The Long Clasp (Post 4)

***
The Challenge

            Human nature—that fecund field strewn as well with all the seeds of noxious weeds and nettles as with those of all perfumy petals and productive harvest—ever works at odds with social good.

            “Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition”  “the ambition and jealousy of each other”  “preconceived jealousies and fears”  “glory, revenge, ambition”  “the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and other irregular and violent propensities”  “private passions: the attachments, enmities, interests, hopes, and fears”  “men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious”  “aversions, predilections, rivalships, and desires of unjust acquisitions”  “ambition or avarice, jealousy or resentment” “views, passions, and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth”  “To presume a want of motives. . .would be. . .to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.”  
          Such observations and assessments color nearly every page of all 85 essays that comprise The Federalist Papers.  Their tone and shade range from dark distaste to mild amusement.  But their persistence throughout the whole, from the quills of three different authors, should also alert us to important considerations.
            The great genius of the founding fathers lay in their clear-eyed recognition and practical ac­cep­tance of the various expression of the foibles of humanity.

            Not to deny or wish away, not to bemoan or expect improvement in the basic workings of human motivation, but to control the effects of its disharmonious action; this was their aim in devising the new government.  This clarity is also a lesson too readily neglected by citizens bound up in the toils of daily life.  Of this Ben Franklin warned on leaving the Convention Hall, when asked “What sort of government have you given us?” he replied “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it!”
           The immediate experience of their first dozen years as citizens and leaders of the newly established country under the Articles of Confederation laid all too bare, notwithstanding the success of the Revolutionary War, the weakness, the imbecility (in the language of the time) of that structure.  The authors of The Federalist Papers analyzed those defects in sometimes wonky detail.  Their essays distill the months-long, high-minded, though often warm, discussions and arguments of the Constitutional Convention. 
            Through those intensive discussions, these men filtered a vast body of history, thought, and experience of the sometimes arcane details of governmental structures and their consequences.  Testing each other’s insights, they at last concurred with serious purpose in drafting a constitution that addressed all the weaknesses that they could foresee.

            The focus in the early numbers of the Federalist Papers, underscoring its high priority to the drafters, was to persuade voters as to the necessity of the Union of all the States rather than resolving into several lesser confederacies or, worse, mere autonomous sovereign States.  Underlying the various arguments ran the theme of weakness against foreign influence or aggression and against the jealousies and annoyances of neighboring States. 
            Outright violence from foreign aggression or domestic insurrection was and has always remained the clearest, most easily understood danger to public safety.  Foreign or domestic “influence” or “intrigue” is more subtle and difficult to apprehend.  A naturally occurring political force, it operates continually to flow and find out any crevice or crook of weakness in an adversary and, as if by hydraulic pressure, to enlarge and exploit the weakness to some purpose of policy.  It may be by bribe or other corruption of individual persons, or by sowing or fertilizing differences among groups within the adversary nation.  Every example is but a tactic in an ongoing strategy to divide, diminish, and ultimately to rule.
            The centuries-long record and experience of European history available to the drafters of our Constitution supplied many of their bitterest epithets of human nature.  For politics at all levels is a human endeavor subject to the defects in character of those involved, as well as to the aspirational qualities of their better selves.
            Any arrangement short of a united government of the States would result in governments of smaller entities, which in effect were or over time would become independent sovereignties.  By reference in the 7^th essay of the Federalist Papers to the then recent and “familiar history” of the British Isles, Hamilton illustrated the domestic dangers inherent to that situation.  Until 1707, England and Scotland were separate governments, ever contentious, ever fighting, and ever blind to their common interests and security.

---

            The United States of America demonstrably is and has been exceptional in the history of human governance.  Exceptional was the foundational idea on the individual equality of all of humanity.  Exceptional was the persistent aspiration that the People of the United States should realize the blessings of liberty inherent within the germ-seed of that idea.  Exceptional is the Constitution so practicably designed as to nourish that sprouting seed and protect it from the constant dangers that threaten to uproot it.
            “[W]hat,” mused Madison in #51, “is government but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?  If men were angels, no government would be necessary.  If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls would be necessary.  In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
            That difficulty—the difficulty of bridging the chasm between aspiration and reality—will persist until the final hour of the Republic of the United States of America, should it ever arrive, or until mankind be shorn of human nature.  That is not failure.  Aspiration is just that—a longing for an ideal, an ideal that sustains hope, a hope that is contagious to the rest of the world.  As it was for the people of the founding generation to act on that hope in the circumstances of their time; as it was for the people of Lincoln’s generation to fight for that hope in the circumstances of their time; so it is for us now living to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, to pursue those principles, to advance that aspiration, to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.