 Welcome to the Cato Institute. My name is John Samples. I'm director of the Center for Representative Government here at the Cato Institute. Thank you very much for coming to today's book forum on From Liberty to Democracy by our friend Randy Holcomb. Our event today will go until about 5.30 or so. We will hear from each of the speakers, including the author Dr. Holcomb. And we'll follow that by a question and answer session, probably a half hour or so from 5.00 to 5.30. And then I would like to invite everyone that's here upstairs for a reception after the forum. We live in a world today in which democracy is approved by all. It has become a word of approval. And you know that because if you look around, democracy has no opponents. As I mentioned to our people on the panel today, we were to say we were going into Iraq in a few weeks to establish an aristocracy of the virtuous or the wise. The rest of the world and many people in America would think we are completely mad. People do everything, including fight wars to establish democracy. Democracy is the word that has no enemies. That said, the United States Constitution and American political culture at its beginning had a complex relationship with the idea of democracy. The founders of the American Republic certainly believed in the rule of the people, which is what they call republicanism, not democracy. They also had doubts about the direct rule of the people, what might be called democracy. In Federalist Number 10, perhaps the most famous piece of writing in political theory by an American, James Madison set out at the start of it to defend what he called popular government, which is the notion that it needed defending. The people that would be reading Federalist 10 weren't sure, unlike us today, that democracy was something that was clearly correct beyond all doubt, beyond all argument. Madison thought it needed defending. He did believe it was defensible, but he thought it was only defensible if the power of majorities were limited. That is, a republican government or a democracy based on majority rule needed some limitation on the most powerful part, what he called a majority faction. In our world today, however, it's Madison that seems to need defending. That is, for a lot of people, Number 10 seems to be, in the terms of the day, elitist. Or Madison seems narrowly self-interested sometimes as the interpretation. His doubts about popular government, about the direct rule of the people seem very doubtful to many people who write and think about politics today. Into all this comes our new book From Liberty to Democracy, The Transformation of American Government by Randy Holcomb. Randy is the DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University. He's chairman of the Research Advisory Council of the James Madison Institute for Public Policy Studies, which is a Tallahassee-based think tank that specializes in issues facing state governments. He has written eight books, including three textbooks on government finance and budgeting. More than 100 of his articles and reviews have appeared in leading academic and professional journals, including the American Economic Review, the National Tax Journal, Public Finance Quarterly, Economic Inquiry, the Southern Economic Journal, and the Journal of Public Economics. Through the James Madison Institute, Randy has written numerous articles and reports on Florida's growth management program and its impact on economic development. Randy has taught at several universities, including Florida State. And he holds a PhD in economics from Virginia Public Technic Institute and State University. Please welcome Randy Holcomb. Thank you very much for that introduction, John. My first thought was that I would just get a copy of the book and read it from cover to cover, but John told me we didn't have time to do that. So what I want to do is to summarize the main idea in the book and then talk about a couple of key episodes in American history. And the title of the book is pretty descriptive of what the book is about. It's titled From Liberty to Democracy, the Transformation of American Government. And if you went back to 1776 and you asked a typical citizen on the street here in the new United States, tell me in one word, what's the fundamental principle underlying American government? That one word would have been liberty, that the government is designed to protect the liberty of its citizens. And back then in 1776, people viewed that the biggest threat to their liberty was government. So the government was deliberately designed to be constitutionally limited. And it was deliberately designed to protect the rights of individuals. Now if we fast forward to today, we would just walk outside and grab somebody off the street and say, tell me in one word, what's the fundamental principle underlying American government? That word would be democracy. We're a democracy, it's a majority rule. We think that the government ought to do what most people want. So if the majority wants a certain type of public policy, that's what we think the government ought to do. And what this book is about is how that transformation from liberty to democracy took place. I was talking to somebody about this book, and it's not somebody with an academic background or anybody from the Kato Institute. It was just of your typical patriotic American who said to me, I thought democracy and freedom were the same thing. So let me start out by discussing the ideas of the founders, because our founding fathers had no intention of creating a democratic government. That is, creating a