Federalist 15: Do today's Tea Partiers know about this?

I had thought I'd be taking these Federalist chapters in big chunks, rather than one-by-one, but it turns out there's a lot to think about in all of these. So we're going to have to go slowly.

You might remember that I said -- somewhat near the outset of this project -- that I expected some of the context of the Federalist would reveal itself as we proceeded through the papers. I wasn't entirely wrong, because we're now at Federalist 15, and Publius is ready to start telling us why the Articles of Confederation stink.

Not, of course, that he needs to make the case. From what I can tell skimming through the Antifederalist Papers, there's no great love for the Articles among any huge segment of the nascent American society. And Publius -- Alexander Hamilton in this particular chapter -- acknowledges as much.

The point next in order to be examined is the "insufficiency of the present Confederation to the preservation of the Union." It may perhaps be asked what need there is of reasoning or proof to illustrate a position which is not either controverted or doubted, to which the understandings and feelings of all classes of men assent, and which in substance is admitted by the opponents as well as the friends of the new Constitution.

So what's the problem here, exactly?

Well, as Hamilton puts it, the antifederalists know the Confederation doesn't work -- but they're unwilling to countenance a government strong enough to overcome the Confederation's problems.

While they admit that the government of the United States is destitute of energy, they contend against conferring upon it those powers which are requisite to supply that energy. They seem still to aim at things repugnant and irreconcilable; at an augmentation of federal authority, without a diminution of State authority; at sovereignty in the Union, and complete independence in the members.

Hmmm. Let me say right here I'm not trying to score any political points. But I've increasingly suspected -- reading the Federalist Papers and skimming over the Antifederalist Papers -- that today's Tea Party/GOP/conservative crowd might be heir more to the antifederalist tradition rather than the federalists. I'm not ready to mount a definitive case here -- I've not done enough reading, and in any case I've already suggested that Alexander Hamilton may not be the most reliable narrator -- but this passage here adds to my sense of things. Because it sure sounds like Hamilton is describing the kind of schizophrenia that characterizes a movement that roots on a president who breaks wiretapping and torture laws while decrying slightly higher marginal tax rates as "tyranny."

But I might be overreading things. I'm not ready to make the case. So let's move on.

Because of the antifederalist bipolar approach, Hamilton says, he's going to have to show how the Confederation really doesn't work. And he starts off with the biggest problem: The national government has too little power, while the states have too much. That means the states can -- and do -- ignore the laws made by the national government. It's an untenable situation.

The United States has an indefinite discretion to make requisitions for men and money; but they have no authority to raise either, by regulation extending to the individual citizens of America. The consequence of this is, that though in theory their resolutions concerning those objects are laws, constitutionally binding on the members fo the Union, yet in practice they are mere recommendations which the States observe or disregard at their option.

Up till now, Publius has talked long and hard about the need for the United States to remain, well, united. Now he takes a different tack: It would be better for the states to exist as separate nations -- though allied, like the NATO alliance -- rather than allow the national government to continue in such an emasculated state. Otherwise, Hamilton writes, it's time to give a national government the power to enforce the laws it makes -- even over the objections of the states.

Government implies the power of making laws. It is essential to the idea of a law that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience. If there be no penalty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or commands which pretend to be laws will, in fact, amount to nothing more than advice or recommendation.

He continues:

There was a time when we were told that breaches, by the States, of the regulations of the federal authority were not to be expected; that a sense of common interest would perside over the conduct of the respective members, and would beget a full compliance with all the constitutional requisitions of the Union. ... In our case, the concurrence of thirteen distinct sovereign wills is requisite, under the Confederation, to the complete execution of every important measure that proceeds from the Union. It has happened as was to have been forseen. The measures of the Union have not been executed; the delinquencies of the states have, step by step, matured themselves to an extreme, which has, at length, arrested all the wheels of the national government, and brought them to an awful stand.

And here again, I'm thinking of today's Tea Party/conservative/GOP folks who regularly assert the rights of states to nullify federal laws. (Take a look at the states attorneys general bringing legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act.) They claim to be acting in the traditions of the Founders; yet the Founders really did act to centralize power -- take it away from the states -- instead of distributing power to the states.

I have no doubt I'll come up against a flaw in this theory -- or that somebody will point it out to me -- as I continue reading. But so far, I'm finding it harder to avoid this idea: Today's Tea Partiers might actually be heirs to folks who wanted nothing to do with the Constitution. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, assuming I'm right. But it might cast a very different flavor to our modern debates.

Bag O' Books: "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis' great talent is to take abstractly nerdy topics and turn them into bestsellers by grafting a compelling human narrative on them. "Moneyball" took baseball stats revolution and made Billy Beane into a hero; "The Blind Side" took a look at football's left tackle position -- a position that even most die-hard fans don't watch that closely, except in slow-mo instant replays -- and turned it into an Oscar for Sandra Bullock. So it's difficult to read "The Big Short" -- a chronicle of the subprime housing market collapse, and how it nearly took the entire financial system down with it -- ­and not  think of the movie possibilities.

Certainly there's characters aplenty, each with wacky distinctiveness but who share a common bond: They were the few people who saw the collapse coming -- despite the "nobody could've known" rationalizations afterward -- and who got rich because of it. There's Michael Burry, a one-eyed former doctor with Asperger's syndrome whose condition gave him advantage: he was one of the few financial analysts obsessed enough to sift through subprime bond documents to discover how tenuous the market was. There's Steve Eisman, whose great talent in life was to be an asshole contrarian. There's Eisman's sidekick, Queens-bred Vinny Daniels, who entered the financial industry not from an Ivy League school but from SUNY-Binghamton. And there's Charlie Ledley, a "diletantte" who made his fortune with shrewd guesses about which companies would rebound from disaster better than others.

