The Constitution is Bad: A New History. #Booktube

sometimes people have
specific demands for political progress they want to make a difference in the world they want to make a change and they go back and re-examine history for that reason they find themselves mining history sifting through historical factoids to find bits and pieces of the truth that will suit their agenda today and sometimes people just go back and re-examine and rewrite history and they end up finding formally neglected unknown or forgotten aspects of important truth that lead to instigate or inspire new movements for political change i think this is one of the most exciting interesting and important political developments to talk about in the writing and rewriting of history um because nobody knows nobody knows what its significance is going to be what are we going to call what are we going to call this new tendency in american history and the understanding the american constitution i i sent this guy an email woody holton asking about the authors of these two books michael clareton woody holton himself another guy named george willem van cleeve i said look when you put these scholars together you look at this kind of new generation of historians really rewriting the history of what happened to american constitution and why it matters what it means today you know what are you gonna what are you gonna call this movement now i'll say to you i didn't say this to him you could say what do you call this the constitution is bad you have a nation of hundreds of millions of people who are raised from birth to believe the constitution is the best and the greatest thing not just in america but in the history of the world they really do they they look with near religious reverence on the history of the american constitution and on its present function and significance in the world today and you have a bunch of ph.d laden scholars rewriting that history and exposing it for what it is well what are we going to call this the debunking the constitution didn't say that i said to him look this is you know this kind of breathtaking new generation of historical scholarship coming out in the shadow of the very strange precedent of what charles beard published fully 100 years ago i'll say more about that in a minute what are we going to call this we're going to call this the post-beard movement in history the anti-beardists you know what is it you know because in many ways what they're doing now is correcting and contradicting what charles beard wrote a hundred years ago even though the tendency began with him and he did send me back a couple couple very interesting replies i got from this author and he joked he said well we could we can call them the clean shavens is it the clean shaven scholars of uh american constitutional history my own autobiography plugs into the story in a peculiar way there was a time when i was young hard to imagine but stick with me there was a time when i was young back around say 1999 i was in university myself and i can remember face-to-face verbally insisting on this kind of analysis of the american constitution with friends and colleagues of mine i remember one guy who was a colleague in the green party it was involved in ecological baltics back then and uh city hall municipal level democracy rather than federal um for various reasons wanting to make a difference in the world wanting to make a difference i could see and not wanting to do fundraising for somebody else's election which won't make any difference in the world one way or the other so it was involved in local politics ecological politics and i remember talking to this guy and and saying to him look you know what you don't realize is that the declaration of independence is one thing and the writing of the constitution is another and the years in between really matter and united states of america existed in those years in between without the american constitution and when you contrast the way the american government worked before the constitution the way it worked after it reveals a whole lot about why the united states is the way it is now there's a lot to unpack here i mean one of these books alone is 880 pages and each page is rather large um there's a lot more to say about it than that but sure you can dumb this down and say look this is a new school of thought that says constitution bad the title of this book is the framers coup charles beard over a hundred years ago planted this seed set out this idea in in beards beard's perspective was that the united states already had a very robust very inspiring democracy before the constitution and that what the constitution represented was a kind of elite anti-democratic conspiracy to make the united states of america less democratic than it was to have a kind of takeover of the slave owning class the investor class the people who own certain types of savings bonds that they wanted to get redeemed that it was a conspiracy having to do with making america easier to invest in especially for british entrepreneurs british portfolio there was a series of very specific uh kind of corporate interests we could say in today's problems there were specific financial interests of a specific agenda by members of an economic elite and that there was real fear um created by a number of again in sort of charles beards parlance or from his perspective uh the sincere unpredictable democratic nature of the united states in its first few decades was terrifying to people who were members of that elite now i've already sort of hinted these guys these guys are not fools um the picture you'll get just from this one book alone from woody holton is a much more nuanced meaningful view than that but already with charles beard again fully 100 years ago what we have is the suggestion of a sort of utterly non-marxist class analysis of colonial america you know that there were different social classes with different particular economic interests obviously slave owners are a very different social class from slaves well you know when you really get into it the people who actually fought in the revolution people who were veterans of the revolutionary war they formed a distinctive social class under themselves uh to some extent the people who would benefit from having peace with the spanish empire were a very different social class the people who would benefit from being at perpetual war with the spanish empire and expanding when you start to look at uh segment by segment of the population who wanted what who was it who wanted to remain strictly on a gold standard really gold and silver hard metals standard and who was it who wanted to make a transition to paper money this is one of the most intensely contested debates