Slavery's Dead Hand

Which is not to say that an educated man in Philadelphia in 1787 would act, nevertheless, upon his best understanding. Far from it. The conclave of white gentlemen who met that May to hammer out procedures for their self-governance felt it necessary for survival to fold into their formula the odious practices of American slave holders. They also (perhaps more out of fear than is commonly recognized) devised a structure of government immensely resistant to change, as if through the power of their will they could assure the new-born United States of America some degree of permanency.

Though the Founding Fathers dressed the document they wrote in high-sounding words like "justice," and "liberty," theirs was a profoundly conservative compromise. Even in the language of their own time it bordered on being reactionary — the word "democracy," for example, does not appear even once in the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights. ‡ As we remember, and venerate, the establishment of the United States as an independent country we too easily forget the worm at the apple's core.

Slaveholding interests suffused the Constitution so thoroughly that the 13th Amendment removes merely their most obvious traces. Somehow we manage to uncritically accept the idea that only supermajorities in Congress should deliver fundamental change, that tiny minorities should be able to block the clear preferences of the majority. This is nothing but the original concrete protections for slave holders shapeshifted into appropriately weighty abstract principles regarding minority protections, sometimes more openly (and usually cynically) acknowledged as the principles of states' rights. The same holds true for the convoluted, exceptionally arduous process of making Amendments. We are so mesmerized by the Constitution that the prospect, at this very moment, of revisiting the Great Depression as a consequence of an unduly lengthy presidential transition raises barely a peep of protest. Amending the Constitution is simply not on the table, even in these extraordinary times. It is hardly far-fetched to see the fight with slaveholders as unresolved and ongoing, except that today's slaves are defined not by color, but by class. What once protected more primitive human predators now with enhanced efficiency protects the super rich.

Today's fights over voter registration crisscross the same ground disputed in 1787 and, deliberately shut out, poverty has an almost impossible time making claims on the Federal government. Nor is it an accident that America lags so far behind other first world countries when it comes to social welfare, education, basic physical infrastructure, rates of criminal incarceration or, indeed, other more profound metrics of a nation's health such as its predisposition towards military aggression. Americans probably aren't that much less interested in social justice than people in other countries, or less willing to commit to democratic reform: such greatly disparate outcomes only make sense in terms of significantly different institutional political constraints.

Yet the United States is not standing still while other countries move ahead. We are moving backwards ourselves. The rich versus the rest of us is not the same old story throughout the sweep of American history. As the rich have learned to use the power of a modern administrative state — a state, it must be emphasized, whose scope and complexity could not have been imagined in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries — they have doubled and redoubled the barriers between the people and the government. The arc of American democracy takes us from the practically non-existent, to the problematic, to the almost purely symbolic. But bread and circuses do not last forever. And a system of government with the real, albeit hidden purpose of exploiting the majority of its people cannot last long at all.

It would be presumptuous to believe that the ultimate defeat of slave interests entails revising central elements of, or scrapping, our current system of government. On the other hand, it would be imprudent in the extreme to assume that things can continue in the direction they're going indefinitely. Acknowledging that critically important elements of our behavior are locked in a distant, irrelevant past would be the first step towards a solution.


† We do not know, moreover, for a fact, that typical American cognitive processes of two hundred years ago would have been comparable to today's. Looking further back, it remains an open and interesting question whether prehistoric homo sapiens sapiens possessed a human psychology much like our own. During the Roman Empire of two thousand years ago possibly human psychology was similar to today's, but certainly not in toto, an appreciation, for example, of ordinary individuals as historical actors being conspicuously lacking. Thus somewhere in human social evolution a sense of a dividing line, or lines, emerges. What we do know, however, is that over the past two hundred years our understanding of human psychology has changed substantially, for the better.

‡ Similarly, "democracy" or its variations almost never occurs in James Madison's extensive notes of the Convention, and then mostly in a negative context. In the entire body of 85 Federalist Papers it appears — perhaps surprisingly — fewer than two dozen times, and there mostly in Federalist 14, though not as a central theme. It never appears in Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense. Yet the concept or term could not have been unfamiliar. Donald Lutz has found that Montesquieu was the most frequently quoted political authority in colonial America ["The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought," American Political Science Review 78,1 (March, 1984), 189-197]. And Montesquieu repeatedly and reverentially refers to democracy in his The Spirit of Laws (1748, English edition 1752). This is clearly the dog that didn't bark: to the extent that the subject of democracy is of interest to revolutionary era American political theorists it appears primarily for purposes of exclusion rather than empowerment.