Cross the cast from "The Dream Team," maybe and stick them in "Wall Street," and "The Big Short" is what you get. (And it's probably no accident that two movies from the 1980s fit perfectly here: As Lewis makes clear, the subprime collapse marked the end of the exuberant "financial 1980s" some 20 years late.)

Only Lewis' cast of characters is real. And they got rich predicting the collapse of the subprime market because they did what very few individuals -- and even fewer big banking institutions -- did: They tried to make the subprime market explain itself. Why are subprime bonds given such good ratings? Why isn't there better information about the quality of loans that are bundled into the bonds? Why is the process so opaque? The answers they got didn't make sense, but nobody else was asking the questions because everybody was making too much money. Until they weren't. (The similarity to "Moneyball" is astounding, actually, except that the fate of capitalism itself rests in the balance.)

In the end, the success (until it failed) of the subprime bond market depended on a bit of weirdness: Housing prices had gone up, up, up for 60 years, and nobody thought they would ever go down. Combine that faulty assumption -- computer models used by big banks wouldn't even let you input a decline in home prices to see what would happen to the value of the subprime bonds -- with the collapse of lending standards, and, well, what happened was always going to happen. Lewis describes an immigrant strawberry picker who got a loan to buy a $700,000 house ... on an income of $14,000 a year. How did that happen?

One thing the book drives home -- something that we want to forget -- is how close the entire financial world came to collapsing in 2008. One of Charlie Ledley's partners calculates that the city of Chicago has eight days of chlorine available to treat the city's water supply -- a calculation he makes because he thinks it might be relevant. Other characters come to question the viability of democratic capitalism -- even as they're making a killing -- because the heart of Wall Street's (and thus America's) economic engine was dependent on opacity, near fraud and Ponzi-like scheming for success.

We're still fighting about how to regulate the financial markets, but Lewis doesn't offer much in the way of solutions -- only anger about the messed-up nature of the system. That's ok: movies don't need to offer solutions. And Matt Damon would be great as Michael Burry.

Federalist 14: Something old, something new

The entire live-blog of "The Federalist Papers" can be found here.

My friend Ben is fond of distinguishing American conservatism from its European forebears; American conservatives, he has told me on several occasions, are conserving a revolutionary heritage. I thought about his statement quite a bit while reading James Madison in Federalist 14.

This chapter is, ostensibly, about whether the United States is too big to be governed effectively. (Madison's answer: If we were a pure democracy, with every man given a direct voice in governing, sure. But since we're a republic -- with representatives sent from the 13 states to the heart of the union -- we'll do fine. And hey, we managed to pull off a revolution together!)

But as we near the end of 14, it's apparent that Madison has another topic on his mind: Whether the type of government embodied in the proposed Constitution is so new, so radical, so unfamiliar that its very novelty increases the risks of failure. Madison's answer, of course, is "no." The Constitution might look like a new animal, he suggests, but it's really a hybrid of the best parts of governments found elsewhere in the world, and throughout history. At the same time, though, Madison offers a defense of the spirit of experimentation:

Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?

(Snip)

Had no important step been taken by the leaders of the Revolution for which a precedent could not be discovered, no government established of which an exact model did not present itself, the people of the United States might, at this moment have been numbered among the melancholy victims of misguided councils, must at best have been laboring under the weight of some of those forms which have crushed the liberties of the rest of mankind. Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society. They reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe.

I noted at the outset that conservatives tend to cite "The Federalist Papers" more often than liberals and progressives, and I still think that's true. But it's here that I start to see signs that progressives can also claim a heritage from the Founding Fathers. Today's conservatives, I think, want to bind us to the vision of the Founders in a way that, perhaps, the Founders would've found alien. A reason I hear for that, often, is that human nature hasn't changed so much in 200 years. And that's right. But I don't imagine it had changed all that much, frankly, in the 200 years before the Constitution was written, either. The Founders, in other words, were not the last wise men to walk this earth.

Still, the Founders might've been experimenters and progressives, but they were rationalists and empiricists as well. They didn't build the Constitution out of a sense of pure novelty, but sought foundations in history and experience for what they were trying. And they expected, as Madison notes, that their successors would both "improve and perpetuate" what they built. If we are to conserve a revolutionary heritage, then, perhaps it was intended from the beginning that we preserve both the revolution and the heritage.

Federalist 11 - Federalist 13: Moneymoneymoneymoney! Money! (Also: The persistence of Euro-bashing in American politics)

I don't have a lot to say about Federalists 10 through 13. They're chiefly about how a unified United States will fare economically. Considering the United States went on to become the richest nation the planet's ever seen, I don't know that there's much to argue about here, even with hindsight fully engaged. But just to recap, keeping the states together will:

* Make it easier for everybody to make money. A unified America will be able to fend off competition from Europe, bargain from a stronger vantage point and -- very importantly -- be able to field a navy capable of protecting its commerce. Alexander Hamilton:

Under a vigorous national government, the natural strength and resources of the country, directed to a common interest, would baffle all the combinations of European jealousy to restrain our growth. This situation would even take away the motive to such combinations, by inducing an impracticability of success. An active commerce, an extensive navigation, and a flourishing marine would then be the offspring of moral and physical necessity. We might defy the little arts of the little politicians to control or vary the irresistible and unchangeable course of nature.

