I
Herewith I lodge my complaint against historians who simply refuse to understand politics, ideology, and the profoundly transformative events we call revolutions. My method is to review recent reviews of books on the revolutions that matter most to us Americans, we who are heirs to not one but three of these astonishing events—the English Revolution, ca. 1620s-1690s, the American Revolution, ca. 1740s-1790s, and the US Civil War, ca. 1850s-1890s. I feel neither compunction nor guilt in commenting on books I haven’t read, because from what I can tell from the reviews, they reproduce tropes that make them contributions (footnotes?) to a master text that has been in the making for three centuries.
That master text goes something like this. The extraordinary upheaval that convinced 17th-century English men and women that their world had been turned upside down was an insanely complicated set of civil wars fueled by religious fanaticism—not unlike the wars of religion that meanwhile convulsed the continent—rather than a revolution that involved armed class struggle and the triumph of the bourgeoisie over a feudal aristocracy whose lordship was embodied in and enforced by a monarchy destroyed, literally and figuratively, when King Charles I was beheaded in 1649.
Thus the names controversy about the event: what to call it, the English Civil War, the Puritan Revolution, or the English Revolution? Thus the inane historiographical debates about where “the gentry”—the commoners who, having bought up the property loosed by Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries (one-third of England’s arable land), were now the owners of the principal means of production—stood when Parliament refused to disperse on the king’s command and raised its own army to fight the royalist cavaliers: if they were members of a new, “middle-class” of men on the make, shouldn’t they have sided with Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army as against the cavaliers, and if they didn’t, how can you call it a bourgeois revolution?
And thus the even more inane set of choices on offer from historians of the event: was this (1) a class struggle (as per Marxist specifications), or (2) an irrational ideological crucible whose idiom was derived from Biblical prophets, or (3) an incomprehensible melee that, for a brief moment in 1647, during a pause in the civil wars—the moment of the Putney debates staged by that New Model Army—looked like the first modern, democratic republic animated by the consent of the governed?
There is no names controversy attached to the event known as the American Revolution, but the questions raised by the master text shape its apprehension as well. Was it, in fact, a revolution comparable to the concurrent French rendition, which devolved into a bloody reign of Terror—or, more remotely, to its heir apparent in Russia a century later? Or was it instead a dignified, relatively tranquil affair that, as managed by Enlightened wigged men uninterested in any form of radicalism, involved very little armed struggle and even less class conflict, thereby producing a unique, constitutionally endowed nation untainted by the social question that derailed its French counterpart? Did it actually install “the people,” the whole people, as the sovereign power of the new nation, or did it carefully exclude the majority of Americans from citizenship and so leave a lasting legacy of racist, misogynistic rule by, who else, the “moneyed men”?
A kind of names controversy does attach to the Civil War, owing to its origins in the attempt to redefine freedom, and with it the nation itself, as the complete absence of slavery, not a necessary compromise with it. Was it the War for Southern Independence, the US Civil War, or the Second American Revolution? But no one except economic historians blinded by their inhuman theories and quantitative concoctions, which render everything as data points on an indecipherable graph, believes that the consequences of this episode were anything short of cataclysmic.
Still, the master text regulates the narratives of the two American Revolutions because, on the one hand, the Commonwealthmen—the ideologues of Cromwell’s constituency—were the intellectual antecedent chosen by incendiaries like Tom Paine, who fired the imagination of their fellow patriots with pamphlets styled after the broadsides and manifestoes of the 1640s; and because, on the other, the English experience of the 17th century was, as Adam Gopnick remarks, the first modern revolution against which all others must be measured.
II
Gopnick is the best writer on The New Yorker’s staff—the only competition is Anthony Lane—in part because his range is so broad: nothing is beyond his quirky, spiky, but subtle, appreciative reach. In the latest issue he reviews a new book from Knopf on this 17th-century experience, called The Blazing World, by Jonathan Healey, an Oxford don.
