, today we have no conservatives in Washington but rather a Progressive Party and a progressive one.

When the current Constitution was framed there were two schools of thought, the Federalists and the anti-Federalists. We remember the Federalists such as Hamilton and Madison, who wrote the Federalist Papers and the Constitution, but we don't have so clear a memory of the anti-Federalists, to include George Clinton, Robert Yates, Sam Adams and Richard Henry Lee. The anti-Federalists were in a number of senses more modern, or perhaps post-modern, than the Federalists.

The Federalists were proto-typical Progressives in the sense that they advocated centralization and a strong federal government. They were advocates of economies of scale that carried forward via the Progressives into the twentieth century. But the Federalists, like Madison, did not reject the basic notion of limited government. Madison argued that a durable Constitution would serve as a more potent limit on tyranny than would Jeffersonian generational revolutions.

The Federalists feared what de Tocqueville called "tyranny of the majority", and the most important theme that runs through the Federalist Papers, such as number 10, is fear of faction, specifically (emphatically) including majority faction. The Federalists did not advocate rule of the majority. They limited popular vote to vote for the House. The Senate was to be elected by state legislatures and the president by the Electoral College. Article II Section I of the Constitution does not provide for popular election of the president:

"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."

Although the Electoral College has received a great deal of criticism among pissant progressives, the recent election seems to me to confute the progressives' claims for unlimited democracy. The absence of a competent media in the United States means that popular opinion is misguided and that democracy necessarily devolves into a contemptible failure here. Conservatives ought to begin to fashion alternatives to the Progressive propaganda into which they have been indoctrinated at Columbia and elsewhere.

As unlikely supporters for ignoring the Constitution as were the Federalists, the anti-Federalists would have been much less likely to support ignoring Article II's natural born citizenship requirements (were they alive today) for they were opposed to a central government period. They would have scorned the idea that popular elections would have any meaning for the very reasons I adduce: the public has no way of evaluating candidates elected on so vast a scale, so large scale democracy must fail. 64 million Americans must be wrong because it is impossible to obtain good information. This is because of constraints on the media's ability to ask relevant questions, its cognitive limits on rationality, not just because it is owned by media conglomerates and biased in the progressive direction.

The anti-Federalists favored small batch production, small units, and local responsiveness. They were post-modern (as well as pre-modern). They favored local democracy in many cases, but not national democracy, an idea that they would have scorned.

There is a true question that no historian has asked as to whether adoption of hyper-decentralization in that early period, as the anti-Federalists favored, would have resulted in a more dynamic, more competitive and more productive American economy than the centralizing approach that Hamilton advocated. Progressivism has claimed that big business makes consumerism possible, but the facts do not seem to support this claim. Production methods of the 21st century are more consistent with the idea of "just in time" decentralization than with large-batch centralization. Perhaps the sub-optimal centralization of the Federalists and the Progressives could have been avoided. A more decentralized America would not have permitted as much lackadaisical big business, waste, railroad-related corruption and big city sleaze of the very kind that resonates today in Chicago.

Jefferson was on the fence. He was often a fellow traveler of the anti-Federalists and objected to centralization, but as president bought Louisiana and acted like a Federalist, establishing the navy and avoiding legislative restrictions on executive privilege and advocating use of state level sedition acts against his opponents.

The anti-Federalists lost the constitutional debate, although they are memorialized in the Bill of Rights, but the election of Jefferson in 1800 was a reassertion of a fossilized anti-Federalism within the Federalist system. Jefferson's election ended the Federalists as a political force, and both of today's political parties descend from Jefferson's Democratic Republicans. But both have rejected the decentralization in which Jefferson believed in principle.

Neither party has been perfect. The Democrats under Andrew Jackson smashed the central bank and emphasized states' rights, albeit for the wrong reasons. The centralizing, aristocratic, elitist element has always been present in American politics via the Whigs and the Republicans. But the decentralizing, anti-elitist element that started with the anti-Federalists and to which Jefferson and Jackson were sympathetic has all but died. This is the tragedy of American politics: our greatest tradition to which conservatism ought to be committed has been replaced by a pale copy of European monarchy, centralization and Fabian socialism via Weyl and Croly. The Republicans have become the Progressive Party and the Democrats the progressive Party. Meanwhile, the American people are scratching their heads.

The great confusion began with Abraham Lincoln, who was a Whig and a centralizer, but who adopted Jacksonian rhetoric that was carried forward by the Mugwumps. The Mugwumps such as Charles Sumner, EL Godkin and David Ames Wells adopted Jacksonian economics and favored the gold standard. But they had two interests that were consistent with their Whig roots and were the basis for the reassertion of centralization that was carried forward via the Progressives. These were a desire to rationalize government via civil service and an interest in establishing professions such as law and medicine.

The Mugwumps' fixation on professionalization and universities led directly to the modern American university's adoption of European standards, which in turn has been the major force for statism in American history. Thus, the modern university is a direct product of American political forces, notably the Republican Mugwumps' fascination with economic and sociological theory led them to send as many as 10,000 Americans to German and European graduate schools in the late nineteenth century. These young graduates came back and established anti-laissez faire centers at Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin and elsewhere via European-trained economists like John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely.

The Republicans thus reasserted themselves as a centralizing force in the late 19th century (the Republican cooptation of Jacksonian Democracy having lasted no more than 35 years, from the 1860s to the 1890s) and then the Progressives became the centralizing elitist force out of the remains of the late nineteenth century Mugwumps and Bourbon Democrats.

The Progressives were smart enough to assert European values in the name of the common man and trust busting, even though the effects of their programs were not so straightforward, and the Democrats then copied the Progressive Republicans in the 1930s, claiming to be for unions and the poor when they were really for Wall Street. The most important step Roosevelt took was abolition of the gold standard and freeing the Fed to create money, the greatest subsidization of business in American history.

Thus, by the 1930s the centralizing force had won, and the decentralizing, anti-elitist force ceased to be a political power except on the fringe. Of course, many and perhaps a majority of Americans still believed in the anti-elitism of Jackson and had decentralizing instincts, but the rhetoric of American politics became riddled with double talk, lies and deception ever since the Progressive era. The wealthy were able to pull off a centralizing coup, securing monetary-creation power for themselves while telling everyone, including idiots like William Greider, that the creation and handing of money to business interests was in the poor's interests. In a sense, through sleight of hand, a fringe elite has been running the nation ever since.

As a result, today we can truly say that America is a one party system, the Republicans who advocate for the Fed on behalf of the wealthy and say they are for free markets and competition, and the Democrats who advocate for the Fed on behalf of the wealthy but say they are for the poor.

So what does all this have to do with the Birth Certificate? The Constitution is in extremis. Ignoring Article II is one more nail in the Constitution's coffin. If you look back to the anti-Federalists, they warned of an over-powerful Supreme Court, fearing it would turn into a force for an aristocratic elite. Likewise, they opposed the central bank for the same reason. They were right. The Federalists believed that the Constitution would prove durable and serve as a restraint on centralized power.

But today even conservatives have forgotten that America is first a nation of liberty, not a democracy. Nor was it intended to be a democratic one, except according to the fringe Progressives who have come to dominate the central government, the very outcome against which the anti-Federalists warned.