And, Hamilton adds, a bigger country means a more economically diverse country -- which will make it easier to ride out tough times in any particular industry.



* Make it easier to collect revenue to fund a national government. Remember, this is back before the IRS had really even been thought off, so many of the government's revenues came from import duties and that kind of thing.

* Get economies of scale. This idea might seem farcical at this point, now that the government is buried in debt, the idea was that one big government might be able to do things less expensively, on the whole, than if the 13 states were all spending money on their own and duplicating efforts. Some of that depends on the United States being a much smaller country; Hamilton at one point boasts that the Navy would only have to defend the country in the Atlantic. Projecting power around the globe wasn't really under consideration here.

But speaking of the rest of the globe, there's a kind of bizarre moment at the end of Federalist 11. Hamilton's been playing up the ability of the United States to make money and compete against Europe -- when all of the sudden he launches a sort of ur-Freedom Fries campaign.

Europe, by her arms and by her negotiations, by force and by fraud, has, in different degrees, extended her dominion over them all. Africa, Asia, and America, have successively felt her domination. The superiority she has long maintained has tempted her to plume herself as the Mistress of the World, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. Men admired as profound philosophers have, in direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority, and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America -- that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere.1 Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the Europeans. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother, moderation. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will will add another victim to his triumphs. Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!

Which just goes to prove: There's no topic in American politics -- and never has been -- that can't be livened up with a little bit of good old-fashioned Euro-bashing. The French suck! USA! USA! USA!

Federalist No. 6 - Federalist No. 10: Let's not fight with each other

I said last time that the shadow of the Civil War would loom heavily over my reading of "The Federalist Papers" -- and starting in Federalist No. 6, it really, really does. Because it's here that Alexander Hamilton starts to make the case that a strong union won't just protect the individual states from wars with external powers -- it'll also keep the states from making war on each other.

So, ummm ... how did that work out for you?

No. Wait. Snark is a little too easy here. Truth is, Hamilton's got history on his side -- but he's going to take his time getting to the most useful parts of it. Instead, he tells us in No. 6 that the problem with leaving the states to proceed forward as autonomous nations is that each small state will be more likely to see the rise of a leader who makes war on neighboring states for his own vainglorious reasons.

Men of this class, whether the favorites of a king or of a people, have in too many instances abused the confidence they possessed; and assuming the pretext of some public motive, have not scrupled to sacrifice the national tranquility to personal advantage or personal gratification.

He goes on at length about this, citing examples from Pericles and Henry VIII, and well, he's right. That's absolutely a danger -- but it's not the ONLY danger, and sometimes it's not even the most important one. (And in any case, both large nations and small ones are subject to the danger.) The Civil War came about not because (say) Robert E. Lee dreamed of a thousand monuments to his name, but because there were very real moral (slavery) and philosophical (the role of the federal government) differences between the Northern and Southern states.

To be fair, Hamilton acknowledges as much in No. 7, listing out a series of reasons individual states might make violence upon each other: territorial disputes, including claims to territories in the west; "the competitions of commerce;" the settling of debts already owed by the Union (mostly leftover from the Revolutionary War); differing approaches to settling contracts; that kind of thing.* It's notable, though, that Hamilton speaks here in generalities -- because there's a specific notable omission: SLAVERY! WHAT ABOUT SLAVERY?!?!

*I don't want to spend too much time on a tangent here, but there's been a theory advanced among (for lack of a better word) neoconservatives in recent years that America preserves its security by establishing democracies in other countries because democracies don't tend to make war on each other. After reading Federalists No. 6 and 7, I think it's safe to say that Alexander Hamilton, drawing from history, might pooh-pooh that notion.

The result of all these potential sources of conflict, Hamilton says in No. 8, would be that each state and/or small confederacy would probably end up more militarized -- and thus more injurious to personal liberties -- than if they stuck together under the proposed Constitution. This is kind of a sly argument: One of the main concerns of the Antifederalists, I gather, is that the new Constitution would allow a central government to form a standing Army. Well, Hamilton says, the raising of a standing army can only be inferred from the words of the Constitution -- but it's a dead certainty if the states go their own way. They'll be so likely to come in conflict with each other -- and here Hamilton drops a number of examples from Europe -- that they'll have to raise their guard against each other.

In making this case, he says a few words about the militarization of a society that seem to be worth considering in 21st century America.

The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors.

This kind of society, of course, is what the new Constitution is meant to protect against. And that's the promise Hamilton makes.

But if we should be disunited, and the integral parts should either remain separated, or, which is most probably, should be thrown together into two or three confederacies, we should be, in a short course of time, in the predicament of the continental powers of Europe -- our liberties would be a prey to the means of defending ourselves against the ambition and jealousy of each other.

Or, as he says more succinctly at the outset of No. 9:

A FIRM Union will be of the utmost moment to the peace and liberty of the States, as a barrier against domestic faction and insurrection.

It is in Federalist No. 10 that James Madison (finally!) makes an appearance and starts to explain why a union under the proposed Constitution will be able to tamp down -- though never eliminate -- factionalism between the states. Basically, the proposed form of government -- a republic -- will allow for democracy but not too much democracy; populist passions will be cooled by the filtration of a small group of elected men, who will thus be able to keep the passions of the day balanced against each other. Maybe one state could come under the sway of crazy men with crazy ideas, he says, but certainly not all of them at the same time. A republican form of government will "refine and enlarge the public views," he says,

by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.

Which brings us back around to the Civil War. If the Constitution was supposed to tamp down conflicts between the states and temper their passions ... well, why didn't it?