Gopnick suggests that Healey is able to wrangle the new social histories, the older Marxist narratives, and the “revisionist” accounts of this moment into his interpretive corral by taking the radicals—the Ranters, the Quakers, the Diggers, the apocalyptic preachers, the proto-feminists, and yes, even the prophets of trans-gender identities—at their word, not in spite but because of their rhetorical extremes. That made me think Healey is writing in the spirit of Christopher Hill, the brilliant, prolific Marxist historian (also an Oxford don) whose books included The World Turned Upside Down (1984), John Milton and the English Revolution (1974), John Bunyan and His Church (1989), Puritanism and the English Revolution (1997), and From Reformation to Industrial Revolution (1970). Gopnick disagrees:
“For Hill, the clashes of weird seventeenth-century religious beliefs were mere scrapings of butter on the toast of class conflict. If people argue over religion, it is because religion is an extension of power; the squabbles about pulpits are really squabbles about politics. Against this once pervasive view, Healey declares flatly, ‘The Civil War wasn’t a class struggle. It was a clash of ideologies, as often as not between members of the same class.’ Admiring the insurgents, Healey rejects the notion that they were little elves of economic necessity. Their ideas preceded and shaped the way that they perceived their class interests. Indeed, like the ‘phlegmatic’ and ‘choleric’ humors of medieval medicine, ‘the bourgeoisie’ can seem a uselessly encompassing category, including merchants, bankers, preachers, soldiers, professionals, and scientists. Its members were passionate contestants on both sides of the fight, and on some sides no scholar has yet dreamed of. Healey insists, in short, that what seventeenth-century people seemed to be arguing about is what they were arguing about.”
That is the master text at work. Notice how. The premise Gopnick and Healey share is that class conflict presupposes an identifiable social grounding, a class whose interests can be deduced from their variegated but similarly gainful occupations—its ideas must be superstructural functions or “reflections” of that grounding in the economic base. If the ideas do not align with the economic interests so deduced, by objective observers who understand what they should be, given the occupations, then class becomes a hopelessly elusive category, and ideologies can be detached from any socially specific situation or position. Either that or the class itself suffers from “false consciousness,” an inability to see what it should, that is, what those objective observers do on its behalf.
The trouble with the premise, a staple of vulgar Marxism as well as positivist social science of every kind, is this: class is a product of struggle, not a predictable predicate that boils down to an inert, inarticulate sociological category. To put it another way, one’s social aspirations or identifications and/or political allegiances are almost never those derived from one’s social origins, at least in the modern world, where one’s standing in society is presumably achieved, not ascribed. Like individuals, classes can be known, to themselves and to others, only by what they do and how they do it, or, as we now say, by their performance. (This is a strictly pragmatic definition in the technical terms posited by Peirce, James, Addams, Mead, and Dewey.)
The English Revolution was effected, as all revolutions have been, by a cross-class coalition that agreed on nothing except the political economy of the future—back then, an agreement on what we would now recognize as a bourgeois society in which the natural right of private property was inviolable, even against a king’s command; in which money, not birth, would determine one’s access to a share of society’s goods; in which work, even hard labor, was the site of self-mastery, not servitude; and in which the dutiful, responsible, male head household was the model of the self-determining individual. On this John Milton, Gerrard Winstanley, John Lilburne, Richard Baxter—the Puritans, the Diggers, the Independents, the Levellers, and the Parliamentarians Long and Short—were unanimous. In that sense, they were bourgeois revolutionaries bent on the overthrow of feudal hierarchies. They didn’t know they were inventing the possibility of capitalism, but they certainly understood what they were up against, and they could specify what they wanted in its place.
Winstanley and the Diggers, the original communists, may seem an exception to this rule, because they did, after all, question the right of private property, at least in principle, as it was embodied in the social power of property owners as a class. But they never doubted that all persons were free only insofar as they owned and controlled the property in themselves, in their capacity to work and produce goods with measurable value. That is the signature assumption of modern bourgeois society and its attendant virtues, such as they are, and the source of its objections to feudal privileges and obligations (an assumption echoed to this day in objections to the benevolent feudalism of “woke corporations”).** [Baxter, Winstanley]
III
To see how even the Puritan divines, who spoke in tongues borrowed from the Old Testament prophets, were committed to the bourgeois virtues, all we have to do is follow Healey’s lead and take their rhetoric at face value. To demonstrate this proposition, I draw on John White, a preacher from Dorchester who, as a promoter of John Winthrop’s mission under the auspices of the Massachusetts Bay Company, wrote “The Planter’s Plea” (1630), a call to escape the decadence of Merrie Old England by civilizing the New World. As preface to White’s polemic, let us keep in mind that Winthrop’s famous speech to his fellow Puritans, given on the eve of their invasion of America, was punctuated by remarks on the political economy of social hierarchy, for example:
“God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence hath so disposed of the condition of mankind as in all times some must be rich, some poor; some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection. . . . All men being thus (by divine providence) ranked into two sorts, rich and poor, under the first are comprehended all such as are able to live comfortably by their own means duly improved, and all others are poor . . . .”
