I.R. MacNeil uses the somewhat ponderous term "non-promissory exchange projector" to refer to any contextual information that informs the individual's perception of a contract into which he or she has entered (e.g. status, habit, self-esteem). His point is that no simple agreement for the exchange of goods and services can exist without a social context wherein certain realities can be assumed pre-existing it.
Most of these exchange projectors are what we would commonly refer to as beliefs and values. Those beliefs and values propagate and spread through cultures not as empirically tested concepts or as logical axia, but as stories--themes tested in human action.
The U.S. Constitution contains very few specific rules and proscriptions. What it contains is a compact--a system of authority that demonstrates through its organization (see above) the values and beliefs that its adherents consider important and the means for allowing communities to work the particulars out for themselves.
In other words, The Constitution is made up of instituted themes--contexts for testing human action (specifically in the form of government action)--story forms. It is in this sense that the Constitution can be considered a narrative. Like the rules of a game (e.g. chess, basketball, Animal Twister), it provides the specific material requirements for a type of interaction--republican society--using which a virtually limitless set of specific events can be constructed. It provides information about what constitutes relevant "action", the set of "roles" that can be embodied by "actors" in the form and flexible rules for judging what constitutes heroic, villainous and other types of behavior. It even contains a device so that when history finds its structures insufficiently flexible--as in the case of what constitutes a "citizen"--it can be "amended" to make its structures more specific.
Reference to the Constitution by the public almost always employs it in this way (as a warrant for action) as opposed to in its strictly legal sense.
Authority : Narration
The Constitution of the United States of America
The "Founding Fathers" (note to revisionists: Sorry, they were fathers.) recognized that "democracy" was a form of amelioration best left to communities, while they had been given the task of building an institution. The rather brilliant plan they devised provided for a system of authority that could allow the democratic ethic to assert itself in daily/local action without the system falling victim to democracy's less enticing tendencies.
Specifically:
- Democracy does not provide well for the liberty and safety of the minority.
- Democratic decision-making rarely exhibits the painstaking collection of evidence and thoughtful consideration. Instead, it is too often biased by emotion.
- Democratic decision-makers have trouble focusing on the long term at the expense of the immediate.
- Democratic bodies tend to the extremes of flexibility--revisiting decisions either too often or not enough.
The philosophical problem was where in the system to invest authority.
Their answer to the problem was to create a compact to which the populations of the various colonies could commit themselves. Authority would reside in the Compact itself. In essence, the promise the people made to themselves would supercede the people in matters of social comportment. That compact was the Constitution.
Hacker, Parenti and others argue that the Founding Fathers actually intended to form a nation that could be run by and for an economic aristocracy.
Constitutional Authority.
The Constitution calls for a three headed system of government:
- The Congress--a public policy decision-making body.
- The President--an executive to oversee the administration of the Congress's decisions.
- The Court--a group of legal experts who could review various actions of the other two bodies.
The system is weighted in favor of the majority in that they get to populate it. The Congress and the President would be chosen through devices that prioritize the will of the majority of the people in the state that the winners would represent. Hence the two bodies would have to answer to those people. In addition, the system weighted itself toward the majority by guaranteeing that many daily decisions would be free of governmental interference (e.g. church membership, speech, assembly, etc) allowing for the machinations of public pressure (the marketplace, community standards, etc) to prevail.
At the same time, the rights of the minority are protected. To this end, two kinds of minority were recognized--individuals and minor segments (smaller states and protectorates). The President could veto Congressional action that threatened individual rights (although that was by no means the original purpose of the veto power), the court could vacate any action by the other two bodies that infringed on individual liberties, and the document iterated a specific "Bill of Rights" out of which precedents of personal freedom could be crafted.
Smaller populations of the federation would be protected by the "bicameral" to two-sided organization of the Congress. The House of Representatives, was populated according to the relative sizes of the states, so that states containing larger numbers of people would have greater influence. The Senate gave each state the same number of representatives--two. For the most part, Congressional action must be considered by both groups, so that each type of influence can be visited on the decision-making process.
In addition, the President would be chosen by an Electoral College. A group of people who would represent the mandates of the people in ratio to the size of their states.
The American Constitution has been called "the best bad idea in human history." It does as much as can reasonably be expected to manage the majority-minority conundrum, but practice, as usual, falls short of theory. As we have seen:
- representatives do not always "represent" the interests of their constituencies.
- Representatives, especially in the House of Representatives which only has a two-year term, find themselves in what Boorstin called the permanent campaign. That is, they are always scrambling for money to get re-elected. Out of this need for funding arises what is sometimes called a shadow constituency--an unnamed population of interests "represented" by the office holder in tacit exchange for their support. Hedrick Smith quotes one lobbyist as saying, "Democracy is not a spectator sport . . . it's a hands-on sport to help those that help us."
- the marketplace only arguably caters to the "majority."
- the electoral college is an extremely controversial instrument which could theoretically put into office an individual decisively lost the popular vote (see the discussion in the EC link above).
No comments:
Post a Comment