Maybe it did. I've been reading the Federalists with the idea that the Civil War disproved some of the assertions made about the effects of unity, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Civil War is just a huge, glaring, bloody exception to the rules that Madison, Hamilton and Jay are setting forth here. And it would be 70 years or so before the divisions between North and South turned bloody. We have stuck together -- despite some turbulent times -- since then. So who knows?

In any case, these first 10 Federalists have felt -- to this reader at least -- like so much throat-clearing. There's been a lot of talks about the benefits of unity and the dangers of splitting up into separate states or confederacies. There's been precious little talk about the proposed Constitution itself, as well as the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation. We've got a few more chapters to go discussing the benefits of union, but just over the horizon we're about to get some answers to our main questions: Why do the Articles suck? And why is the Constitution so awesome?

Federalist Interlude: On the Perils of Public Autodidactism

Here's the problem with a project like live-blogging your way through the Federalist Papers -- it quickly becomes apparent to everybody else how much you might not know. In a classroom, you can mostly hide -- and when the moments come to prove your knowledge, well, often those tests are literally tests, and the results of them remain between you and your instructor.

Here, I'm liable to embarrass myself before literally tens of people. Some of them my friends.

I mention this because several people -- Glomarization in the comments, another friend behind the scenes -- have gently suggested that perhaps I'm reading the Federalist Papers in a bit of a vacuum: That I'm not really accounting for or explaining how badly the Articles of Confederation (America's constitution before the Constitution) were broken while I toss around insults like "douchebag" at Alexander Hamilton and "strawman" at John Jay.

And, well, they're right.

Part of this, I think, is a problem of my own expectations: I knew that the Federalist Papers were authored, basically, in support of ratifying the new Constitution. And the new Constitution was created, basically, because those Articles of Confederation weren't really working all that well for the new United States. So I guessed -- incorrectly? correctly? -- that part of the process of persuading the public to ratify the Constitution would involve a little bit of comparison. Not just "This new Constitution is awesome!" but "This new Constitution is awesome -- and here how it's better than the old Articles!"  In other words, I think I expected the context to reveal itself somewhat.

Which is perhaps fine for me as a reader. Maybe less fine for those of you who kindly bother to follow me on this little journey.

The other part of the problem is this: I don't have a teacher in this process. A classroom instructor can guide you through a text, providing context and information along the way. I don't have that; I'm improvising. In my defense: I've got a copy of "The Antifederalist Papers" open side-by-side with my copy of "The Federalist Papers." Additionally, I've spent considerable time with each chapter trying to Google my way to contextual knowledge.

Absent that, though, my knowledge of the Articles boils down to a 20-year-old drive-by from basic civics class: In those days, the United States was led by a weak Congress with no power to tax or, really, lead the country in a unified direction: The states possessed more power in this configuration than they do now. States didn't necessarily respect the laws and regulations of their neighboring states. It was a bit chaotic.

And ... that's about it. Which, for this project, probably isn't enough.

The smart thing to do right now would probably be to abandon this project, or at least the public portion of it. But lordy, that's not what the Bloggy Age is about! Frankly, I'm doing this in public in  large part because I hope I'll get some  pushback and education from my knowledgeable friends. I'll hazard looking stupid, because I figure that's the best way for me to get smarter. It's either that, or go back to college. And I ain't got time for that.

So onward ho. We'll return to "The Federalist Papers" tomorrow.

Federalist No. 2- Federalist No. 5: "Concerning Dangers from Foreign Force and Influence"

If you were a late 18th-century resident of New York reading the Federalist Papers for the first time, I think there's a small-but-not-insignificant chance you'd only be a few pages into Federalist No. 2 before you started wondering if "Publius" -- the supposed author of these papers -- is a touch bipolar. Behind the scenes, of course, "bad cop" Alexander Hamilton has turned over the writing duties to "good cop" John Jay. The shift in tone is abrupt, even if the goal is the same.

Still, if Detective Hamilton looks bad because he's bringing rubber hoses and lead pipes into the interrogation room, we can't let Jay off the hook too lightly. Because his job here is to make the case that -- despite what opponents of the proposed Constitution tell you -- it's important that the United States actually remain united states. So Federalists No. 2 through 5 are all about the wisdom of sticking together. Unless I'm missing something, though, Jay is arguing against strawmen.

It is well worthy of consideration therefore, whether it would conduce more to the interest of the people of America that they should, to all general purposes, be one nation, under one federal government, or that they should divide themselves into separate confederacies, and give to the head of each the same kind of powers which they are advised to place in one national government.

And later:

With what propriety, therefore, or for what good purposes, are attempts at this particular period made by some men to depreciate the importance of the Union? Or why is it suggested that three or four confederacies would be better than one?

Yeah! Why do those guys want to break us all up?

Wait a minute. Which guys are those?

Damned if I know. Remember: I'm not an academic. I've got what I think is a decent knowledge of American history, but I can't remember the names of anybody who suggested -- at this point in time -- that America would be better off breaking into pieces. A quick Google search does me no good. I even download a copy of "The Anti-Federalist Papers," hoping to find an example. But what I find, skimming through chapter headings, are a series of other objections: the Constitution's lack of a Bill of Rights (it would later be added), along with a whole host of what might now be called "big government" concerns about taxes and tyranny. What I don't find, though, is a "let's call the whole thing off" attitude about the Union.