Notice that the difference between rich and poor has nothing to do with royalty, birth, office, custom, occupation—or income. The subjection or dependence of the poor is signified by their lack of control over the property in themselves; riches, power, eminence, comfort, & co. are conferred by the ownership of oneself, as this is enabled by effective claims to real, private property—”their own means duly improved”—or, in short, self-sufficiency. In this limited sense, Winthrop already deploys the language of class rather than estate, describing a society in which customary access to the commons is a relic of the distant past and noble birth carries no connotation of superiority, social or otherwise.
John White offers his credentials as a true believer, a bona fide Puritan, in the opening pages of his tract. The point of colonizing New England was nothing more or less than the spread of righteousness, real religion: “the furthering of godliness and honesty.” In doing so, the colonists would not only sanctify their New World, they would escape the social constrictions of the Old, “where a few men flourish that are best grounded in their estates, or best furnished with abilities, or best fitted with opportunities, and the rest waxe weak and languish, as wanting room and meanes to nourish them.” (Notice that word again, “means.”)
White aims to justify the Puritans’ errand into the wilderness by this doubled strategy: their “shifting into empty [sic] Lands” will purify both the settlers themselves and the indigenous brutes who, being wholly uncivilized, cannot yet know true religion. To begin with:
“It cannot be denied but the life of man is in every way made more comfortable, and offered a more plentiful supply in a larger scope of ground. . . . a large place best secures sufficiency. . . . the husbanding of unmanured grounds, and shifting into empty Lands, enforceth men to frugalitie, and quickeneth invention, . . . and the taking in of Large Countreys presents a naturall remedy against coutesnesse, fraud, and violence; when every man may enjoy enough without wrong or injury to his neighbour.”
This prescription, a kind of frontier thesis avant la lettre, is addressed to the colonists. The other script faces west, toward the margin of the prospective colonized space, where the Natives gather: “Wee hardly have found a brutish people wonne before they had been taught civility. So wee must endeavor and expect to worke that in them first, and Religion afterwards.” But what teaches or produces civility? That is, what kind of social structure and norms would undergird and motivate the civilization of indigenous peoples, who “often perish [sic] for lack of industry” because they have no experience of private property, contract, and modern work habits? (Not, mind you, because they are genetically deficient or sub-human, but because they can’t act upon the incentives and requirements built into modern market society: they are not culturally equipped to behave properly and recognizably in such a society.)
White’s answer spells out the political economy of Puritanism—the vision of a bourgeois society—which, again, would inform and animate the actions of all parties to the anti-royalist coalition in the 1640s. "The “greatest advantage” of colonization “must needes come unto the Natives themselves,” by their incorporation into the social fabric of modern economic life: “Withall, commerce and example of our course of living cannot but in time breed civility among them, and that by Gods blessing may make way for religion consequently, and for the saving of their soules.” [my italics]
White acknowledges, meanwhile, that the area to be settled by the Massachusetts Bay Co. was not endowed with great natural plenty, like colonies further south where the Virginia Co. presided: “the Countrey wants meanes of wealth. . . . there is nothing to bee expected in New England but competency to live on at best, and that must be purchased with hard labour.” But this lack of the sources of quick enrichment was, for White and his audience, a recommendation, because competency—what Winthrop had defined as living comfortably, not lavishly, by one’s “own means duly improved”—meant self-employment, self-mastery, self-determination, the freedom of one’s time and labor-power, thus one’s will, from another’s command:
“Now wee know nothing sorts better with Piety than Competency . . . if [we] desire that Piety and godliness should prosper; accompanied with sobriety, justice and love, let [us] choose a Countrey such as this.” [my italics]
Notice what White assumes as a matter of course, that true religion, the saving of souls, the kingdom of God on earth, etc., these presuppose a certain political economy, a social structure and, accordingly, a property/labor system. This vision of bourgeois society as a godly space doesn’t treat the idea or possibility of grace as something external to the everyday experience of commerce, industry, and so forth—as removed from the hurly-burly of modern market society—but rather as a dimension of it, as something people can feel as they go about their lives, at work, at church, at home, in the most mundane pursuits imaginable. Indeed White’s vision of salvation requires a seamlessness, a continuity between if not an identity of the everyday (the material) and the eternal (the spiritual).