government that would carry out policies that were the will of the majority. In fact, our government was designed to insulate its activities from popular opinion. And by the way, I account for it, American government under the US Constitution was designed to be roughly one sixth democratic. And let me tell you how I come up with that accounting. We have these three branches of government. We have a system of checks and balances with three branches of government. And if that's going to work, those three branches of government have to be roughly equal in power to check and balance each other. If we look at the judicial branch of government, we see there that led by the Supreme Court, those Supreme Court justices are appointed by the president. They're confirmed by Congress. They serve life terms. And so they're pretty much insulated from democratic pressures. Now I would say that's not as true now as it was when the nation was founded, because now just the appointment process has a lot of politics that are involved in it. But nevertheless, the judicial branch of government remains the most insulated from democratic pressures. Let me next turn to the executive branch of government. And I think I'll talk most about the executive branch because the executive branch is led by a president. And the president is chosen by through the electoral college system. And if we go back and look at the way the electoral college system was designed, it in fact was designed to insulate the selection of the president from democratic pressures. The electors are chosen by their state governments. And the Constitution doesn't specify how those electors are selected. It's never has specified how electors are selected. It then doesn't know. They're chosen by their state governments. And originally, most electors were chosen by the state legislatures. So go back to 1800 when Thomas Jefferson was elected. Most electors in the electoral college were chosen by their state legislatures. There were a lot of different systems that were used to choose electors, and there was some popular voting. But mostly it was the state legislatures that chose the members of the electoral college. And the way the Constitution originally read, the electors would vote for two candidates, at least one of which had to be from a state other than the electors' own state. And the reason why the founders did that was they viewed that most electors would be inclined to vote for somebody from their state. And so the Constitution required that they had to vote also cast one of their votes for somebody from another state. And the Constitution specified that if no candidate got votes from a majority of the electors, that the top five candidates would be forwarded to the House of Representatives. And the House of Representatives would then choose the president. By amendment, that's since been changed to three, but the principle is the same. And the founders, when they wrote the Constitution, they thought that because most electors would be inclined to favor people from their states, that in the typical presidential election, nobody would get an electoral majority. And so as a result, in the typical presidential election, a slate of candidates would be forwarded. The electoral college would forward a slate of candidates to the House of Representatives. And the House of Representatives would then choose the president. So the electoral college was viewed as essentially like a search committee. And those electors would know better than the general public who the candidates were, what their qualifications were. So they would be better qualified to select somebody for president. And because the founders thought that in most elections, nobody would get an electoral majority, then the electoral college as a search committee would forward candidates to the House of Representatives, where in most elections, the president would be chosen. The Constitution specifies that electors are to cast their electoral votes in their states. Why would that be? One answer I've heard given is because, well, back then, transportation was slow. And it would have been hard for them to assemble in a central location. But Congress assembled in a central location. And if the founders had thought it was important, they could have had the electoral college meet together also. But they didn't. And they deliberately didn't in order to keep them apart. Because if they had gotten together, it would have been too easy for them to trade votes and engage in log-rolling so that the electoral college would have had more of a chance of selecting the president. By specifying that the electors cast their votes in their state, they keep the electors from getting together and bargaining ahead of time to select the president, making it more likely that unless there's a really strong candidate, the president would be chosen in the House of Representatives. Now, the presidential election system never worked that way. We always had candidates that received pretty strong electoral majorities. Actually, in the election of 1800, there was a tie in the electoral votes that was decided in the House of Representatives. One of the two top vote-getting candidates was selected. But after that, there were always pretty strong electoral majorities. So people got used to the idea that whoever got the most votes ended up winning the presidency. Also, pretty quickly in American history, states went from all these different types of selecting electors to going to popular voting for electors as is done today. So that when we move ahead to the election of 1824, in that