I know it’s the 21st century, and people just don’t read. Instead, they squeak by when they can, or they grab facts off the Web, and satisfy themselves with knowing that the facts they’ll never learn can be found. That’s all good if the fact is how much veal is in pork sausage (none), but it cannot lead to civic, social or political literacy. To be a good citizen, a reliable neighbor and an informed voter, you’re going to need to read.
If you choose to do your reading online, I’ll roll my eyes and feign distress, but I’ll be secretly glad that you’re reading at all. What you should read to get the simplest basics of being an involved American is no mystery at all. We’ll get to that shortly.
A group called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) is offering a summer reading list for college-age adults. (No, that is not an oxymoron!) Their 2008 list is clearly influenced by the fact that this is an election year, and a very important election year at that.
A person who actually needs the reading suggested by ISI would not necessarily “get” the point by scanning the list. I’ll tune you in: They want readers to know what is the foundation and meaning of American governance, how it began and how it came to be as it is with us today. To that end, they recommend the biographies and writings of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, the story of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and much more. You’d never read it all, so I’m going to let you off the hook a bit.
Let’s toy with some questions along the way. How do you think Americans felt about the U.S. Constitution when it was introduced? Do you imagine the Founding Fathers of America shared a common vision for the country? How did our nation get along from independence (July 4, 1776, more or less) until we had a constitution (June 21, 1788)?
That’s enough. If you can confidently answer all these questions, you probably know a lot of what you need to know. On the other hand, if you think any of these questions are ancient history or of no particular relevance today, you’re sadly mistaken, and you need to do all the reading you can make time for. Use up your vacation days, skip sleep and cancel your weekend plans. You need to be reading before you step into the political arena even on the level of cocktail conversation, much less the voting booth. The answers to the quiz question matter every single day in America, even in 2008.
The United States was originally a federation of states nearly as independent of each other as the countries of Europe. That single fact maybe is ancient history, but it underlies everything that follows. As a group of related states, under the Articles of Confederation—which you can read online in lots of places, including at usconstitution.net/articles—everything seemed to be going fine, but some of our Founding Fathers wanted… well, just about anything you can think of, from a king to near anarchy. Their primary disagreement can be super-simplified to this: Should the government of this federation have anything to do with how states conduct their business or how the citizens of the several states live? In other words, should a nation be constituted, or should we remain a collection of federated entities? That is, should the “nation’s” government be a Big Deal, or should it be only a clearing house for common interests (war and peace, basically)?
To this day, no other question is more important. Republican and Democrat? Not as important. Besides, on the underlying, ideological questions, the parties trade places from time to time. Party loyalty is about as sane as always going to the store where you never find what you want to buy—except you did on the first visit.
The early American leadership lined up roughly in two camps, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists (although they wouldn’t have seen it that way). In the end, the number of states in favor of a government under the Constitution was… go ahead, out of the 13, guess! It was zero.
To win some people over, the U.S. Constitution had to spell out the specific rights of the new government, others demanded a specific recitation of the limits of the government. This is an argument which the involved leadership of America continues to debate, effectively the Big Brother/social-good government versus the laissez-faire/marketplace government. To get the approval of others, the rights reserved for and guaranteed to individual citizens had to be enumerated. For ACLU types who champion individual freedom, history begins with the first ten amendments to the Constitution, which had to be promised before the document could be ratified. Ironically, the result of the enumerated rights has been pretty precisely the opposite of what was intended, because without it, a citizen could have argued that he had all kinds of rights that none of us has today.
After, and only after you have read the Articles of Confederation, go on to read the U.S. Constitution (usconstitution.net). Then, when you can’t figure out how we got from one to the other, or if you doubt that the tension and dissention of the Founding Fathers’ era is still alive and well—and ought to be considered your choice of the next president—read on. The Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers and the biographies of their authors will help.
In the end, what you discover is the brilliance of our system. Anyone can be president? Probably not. But, anyone can use the power vested in him or her by the Founding Fathers to intelligently pursue both happiness and a better nation. If you’re not entering the 232-year-old debate when you enter the voting booth, you might as well choose your candidate by race, gender, age or the fact that he/she uses the same toothpaste you do.