today who wanted a permanent standing army and who didn't who wanted a bill of rights and who didn't um there was this idea planted at least at the elite levels of academia over 100 years ago by charles beard that this kind of analysis could bring about something really revelatory that this could really reveal to us why the united states functions the way that it does today and from beard's perspective what went tragically wrong when you know the constitution was written so again this title is kind of click bait the framers coup the idea that the writing of the constitution was itself an elite coup d'etat now um there were many things charles beard was fundamentally wrong about and i think one of the most profound changes in the writing of history um which will now influence the way we do politics in the present tense and going forward is just the greater ease of access to historical documents so really briefly i used to be a scholar of theravada buddhism that's the orthodox school of buddhism a school of buddhism that's very much based on a textual corpus so this textual corpus is much bigger than the bible it fills a couple of library shelves it's a whole bunch of ancient texts that a hundred years ago were really hard to leave through and find what you're looking for even if you have an index there may be no index there may be handwritten manuscripts you're working with whatever your scenario is right well guess what you take those two library shelves full of books you digitize them you put them on a cd-rom or you put them on the internet you can hit control f on your keyboard and you can really rapidly find every single time the word masturbation is mentioned in those ancient sacred texts you can find every single time the word slave and slavery are mentioned those texts things that used to be debatable and wrapped in a sort of um haze of cognitive dissonance and voluntary ignorance the difficulty of being well who can really say exactly what the position of the buddha was on slavery yeah well guess what now anyone anyone can hit control f they can go through and read every single passage to mention slavery and they can draw their own conclusions something similar has happened in the hundred years since charles beard was the influential person in this field in that that haze the haze of voluntary drugs and cognitive dissonance started to disappear um the enormous corpus of texts left that are either directly or indirectly connected to uh you know the writing of the constitution federalist papers anti-federalist papers which includes personal letters between these people that were preserved in archives and museums not just strictly uh legal documents like hansards records of formal debates or what have you uh newspaper articles i mean what the extent to which this guy went through the archives what he went through the archives and mined examples of every possible political and economic perspective that were published in the letters to the editor of newspapers at the time it's brilliant it's it's really useful but the fact that he can access those things now in a split second as opposed to actually leafing through uh paper records that is transforming the way we understood the past and it's gonna transform the decisions we make in the the present and and how we look at the future so the most fundamental misconception that charles beard propounded or popularized was that everything in the united states of america was going great everything was just fine before the writing of the constitution before the elites organized this coup d'etat as he might put it or is the title of this book was it that somehow the united states had this vibrant wonderful democracy that was an inspiration for example in europe but you know around the world this was this exciting new idea again ideals espoused in the declaration of independence and writings from thomas paine and things that are prior to the negotiated negotiations constitution and that then there was this kind of dimming of that optimism as this uh overtly elitist anti-democratic republican tradition took over with writing constitution well the most basic premise there that everything was fine the new generation of scholars are proving that utterly wrong the united states was a deeply dysfunctional democracy in the years prior to the constitution there were very serious and you could say insoluble problems that were tearing the country apart and you know you can in examining this history you get to question to what extent your own values are on the side of elitism and to what a side to what extent you sympathize with the the populists or the so-called democrats in this situation okay well probably everyone in this audience would say that they believe in democracy taxes are unpopular people don't want to pay taxes some people are literally willing to kill the tax collectors rather than pay taxes do you send in the army to force them to pay taxes you know again this is a simplification you can get the version that's in 800 pages the version that's in 400 pages you can read this history for yourself but if you don't come to these books with some kind of fundamentally anarchic view that armies don't have any business to existing that the government has no business collecting taxes to maintain a navy that the government shouldn't be able to negotiate a peace treaty with the french and the spanish like the most basic suppositions about government competence and what it will take to sustain a professional government service of that kind that is really what's being questioned and called into debate in that in that period and you can definitely say that the pre-constitutional period was based on a reckless optimism that the united states is going to be able to have all of the advantages they had grown accustomed to under the british empire without any of the disadvantages right and what they found instead was this is not surprising at all they were suddenly cut off from the economy of the british empire both in terms of importing and exporting is that suddenly they were paying much much higher taxes and they were getting much much less in return before they paid taxes to the british empire but they got the british navy british army they were part of a world spanning empire they would farm tobacco and they would be able to export their tobacco not just east to europe but south to the caribbean and they would import rum in return and so on the the economics of the united states of america oh and this is this is not even getting into my my favorite topic all of this is linked to the consternation and terror of paper money so this is something captured in a fascinating way by by holton in his book what americans felt in these few years