Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 95

As we said at the beginning of this chapter, there are different narratives to be told about the American founding. We did not want to fall into the oversimplification trap, portraying the founding as a headlong rush to liberty on the part of an oppressed people. Politics is always a good deal more complicated than that, and this is a book about politics. We also wanted to avoid telling a story that errs on the other end of one-sidedness, depicting the American founding as an elite-driven period of history in which the political, economic, and religious leaders decided they were better off without English rule, inspired the masses to revolt, and then created a Constitution that established rules that benefited people like themselves.

Neither of these stories is entirely untrue, but they obscure a very important point. There was not just one “elite” group at work during the founding period. Although political and economic leaders might have acted together over the matter of the break from England (even then, important elites remained loyal to Britain), once the business of independence was settled, it was clear that competing elite groups existed. These groups included leaders of big states and leaders of small states, leaders of northern states and leaders of southern states, merchant elites and agricultural elites, and elites who found their security in a strong national government and those who found it in decentralized power. The power struggle between all those adversaries resulted in the compromises that form the framework of our government today.

Because the debates about the Constitution took place in a pre-digital age, they were vociferous, reasoned, angry, manipulative, and stubborn—but the players were limited. Imagine, if you can, what the arguments over constitutional winners and losers would have looked like in a hypermediated age like ours. Perhaps all of the norms that support the Constitution were easier to respect and observe when there were not multiple channels calling for them to be bent or broken to serve the ends of different players.

In Your Own Words

Evaluate the narratives told about the founding of the United States.