Skimming through the Antifederalists, in fact, what's striking is that they -- like the Federalists -- believe the Articles of Confederation (basically: the constitution before the Constitution) are broken. They just think the proposed Constitution isn't necessarily the right solution. Here's "Centinel," writing in Antifederalist No. 21:

That the present confederation is inadequate to the objects of the union, seems to be universally allowed. The only question is, what additional powers are wanting to give due energy to the federal government?

Well, that seems to be a fair question, doesn't it? Even an enduring one.

But we're moving into Federalist No. 3 now, and Jay finally sets himself to the task of answering his strawman question: Union (unh!): What is it good for?

Safety, basically.

Thirteen separate states, he says, will have 13 different ways to give offense to the wider world, increasing their chances of stumbling into war. A unified nation is less likely to go to war over, say, border problems than a border state itself would. Jay doesn't really explain, though, why Massachusetts should care if (say) Virginia goes to war. He's assuming the attachment to Union, I think, because he knows he's already got it -- he knows he's arguing against strawmen.

There's also safety -- and quality -- in numbers. Bigger city high schools usually have better basketball teams than small towns because they have a bigger talent pools to draw from; Jay figures the same thing. Jay starts this case in No. 3, and continues making it in No. 4.

One government can collect and avail itself of the talents and experience of the ablest men, in whatever part of the Union they may be found. It can move on uniform principles of policy. It can harmonize, assimilate, and protect the several parts and members, and extend the benefit of its foresight and precautions to each. In the formation of treaties, it will regard the interest of the whole, and the particular interests of the parts as connected with that of the whole. It can apply the resources and power of the whole to the defense of any particular part, and that more easily and expeditiously than State governments or separate confederacies can possibly do, for want of concert and unity of system. It can place the militia under one plan of discipline, and, by putting their officers in a proper line of subordination to the Chief Magistrate, will, as it were, consolidate them into one corps, and thereby render them more efficient than if divided into thirteen or into three or four distinct independent companies.

Bigger is better. Less likely to be messed with. More able to achieve unity of purpose. And if it weren't for the whole "nobody seems to be arguing against Union, just about how it's going to be governed" thing, I'd think this case was pretty compelling.

Jay's got one last card to play along these lines, though. Unity, he says, will make Americans safer ... from each other. Splitting into separate states or confederacies, he says in Federalist No. 5, will only pit those states and confederacies against each other. North and South will most likely end up competing with and distrusting each other.

The North is generally the region of strength, and many local circumstances render it probable that the most Northern of the proposed confederacies would, at a period not very distant, be unquestionably more formidable than any of the others. No sooner would this become evident than the Northern Hive would excite the same ideas and sensations in the more southern parts of America which it formerly did in the southern parts of Europe. Nor does it appear to be a rash conjecture that its young swarms might often be tempted to gather honey in the more blooming fields and milder air of their luxurious and more delicate neighbors.
(snip)
Hence it might and probably would happen that the foreign nation with whom the Southern confederacy might be at war would be the one with whom the Northern confederacy would be the most desirous of preserving peace and friendship. An alliance so contrary to their immediate interest would not therefore be easy to form, nor, if formed, would it be observed and fulfilled with perfect good faith.

And here I'm tempted to give John Jay a break. The tensions between North and South were already apparent at the time. The Constitution's framers were doing the best they could to keep everybody together, even making concessions that let Southern states count their slaves as almost-people for the purpose of Congressional representation. So maybe the Constitution did delay the inevitable conflict.

What I don't know, though, is if that delay was worth it. Did the history of Union help the states patch their differences after the Civil War? Did slaves go free sooner or later because of the early compromises and the later war? Who knows? But it looks as though the shadow of the Civil War will be looming over upcoming chapters, so we'll have a chance to discuss this more.

A final thought: Back in Federalist No. 2, Jay makes the case for the Constitution by noting that its framers were, well, good guys -- patriotic and wise veterans of the Revolution. And no one can deny those men did good and useful work. Yet even where the Founders are concerned, I'm more than a little enamored of this reply by "Brutus Junior" in Antifederalist No. 38:

If we are to infer the perfection of this system from the characters and abilities of the men who formed it, we may as well determine to accept it without any inquiry as with. ... I confess I think it of no importance what are the characters of the framers of this government, and therefore should not have called them in question, if they had not been so often urged in print, and in conversation, in its favor. It ought to rest on its own intrinsic merit. If it is good, it is capable of being vindicated; if it is bad, it ought not to be supported. It is degrading to a freeman, and humiliating to a rational one, to pin his faith on the sleeve of any man, or body of men, in an affair of such momentous importance.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like I'm finding something closer in spirit to modern, populist Tea Party conservatism in the Antifederalist Papers -- lots and lots of talk about tyranny -- than in the Federalist Papers. And maybe I'm just partial to contrarians, but I'm liking the pluck of the Antifederalists, too. All of which has me worried: Is this reading project going to turn me into a weirdo libertarian?

Federalist No. 1: America's Founding D-Bag

Alexander Hamilton has always seemed to me to be America's Founding Douchebag. That's probably unfair, but there's something about duelling -- Hamilton's involvement in an act that conferred "civilized" rules on a savage, life-taking act -- that struck me as ur-fratty. And though he's now celebrated for helping bring about the Constitution's ratification as one of the co-authors of "The Federalist Papers," his apparent monarchist streak still strikes me as at odds with the democratic nature of the government he actually helped launch.

Plus, there's the whole $10 bill thing.