in between achieving independence and before writing the constitution was that they had paper money that was reliable under the british empire that was something the british empire was capable of doing but that their own attempts to have an independent paper currency had failed and would continue to be a failure and couldn't be trusted they were in a situation where they were adjacent to the spanish empire that was still very successfully based on silver coinage the fabled pieces of eight that you might have heard of in uh pirate stories of the of the time and on the other side of course they had the remnant of the british empire in what would later become canada quebec etc they had they were surrounded by empires that had working currencies and the united states america when it achieved independence not only was its own economy decimated by being cutting off by being suddenly cut off from precisely the network of world trade they had relied on before but also they suddenly had no working currency system and again how much do you believe in democracy do you believe that the government should just have the right to create money and force enough people create the terms for uh debt repayment government bonds and so on and ultimately rely on military force to say to people look these are the financial conditions of your life whether you like it or not or do you believe in the kind of really chaotic anarchic democracy that existed before the constitution where you know people were able to just physically shut down courthouses they were able to go and through violence just just because it wasn't popular they were able to both through their vote and through mob violence prevent the most you know basic functions of the state uh on a day-to-day basis including crucially tax collection debt repayment maintaining of armies uh so on and so forth okay so there's been a kind of profound maturation of the charles beard hypothesis right so if you say 100 years ago charles beard was saying the constitution cannot be understood as the pinnacle of democratic achievement it has to be understood as a counter-democratic anti-democratic movement brought about by certain very definite elites now at that level of generalization this new generation of books coming out is affirming charles beard's hypothesis however um beard without being a marxist he engaged in this type of social class analysis very clearly to try to vilify the elite classes to say well they were wrong and this is bad and evil and he's also claiming that there really was no crisis there was no crisis to be solved that this was all done kind of with bad intentions the new generation of scholarship is instead revealing well there was a crisis there was a very real crisis there were tremendously important problems to be solved and on many issues many those evil corrupt elites were correct there's no point vilifying them as as evil people can be members of an economic elite and still be correct that the government needs to collect taxes the government needs to pay its debts that ultimately um you can't have a form of democracy in which people can vote the state into bankruptcy that there's going to be some measure of oppression including the oppression involved in creating paper money all these things that today we take for granted but what comes out of that today i've googled around a lot for reviews of these books the two have shown you on camera george william van cleaves 2019 publication a couple of other books that are part of this new generation of scholarship and it's fair to say in 2021 that the formal academic book review is dead and even the formal newspaper book review is dead but what you find instead are a lot of sincere informal emotional reactions to these books posted on the internet um sometimes from people with phds you know really some of them were from career academics some of them just from members of the public at various levels of area edition and engagement and what i saw again and again was people asking what are we supposed to believe now what are we supposed to do now i'm not american i'm canadian and as has been mentioned when i was a very young man because of my own reading my own research i was already kind of very biased in favor of this approach to understanding the american constitution both in how it was written why it's written the way it is why does the advantage the disadvantages very fundamentally people are being asked to shift from having an almost religious reverence for the constitution as a document that was written to rule over all humanity in all times in all places forever that it was this perfect achievement defining democracy that should last basically should remain unchanged for centuries thereafter and instead they're being led to a view of it which apart from the class analysis apart from the questions of the elites versus democracy etc etc interesting in itself instead you're led to have a view of the constitution as a very messy series of short-term solutions to short-term problems that barely made sense barely at the time the constitution was written and that rapidly became revealed to be complete nonsense to be a terrible way to govern a country within just one century after it was written you switch from viewing the united states as a country with amazing achievements and an impressive culture impressive economy and impressive empire even shall we say you switch from viewing the american empire as something that is great because of its constitution to instead viewing it as something that has been great despite its constitution this is the year 2021. let me just ask you what does it say in the constitution about police brutality it's easy to complain police brutality is terrible in the united states america today all right what if i tell you that everything that's good about policing in the united states of america is not because of the constitution it's despite the constitution doing this kind of reading whether you're looking at the military the civilian the judicial aspect the functioning of congress the reality is we're people who have modern expectations of what democracy is supposed to be and we look for this system created with a series of very strange short-term compromises and stop-gap measures we look for it to satisfy or live up to those expectations when the system itself the text itself and so on is instead truly truly a shameful relic of a past that is inextricably linked to not just slavery not just genocide but the stupidity of this one generation of really highly incompetent individuals who were in no way prepared in no way prepared to take on the task of defining how that country was going to be governed for just the next 10 years let alone the next 200.