So, the heated religious rhetoric of mid-17th century England is not to be read through, “between the lines,” to its actual repository in either a real social world of power or an imaginary kingdom of God—a world elsewhere—as if this language is a transparent medium or mere conveyance without weight and consequence except in one place or another. It is itself a reality. But its legible deployment by anyone required an audience that could assume what John Winthrop, John White, John Milton, Richard Baxter, and Gerrard Winstanley did in speaking or writing it—that the world already contained what the speakers and writers took for granted, a bourgeois society wherein superior rank was determined, or would be determined, by private control of money and property, not noble birth or grants of privilege, property, and stewardship from a king.
IV
So much for the blueprint, the English/Puritan Revolution of the 17th century, through which, as Karl Marx, Christopher Hill, and C.H. George liked to say, “Locke supplanted Habbakuk.” Or, to put another spin on it, through which the Whig interpretation of Anglo-American history—"ours is a windup world, regularly ticking forward,” as Gopnick summarizes it—replaced the delirious, eschatological, apocalyptic visions of the preachers and levellers who came to power in the 1640s.
The master text derived from this event still regulates the explanation and evaluation of revolution in the Anglo-American world, and from both Left and Right. From both political angles, the American Revolution appears as rather less than a radical event that improved on anything that came before. Indeed it looks more like a conservative triumph, and quite possibly a counter-revolution meant to contain the unruly energies of the unbound people “out of doors,” particularly the slaves to whom the Brits promised freedom if they joined the conquering army raised by Parliament.
At left and right-wing extremes, this angle of vision accordingly sees the making of the US Constitution as the Thermidor—the terminal moment—of a de-centered, genuinely popular experiment in democratic government. The conclusion to be drawn from the story of American independence, so conceived, is that the pre-Constitutional order created by the Articles of Confederation is a tried-and-true template for meaningful, fundamental political change in the present; surely this conclusion now drives the radical thinking of the new majority at SCOTUS, whose counterfeit pedigree comes from an anti-federalist organization called the Federalist Society.
Now, if we suppose that Jacobin—the vibrant young socialist magazine that carries the torch for Bernie, the Squad, DSA, M4A, union organizing, and assorted other radical causes—represents the mainstream of non-lunatic left-wing thought (its founder is now the publisher at The Nation as well), the same conclusion prevails in this precinct. To illustrate the Left’s participation in and reproduction of the master text I have outlined here, I turn to the current issue, where Chris Maisano, a contributing editor, interviews Robert Ovetz, the author of We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few (Pluto Press, 2022), a new book bearing ecstatic blurbs from no less than Noam Chomsky, Olufemi Taiwo, Gerald Horne, and Richard Wolff—the marquee names of the Left’s old and new avant-garde. It’s not a review of the book, but it does let the author speak freely, plainly, and to my mind, inanely, about the meaning of the American Revolution.
Here’s a representative sample of Ovetz’s peerless capacity for emitting incantatory passages from the master text, making sounds that pass for judgement. He speaks of the 1780s, the “Critical Period,” so-called because by most accounts, including that of James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, it was the moment when patriots had to address the problem of an “elective despotism,” as Thomas Jefferson called it—in other words, the possibility that electoral majorities could be as lawless and despotic as any tyrant (a possibility later realized in the united states of the Jim Crow South, ca. 1889-1969):
“This was a short period after a revolutionary period of upheaval when ordinary people shared power with elites. Because some states were unicameral with short terms, few had an executive veto, and none had judicial review, it was easier to pass new laws quickly. State laws were the final word because Congress didn’t have “supremacy” power or judicial review. While they still had property requirements to run for and serve in office, these democratic elements are mostly missing from our current Constitution. This is not to idealize the states but to show how the Constitution was a reactionary outcome to the revolution.”
To which I can only say, bullshit, or, more politely, why not try reading the document itself, and then the thinking that went into its making, especially that of Madison himself? I sure as hell don’t want to cover that ground again, so instead, I’ll copy the (unabridged) link to the piece that ran in Project Syndicate last year called “The Revenge of the Anti-Federalists,” and offer an excerpt from it.
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Here’s the link:
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V
Here’s the excerpt, which concludes the piece. To be honest, I can’t see how anyone can read Madison’s painstaking efforts to preserve the “republican principle” of majority rule while protecting both the rights of persons and the rights of property, and then conclude that he was willing to sacrifice the former to the latter. His great fear was that the new American republic would founder on this very shoal, as all previous republics, ancient and modern, had foundered. “The poor were sacrificed to the rich,” as he put it. Everything he said, wrote, and did from 1786 until 1821 was an attempt to avoid that probability.
. . . . . . .