So I'm not surprised, just a page into Federalist No. 1 -- written by Hamilton -- to discover that he was also possible America's Founding Negative Campaigner. Writing under the "Publius" name, he tells New Yorkers that backers of a new Constitution just want candy and kitties and charity for their fellow Americans. Opponents, he suggests, are merely motivated by selfish interests:

Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter, may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminuition of the power, emolument and consequence of the offices they now hold under the State-establishments -- and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandise themselves with fairer prospects of elevation fromt he subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies, than from its union under one government.

Let's step back a second: The purpose of the new Constitution was to centralize authority in the United States under a federal government. It was, in some respects, a power grab -- and Hamilton, as one of the framers and campaigners for the new Constitution, might reasonably be expected to be one of the chief beneficiaries of that grab. But Hamilton starts his campaign by criticizing the Constitution's critics -- they're the power grabbers, petty men who'd rather rule over several small fiefdoms than one big empire. At a vantage point of 200 years, at least, it's kind of hard to take Hamilton seriously when his approach is so naked and, well, unsubtle.

But Hamilton is smart, though, because he acknowledges as much in the next paragraph:

Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives, not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as upon those who oppose the right side of a question.

This is the 18th century equivalent of sending Sarah Palin out to proclaim that "Barack Obama pals around with terrorists," only to back down a few days later with "He's an honorable man" utterances. The damage is done. We have, however, already learned a valuable lesson: Our Founding Fathers weren't demigods residing on Mount Olympus; they were politicians, with the willingness to roll up their sleeves and start hurling muck if needed. Folks fed up with the "tone" of our politics today should realize it was ever thus.

We're moving quickly, though, and Hamilton -- while he's probably not thinking about a 21st century audience for his words -- is quickly demonstrating not only that the tone of American politics has always been fractious, but the substance of the debates can be unchanging as well. At issue? The authority of a central government versus the rights and liberties of people under that government.  Conservatives these days argue that more centralized government means less freedom for citizens, but Hamilton goes out of his way to pooh-pooh that idea.

An overscrupulous jealous of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pertence and artifice; the bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealously is the usual concomitant of violent love--

Get that? If you're too worried about the rights of the people, you're just like an abusive husband!

--and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is too apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that that the vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the conteplation of a sound and well informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us, that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism, than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics the greatest number have begun their career, by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing Demagogues and ending Tyrants.

Get that? If you're too worried about the rights of the people, you're probably a tyrant in waiting! Real liberty is to be found under the protection of a "firm" government. Sorry, folks, but I'm not losing the "douchebag" vibe from Hamilton here.*

*Don't get me wrong: Revolutions in "the name of the people" have given us tyrannies in Russia, China and a whole bunch of other places. Seeing as how Hamilton had somewhat recently participated in a Revolution aimed at throwing off a tyranny in the name of the proposition that "all men are created equal" his assertion here seems ... convenient.

Hamilton is winding down at this point. But he's also getting started. Yes, he says, he favors the new Constitution -- and the aim of the coming series of articles is to convince New Yorkers to ratify it, as well. Otherwise, he says, the United States will disappear.

For nothing can be more evident, to those who are able to take an enlarged view of the subject, than the alternative of an adoption of the new Constitution, or a dismemberment of the Union. It will therefore be of use to begin by examining the advantages of that Union, the certain evils and the probable dangers, to which every State will be exposed from its dissolution. This shall accordingly constitute the subject of my next address.

NEXT TIME: What's so great about the Union, anyway?

Bag O' Books: 'The Federalist Papers'

I've never read "The Federalist Papers."

This is a little bit embarrassing to admit. I've spent a considerable portion of the last few years thinking and writing about government and politics, with arguments about the nature of the American Constitution often residing somewhere near the center of my debates. Yet I've never delved into the document that -- outside the Constitution itself -- does more to illuminate the thinking of the Founders who created the government that we still live with today.

It's even more embarrassing because many of those debates have been with my conservative friend and collaborator Ben Boychuk -- and, well, he has read "The Federalist Papers." And he's drawn on them, not infrequently, to make his case against the arguments I've made. I've felt slightly overmatched at times, as a result.

In my defense, I don't think I'm alone in this. I might be wrong, but I've noted that smart conservative commentators tend to invoke "The Federalist Papers" far more often than smart liberal commentators. (Everybody quotes Tocqueville, but that's another project.) I don't think it's because of any anti-intellectualism on the part of liberals: I suspect that liberals -- while respecting much of the founding legacy -- don't feel nearly as chained to it conservatives do. Conservatives, I think, feel that if you can successfully invoke the Founders, you've probably won the argument. Liberals, on the other hand, consider the founding vision to be a critical part of the argument -- but not the trump card. And truth is, I'm sympathetic to the latter vision. I don't think of the Founders as "dead white males" but I do think they built a government for a society that was more rural, more racist, more homogeneous and much less egalitarian than today's.

Still, I feel like I'm missing a critical piece of political literacy. So starting today, I'm going to start reading my way through "The Federalist Papers." And I'll be documenting my journey here. I'm not sure if it matters, but I'll be using a Bantam Classics version of the collection, complete with an introduction by Garry Wills. (Which, yeah, he rubs elbows in liberal circles pretty extensively -- but he started out in the conservative tradition.) I'll update my progress very few days.

Let's be clear, though. I'm not an academic. (Obviously.) I'm guiding myself through this as I go along. So ... I might go down some blind alleys in this journey. We'll find out.

And who knows? Maybe I'll get some "Julie & Julia" style book-and-movie deal out of this gig, with the interweaving stories of me reading the book and Alexander Hamilton dying a bloody, painful death.

