Bienvenue.

Submitted for your approval, two historical anecdotes of interest:

1830: As related in John Meacham’s magnificent book, American Lion, a controversy early in the administration of Andrew Jackson centered around the construction of the Maysville Road, a thoroughfare intended to eventually form a leg of a highway that would link the western portion of the United States from north to south. The issue was that as initially proposed, the Maysville Road was contained entirely within the state of Kentucky, and was a pet project of Henry Clay, the powerful senator from Kentucky later known to history as the Great Compromiser. There were several issues at play here. Jackson and Clay were bitter political enemies, and Jackson was frugal with the public treasury and took a dim view of what would later be known as pork-barrel politics — in fact, Jackson remains the only president to have ever paid off the entirety of the national debt. However, the overriding consideration from Jackson’s perspective was that since the road was contained entirely within a particular state, the Constitution did not allow the federal government to fund the project; Jackson understood the “Interstate Commerce Clause” in a quite literal fashion. Despite the pleas of some of his closest political allies and oldest friends, who also stood to gain from the project, Jackson vetoed the Maysville Road bill.

1887: When several counties in Texas were struck by crippling drought, Congress passed the Texas Seed Bill to appropriate $10,000 to purchase seed for the farmers in the affected areas. This was a relatively small amount of money even at that time (just over $200,000 in current dollars), and the need was great — according to the Bill of Rights Institute, 85% of the cattle in the region had starved, and the farmers had to eat their seed corn to survive — but Grover Cleveland vetoed the measure nonetheless. While he was moved by the farmers’ suffering, he was concerned that preemption by the federal government of the opportunity for the farmers’ neighbors and countrymen to assist them would weaken the ties that bound communities and the nation together. More importantly, however as Cleveland put it in his veto message:

I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.

So what can we gather from these two episodes? Well, for one thing, they demonstrate that at various points in our nation’s history, each of the three branches of government took its duty to the Constitution seriously. Jackson and Cleveland vetoed bills despite political interests and personal sympathy because, in their judgement, they were unconstitutional. This is almost mirabile dictu in an age where, just to choose an egregious example, a president of very recent memory campaigned vociferously against campaign finance reform legislation on the express grounds that it was unconstitutional — then, having assumed the presidency, signed the selfsame legislation into law in the serene confidence that the Supreme Court would exercise the judgement that he so conspicuously lacked. Of course, he was to be disappointed in this expectation. The Constitution was designed for leaders who would jealously guard their prerogatives, and would assume ownership of their responsibility to defend and conform to the Constitution. Instead, we have Congress delegating war-making powers to the executive because they find justifying either a declaration of war or a lack thereof to be politically inconvenient; we have presidents signing bills into law in the firm belief that they are unconstitutional for the same reason, leaving it to the Court to clean up their messes; and both branches stand hat-in-hand while the judiciary legislates strict busing quotas. Our system groans under the weight of such elemental corruption already; it cannot bear it much longer. We should demand better.

Then there’s the historical irony that the first two presidents that I have mentioned were Democrats, and the third a Republican . . .

More than any of these, though, the value of these examples is to demonstrate that the questions that so bedevil our Republic are not new. We as Americans, and in particular we as conservatives, tend to assume that the citizens and the politicians of the early American period had such an intimate grasp of what we view, with all justice, as the fundamental precepts of American government that bickering about pork, or the reach of the federal government, or whether or not it was the duty of the federal government to sustain the destitute, must be modern points of contention. What the above events should illustrate, though, is that the questions have always been here; it is only the attitudes around them that have changed. When Tocqueville wrote — in 1835 — about the “soft despotism” in which the state would take away the responsibilities of citizens and reduce them to children, it wasn’t because he was the second coming of Nostradamus; it was because he could see this possibility all around him, even then. He wrote, “”But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom” — sound familiar? As he might say in his native tongue, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

What makes this point so important? It serves to demonstrate something that conservatives can never allow themselves to forget: Victory is fleeting, on both the political and historical level. This shouldn’t be a difficult concept for conservatives to grasp, since we’re the ones who are supposed to understand the timelessness of human nature. However, there is a triumphalist attitude that occasionally develops in the modern conservative movement that allows itself to believe that it is on the verge of permanently and forever altering the attitudes of the masses concerning these questions — that, to take one notorious formulation, we can reach the End of History. However, there will always be grasping and/or cowardly politicians, and the impulse on the part of a large proportion of the polity to desire to cast away its hard-won protections from government in order to be taken care of. The questions of 1830 and 1887 were not decisively answered then; they resound in 2010, and will resound in 2030 and 2087 — if we’re vigilant, and if we’re lucky. If they stop resounding, it won’t be because conservatives have won . . .

So what’s the point in the here-and-now? Simply that conservatives should not only continually re-commit to what they’re fighting for, but also continually re-commit to fighting, since the occasion to stop will never arise. Conservatives should be “Happy Warriors,” to borrow from the great Mark Steyn, but if you stay a conservative, you’ll always be a warrior. Keep demanding the best of your politicians, and keep holding before them the charge that they bear, the legacy — our great Constitution, our civic mythology, our sacred history — with which they have been entrusted. That’s the easy part; the hard part is that your fellow citizens bear the same charge, the same legacy, the same responsibility — as do you, for that matter. Never let them forget it . . . no matter how much they want to. When presidents again feel their responsibility to the Constitution as deeply as do the Justices of the Supreme Court, when your fellow citizens again hold the legacy left them by the Founders in as high a regard as their conveniences and entertainments, then you’ll have won . . . a breather. Enjoy it while you can.

As always, I appreciate your time and interest.

Posted by Loneloc on February 23, 2010   ♦   Filed in Uncategorized

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