Let me now turn to “original intent” as a way of demonstrating that both Right and Left are wrong to equate democracy and majority rule, thus mistaken in defining the ratification of the Constitution as the Thermidor of the American Revolution. There can be no doubt that the Senate, at least as hamstrung by the filibuster, urgently needs reform, or that the Electoral College is an ugly anachronism; but neither can there be any doubt that an amended Constitution is a better solution to our contemporary political impasse than a return to the Articles of Confederation.
In early 1787, having made a detailed study of republics ancient and modern, James Madison wrote a memo to himself called “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” This was a long rough draft of the famous Federalist #10. Here he worried about the multiplicity, the mutability, and the injustice of the laws passed by the various states under the diplomatic compact called the Articles of Confederation. But the big problem was the will of the people itself—an “elective despotism,” as Thomas Jefferson himself put it in 1783.
“If the multiplicity and mutability of laws prove a want of wisdom, their injustice betrays a defect still more alarming: more alarming not merely because it is a greater evil in itself, but because it brings more into question the fundamental question of republican Government, that the majority who rule in such Governments, are the safest Guardians both of public Good and of private rights.”
Madison believed in the sovereignty of the people as the sine qua non of republican government. But he assumed that the defense of majority rule, and with it the possibility of a legitimate exercise of state power, required a logic that wasn’t circular—a logic that didn’t justify the power of the state, as expressed in law, by reference to power as such, in this instance the power of numbers.
In sum, Madison knew that a majority could be as despotic as any tyrant. What was to be done? How to contain or combat this despotic potential and thus preserve the substance and legitimacy of popular government? Neither a “prudent regard” for the common good nor “respect for character”—for elite opinion—was adequate, according to Madison. But piety was no help, either, because, like other “passions,” it could easily inflame oppressive majorities.
“The conduct of every popular assembly acting on oath, the strongest of religious ties, proves that individuals join without remorse in acts against which their consciences would revolt if proposed to them under the like sanction, separately in their closets. When indeed Religion is kindled into enthusiasm, its force like that of other Passions, is increased by the sympathy of a multitude.”
So, the way to establish a republic on enduring foundations was not to prevent but to prolong the process of majority formation, to devise, as Madison put it, “such a modification of the Sovereignty as will render it sufficiently neutral between the different interests and factions.”
In place of prudence and character and piety—instead of respect for elite opinion and its attendant hierarchies—Madison proposed, then, to put the structural constraints of a constitution. By this I don’t mean only that he proposed a “limited government” circumscribed by rights guaranteed to individuals, or prerogatives reserved to the states (the Bill of Rights), as enforced by a judiciary that recognized the federalist separation of powers. Of course he did. I mean also that his constitutional design, his “modification of the Sovereignty,” inscribed a difference, and a debate, between what he called “the two cardinal objects of Government, the rights of persons and the rights of property.”
It did so by adopting a “middle mode” through which the legislative branch was divided against itself, and each house became the effective voice of one of those “cardinal objects.” In this sense, Madison proposed to enlist historical time as the bulwark of justice in a society that would inevitably be riven by the differences between what he called “the Class with, and the Class without property”—he proposed to indefinitely prolong the debate between the social classes that had already appeared, in the 18th century, as the bearers of these different rights. The class without property would defend the rights of persons in and through the lower house of the legislatures, including the Congress itself. The class that possessed it would defend the rights of property in the upper house. But both houses would be subject to periodic electoral discovery and pressure.
In a critique of Jefferson’s draft of a constitution for Virginia, Madison explained the historical grounds for this division of labor.
“This middle mode reconciles and secures the two cardinal objects of Government, the rights of persons, and the rights of property. The former will be sufficiently guarded by one branch, the latter more particularly by the other. Give all power to property, and the indigent will be oppressed. Give it the latter and the effect may be transposed. Give a defensive share to each and each will be secure. The necessity of thus guarding the rights of property was for obvious reasons unattended to in the commencement of the Revolution.”
All previous republics had collapsed because they could not balance “the two cardinal objects of Government,” the rights of persons and the rights of property. The great secret divulged by the history of republican government, Madison had found, was that there was nothing left to learn from that history. Except this: Either the rights of persons would be protected from the power of property, or the new American experiment would perish along with all the other attempts at government of, by, and for the people.
“In all the Governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots & lawgivers the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich. In the existing state of American population & American property, the two classes of rights were so little discriminated that a provision for the rights of persons was supposed to include of itself those of property, and it was natural to infer from the tendency of republican laws, that these different interests would be more and more identified.
“Experience and investigation have however produced more correct ideas on the subject.”