More likely I'll come out on the other side of this an Antonin Scalia-style originalist conservative. Anything could happen.

Bag O' Books: Eating Animals

How to respond to Jonathan Safran Foer's latest book, Eating Animals? Let us examine the choices:

* BOREDOM: This might be your initial response. After all, the last decade has seen the rise of a new -- or maybe renewed -- literary subgenre concerned with the ethics and sustainability of how we eat. Eric Schlosser got the ball rolling with 2001's Fast Food Nation; the intervening decade has brought us Matthew Scully's Dominion and David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, among other contributions. Mark Bittman once advised us How To Cook Everything, but more recently has decided that Food Matters -- and that maybe we shouldn't be eating so much meat.

The masterpiece of this movement, of course, is Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, which took its readers on a tour of 21st century "factory farming," with steps along the way for moral contemplation of meat eating, hunting and Whole Foods shopping. Pollan's tome -- and a couple of spinoff books -- was a smash hit, finding its way to the bottom of thousands of reusable cloth bags toted by enviro-foodies to farmers markets across the land.

So what's new for Foer to say? Not much, honestly. His reportage here covers much of the same ground already trod by Pollan. Factory farming -- we're told again -- is a dirty, cruel process that is awful to behold is probably making us sick. If you've read Pollan, you're likely to find yourself in the grip of a second possible reaction:

* IRRITATION: What Foer does offer is attitude and sanctimony. Where Pollan is professorial, using narrative to nudge his reader toward a conclusion, Foer comes across a smart, profane, angry undergrad -- one you might try to avoid on the quad when he starts hectoring passerby to stop and watch his Meet Your Meat video. He might be in command of the facts, but damn he's annoying.

It wouldn't be fair to compare Foer to Pollan so much, except that Pollan is one of the targets here. In Omnivore, Pollan concludes he's not willing to give up meat -- but he decides to seek it from alternative sources (local ranchers, hunters) who use sustainable practices and keep animal cruelty at a minimum. This draws Foer's moral ire, declaring that Pollan is among those who "never, absolutely never, emphasize that virtually all of the time one's choice is between cruelty and ecological destruction, and ceasing to eat animals."

There's only one problem with this critique: Foer ends the book as a committed vegetarian -- as he has to, really, once he decides he cannot justify any amount of animal suffering in the name of a good meal. Despite this decision, however, he vows that he can support efforts to create sustainable, minimally cruel family farms.

"The meat industry has tried to paint people who take this two-fold stance as absolutist vegetarians hiding a radicalized agenda," Foer writes. "But ranchers can be vegetarians, vegans can build slaughterhouses, and I can be a vegetarian who supports the best of animal agriculture."

We never really understand why Foer -- who finds any level of animal suffering to be unacceptable -- decides this approach is appropriate. But bizarrely, this conclusion is not that far from Pollan's own. The distinction, I suppose, is that Foer is really sensitive and tortured about the process. This is moral preening, and that is all it is.

This sanctimony -- replete with references to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Holocaust -- would make Eating Animals worth tossing in the trash bin at your nearest barbecue joint ... were it not for the third possible reaction to this book:

* GRUDGING ACCEPTANCE THAT FOER IS KINDA MAYBE RIGHT: Damnit, factory farming is gross. It fills our rivers and waterways with shit; it fills our air with climate-changing gases; it delivers meat filled with contaminants and antibiotics. And it is, by any rational standard, cruel: chickens have their beaks cut off; pigs live in their own waste; cattle are dismembered while alive and conscious. These are facts that should give one pause -- if not for the sake of the animals, then for the sake of our own health.

Foer, of course, wants more than a pause. He wants a halt. The environmental factors are important to his case, but it's clear he considers the moral argument most persuasive.

"Think about it," he asks. "Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?"

My first, glib answer: A little bit of both.

Less glibly, what I mean to say is that I do not grant (say) chickens the same moral weight that I do a human being. Foer presents science here that chickens -- among other animals -- share human capacities for pain, fear, reason and other cognitive processes. I don't doubt that he's right. But still: I do not grant a chicken the same moral weight as a human. I just know there's a difference between us and them. (If chickens one day rule the earth, I may regret these words.)

Until then, though, I find the example of nature too compelling. Animals eat other animals. All the time.

Foer doesn't buy this argument. "The entirety of human society and moral progress represents an explicit transcendence of what's 'natural,'" he says. And he's right. But what is interesting to me about this is that environmentalists -- and, let's face it, there's a signficant overlap between them and the vegetarian community -- make this argument in no other context. Dams are unpardonable usurpations of Mother Nature's work; so are power plants. Environmentalists usually call on us to disturb nature as little as possible, to acclimate our processes to the earth's natural rhythms. Then dinner time comes.

So where does this leave us? Probably -- if you've ever given thought to your meals -- at the same place you started.

My family already buys our meat from a halal butcher who, in turn, buys his cattle and chickens directly from nearby Amish farmers. We already have escaped the factory farm system, putting our money toward something as sustainable and minimally cruel as we can achieve while still eating meat.

But we probably don't need to eat meat as often as we do. Tonight I prepared a vegetarian stew from the Sundays At Moosewood cookbook. It was delicious, stuffed full of veggies and spices, and any concerns I had about missing meat were quickly overcome by the fact that it was super tasty.

This, of course, is what Foer misses. In his quest for moral perfection, he forgets that a good meal -- even a simple meal, even a vegetarian meal -- can bring you pleasure. Pollan never forgets that. I know whose manifesto I find more appealing.

Bag O' Books: "Bomb Power"

It is difficult not to stand in awe -- and a little envy -- of Garry Wills. His casual brilliance has made him one of the more prolific writers and thinkers of the age, and his thinking has been supple enough to carry him from an early alliance with William F. Buckley to an esoteric ideology that still seems to call itself "conservatism" while finding itself most comfortable on the pages of the lefty New York Review of Books. He's the kind of guy who appears capable of tossing off a 250-page book between lunch and dinner, while the rest of us are struggling to compose coherent blog posts in a comparable amount of time.

His new book, Bomb Power, reads a little bit like that -- a 250-page blog post. Wills makes the case that the advent of the Atomic Age also ushered in an era of presidential overreach: that Harry Truman used the prerogatives of the bomb to assert unconstitutional powers (in warmaking, foreign policy and even domestic policy) and to shield his efforts from congressional and judicial oversight; that every president since then (with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter) has tried to expand on that unconstitutional foundation.

At its best, Bomb Power serves as an overview of 65 years of expanding presidential power. But Wills doesn't really pursue his own thesis with much zeal: we see the advent of the bomb at the beginning of the book, and the rise of some institutions to govern its production and use. Wills, though, doesn't do much to make the connection to the overreach he describes thereafter: Korea, the Bay of Pigs and the Gulf of Tonkin all the way up to Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

And his argument is made more difficult by a lack of context. Except for some brief references to Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln, we're not given much of a lesson in how executive power was wielded prior to World War II -- only told that the legislative branch was given more primacy than it currently exercises.. And in critiquing the unconstitutional nature of the postwar rise of the Cold War national security state, Wills doesn't bother to discuss whether the measures taken in the name of anti-Soviet national security might've been, you know, useful. This book, in other words, is written for people who already agree with Wills' point-of-view on such matters.

Wills finally peters out with a single paragraph looking to the future. "Some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution," he writes. "It may be too late to return to its ideals, but the effort should be made."

As it happens, I'm pretty sympathetic to Wills' perspective. This book, however, felt like an appetizer for some other, longer and better-argued work of history.

Bag O' Books: 'Revolutionary Road'

Try as I might -- and I've tried -- I just can't get into John Updike. I know that he was one of the literary masters of the second half of the 20th century. It's just that he's so boring. Other readers, readers I like and respect, disagree with me, so I give a run at an Updike novel now and again. A few weeks ago I tried my hand at Rabbit, Run, and I didn't make it nearly as far as I should've. The pace was glacial, the dense layers of description and internal monologue acting more as an obstacle than as illumination. I couldn't go on.

For whatever reason, though, I thought I'd at least kick the tires of postwar middle-class ennui with Richard Yates' 1962 novel Revolutionary Road. Turns out I made a good choice: Yates turns out -- in this book at least -- to be closer in spirit to the wit of Philip Roth than to Updike. There's entertainment going on here, though it's the kind that'll make you wince every few pages.

Like a lot of people my age, my first awareness of Revolutionary Road came not in a bookstore or literature class, but in a movie advertisement: I've never seen the 2008 film starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, but the trailers seemed to promise a been-there-done-that portrayal of the crushing soul-lessness of suburbia. I've not the seen the movie; I can tell you that the book reads more like a satire than an actual tragedy, despite some grizzliness in the last act.

And the satire is not of the suburbs, really, or the people who live in them -- but of the kind of people who live in the suburbs and think they're too good for them, folks who harbor fantasies of urban bohemia even as they go about the day-to-day drudgery of raising kids and earning money at boring jobs. Today, we call people like this "yuppies," but the term didn't really exist in 1962 -- and Yates was well ahead of his time in chronicling not just the rise of suburbia, but also the backlash.

Here's the Amazon.com synopsis of the book:

Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy.

What the synopsis doesn't tell you is how thoroughly and neatly Yates depicts the pretentions of his characters. April isn't actually a good actress; Frank literally talks a good talk, but it usually amounts to a jargon-filled rant against bourgeois life that was probably articulated better in some of the books he read during a brief stint at Columbia. Yates depicts a typical dinner gathering given by the Wheelers:

And even after politics had palled there had still been the elusive but enlessly absorbing subject of Conformity, or The Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, American Society Today. "Oh Jesus," Shep might begin, "you know this character next door to us? Donaldson? The one that's always out fooling with his power mower and talking about the rat race and the soft sell? Well, listen: did I tell you what he said about his barbecue pit?" And there would follow an anecdote of extreme suburban smugness that left them weak with laughter.

"Oh, I don't believe it," April would insist. "Do they really talk that way?"

And Frank would develop the theme. "The point is it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so typical. It isn't only the Donaldsons--it's the Cramers too, and the whaddyacallits, the Wingates, and a million others. It's all the idiots I ride with on the train every day. It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity."

The book follows the Wheelers as they select and decorate their suburban Connecticut home in ways they hope will show themselves to be above suburbia. And when tragedy does occur, it's only because the our main characters contemplate making good on all their snooty talk. As a pretentious, city-loving wannabe urbanite who has done his fair share of suburb-dissing, I can tell you I had a rare experience with this novel: I felt indicted. Repeatedly, and at times painfully, and at a distance of a half-century.

Yates can't quite sustain the indictment; the last act of the book feels like a movie that -- having run out of things to say and do -- ends with a run-of-the-mill car chase. Until then, though, Revolutionary Road is a splendid book, well-drawn but efficiently paced. It's the kind of book I wish John Updike had written.

Bag O' Books features my thoughts about whatever I've read recently, even if I'm decades late to the table.