In other words, the study of history has forced a complete departure from classical and modern republican theory, Aristotle to Montesquieu. As he said in the constitutional convention on June 19, 1787, “According to the Republican theory indeed, Right & power being both vested in the majority, are held to be synonymous. According to fact & experience, a minority may in an appeal to force be an overmatch for the majority.”
“It is now observed that in all populous countries, the smaller part only can be interested in preserving the rights of property. It must be foreseen that America, and Kentucky itself will by degrees arrive at this stage of Society, that is some parts of the Union, a very great advance is already made towards it “ (Kentucky was shorthand for the most verdant lands on the trans-Appalachian frontier, a new Garden of Eden.)
“It is well understood that interest leads to injustice as well where the opportunity is presented in bodies of men as to individuals; to an interested majority in a Republic, as to the interested minority in any other form of Government. The time to guard against this danger is at the first forming of the Constitution, and in the present state of population when the bulk of the people have a sufficient interest in possession or in prospect to be attached to the rights of property, without being insufficiently attached to the rights of persons. Liberty not less than justice pleads for the policy here recommended.
“If all power be suffered to slide into hands not interested in the rights of property which must be the case whenever a majority fall under that description, one of two things cannot fail to happen; either they will unite against the other description and become the dupes & instruments of ambition, or their poverty & dependence will render them the necessary instruments of wealth. In either case liberty will be subverted: in the first by a despotism growing out of anarchy; in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption.”
That last paragraph sounds like a Platonic prophecy, an acknowledgement that democracy was a dead end. Except that Madison never doubted that majority rule was the necessary if not the sufficient condition of popular government. In the Constitutional convention, on June 26, 1787, for example, he said this:
“An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who labor under all the hardships of life & secretly sigh for a more distribution of its blessings. These may in time outnumber those who are [placed above the feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the former. How is this danger to be guarded against on republican principles?”
In other words, how to preserve both liberty and equality? How to treat both the rights of property and the rights of persons as commensurable commitments? How to embrace majority rule without enabling an “elective despotism”?
Nor did Madison ever think that a “natural aristocracy” of well-educated men with good character—an elite—could contain or guide the unruly energies of the proletarian masses. He always believed that the constitutional structures he designed would convert passions to interests, and that insofar as economic development created more and more interests, an oligarchy founded on corruption was unlikely if not impossible.
But again notice that Madison, like his fellow Founders, did not equate majority rule and legitimate popular government, republican or otherwise.
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https://jacobin.com/2023/04/us-constitution-we-the-elites-robert-ovetz?mc_cid=1b6bd2a802&mc_eid=d90726a8b1
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/24/the-blazing-world-jonathan-healey-book-review
It's not a controversial view at this point that the Constitution represented a conservative counter-revolution to the more radical currents unleashed by the War of Independence. Michael Klarman argues as much in his 2018 study The Framers' Coup. Madison and Company convened the convention explicitly in the wake of what they saw as an "excess" of democracy at the state level, specifically the passage of debtor-relief laws, the issuing of paper currency, and Shays's Rebellion in Massachusetts--all of which threatened property owners and creditors. Once convened in Philadelphia, the delegates outdid each other in the contempt they poured on democracy, which Elbridge Gerry, for example, derided as "the worst of all political evils." Their final frame of government built in many anti-democratic features designed to insulate the government from the will of the people, especially through elections, which favored economic elites.
Why did it pass, then? First, everyday Americans recognized that there needed to be a stronger federal government for the purposes of trade, taxation, and currency regulation. That much they agreed on. But Klarman notes that the Philadelphia convention went far beyond what most Americans wanted in terms of the anti-democratic features of the new national government. The anti-federalists argued strongly against adoption because of this, and almost succeeded in preventing it. But the delegates at Philadelphia lowered the threshold for adoption by not needing unanimity among the states, and structured the ratification conventions to give an edge to city elites like themselves, who wanted to pass the new document.
Today, the Right and Left are critiquing the Constitution for very different reasons. The Constitution was at once pro-national government and anti-democratic. Today's Left, represented by Jamelle Bouie, likes the pro-national government features but not the anti-democratic elements. The Right takes the opposite view: they're against federal power in favor of states, but like the anti-democratic features of the Constitution like the Supreme Court and Senate. The Left seeks to strengthen the federal government's sovereignty over the states while democratizing its constitutive parts. The Right seeks to weaken the national government's power (along the lines of Calhoun's vision) but increase the anti-democratic features across the board. That is a major divide. It's possible to have a unitary national government that's also de-centralized (but not federated) and democratic. This is what the Left should pursue.