election, which John Quincy Adams was elected, in that election, almost every elector was chosen by popular vote as is done today. And in that election in 1824, Andrew Jackson got the highest number of electoral votes, but nobody got an electoral majority. And so the election went to the House of Representatives. And John Quincy Adams ended up being selected in what historians have sometimes referred to, or I guess people at the time, referred to as a corrupt bargain. Although it doesn't appear that way to me. It appears to me that if we view the Electoral College as a search committee who forwards the top candidates to the House of Representatives, that they could choose among those candidates. And there was no reason why they should choose Andrew Jackson, the person who got the highest number of electoral votes. However, the supporters of Jackson felt that they were cheated, that Jackson should have been chosen by the House of Representatives. And they vowed that wouldn't happen again. They formed the Democratic political party as a result shortly after John Quincy Adams was elected president. And the Democratic party was formed specifically for the purpose of electing Andrew Jackson to the White House. And it worked. He was elected. And American politics was transformed then, because that was the first time, while presidents were affiliated with parties before that, that was the first time that there was a really strong party organization geared toward electing a president, which was the start of the modern party system. And after that, anybody who wanted to run for president had to have a pretty strong political party behind them. But there I'm getting a little bit ahead of the story. The point that I really want to make here is that the Electoral College system was designed to insulate the selection of our chief executive from Democratic pressures. Although today, the way it's evolved, it's a political popularity contest where those Democratic pressures are very evident. Originally, the Electoral College was meant to keep the president from being subject to Democratic pressures. And now, if we move to the legislative branch of government, originally, senators were chosen by their state legislatures. And that was true up until 1913. The 17th Amendment to the Constitution changed the method of electing senators from having them chosen by the state legislatures to having them chosen by popular vote. And that had a lot of effects. I talk about that a bit in the book, but I think I'll just keep it pretty short here. One of the big effects was state governments no longer had the same representation in the federal government that they had before. Before, for legislation to pass, it had to meet with the approval of the representatives of the people in the House of Representatives and the representatives of the state governments in the Senate. But now, senators and representatives are elected by the same population by the people. So really, there's two houses that represent the same group of people. And in the House of Representatives, representatives were always chosen by popular vote. So if we look at the legislative branch as the founders intended it, originally, the Senate was chosen by the state legislatures, again, insulated from democratic pressures. Only in the House of Representatives did the people have a say in selecting the people who led their governments. And so from that, I draw the conclusion that as the founders intended it, our original government, they intended only to be one sixth democratic. That's half of that one third of government in the House of Representatives. And in the rest of government, we had designed our government to be insulated from democratic pressures. Because I think sometimes there's this idea that any anti-democratic ideas are somehow anti-American. But I mean, if you go back to the founders' intention, they deliberately intended to insulate the American government from democratic pressures and from popular opinion. From that, let me fast forward, because I just have a limited amount of time to talk. Let me fast forward. The book really covers a lot of episodes in American history looking at how, bit by bit, the government became more democratic. There was more accountability to the people. And ideologically, we were more inclined to think that the role of government is to carry out the will of the majority. And then as the founders had tried to design a government that was constitutionally limited, increasingly those constitutional constraints were eroded until it's hard today really to see any constitutional constraints on the scope of government whatsoever. And it seems to me the big turning point and maybe I'm overemphasizing a particular event. But I see the Supreme Court's ruling of social security as constitutional as the final blow to the Constitution of the United States. When in Roosevelt's first term, he had proposed and gotten passed through Congress a railroad retirement program that was very similar to social security, but it applied to a much more limited group of people. And the Supreme Court ruled that to be unconstitutional. But undeterred, Roosevelt and the Congress then approved the social security program. And that came up for a constitutional review in 1937. And the court, in three separate rulings on one day, ruled that the social security program was constitutional. And the way I look at it, considering the 10th Amendment to the Constitution that says that the power is not explicitly given to the federal government, those limited powers not explicitly given to the federal government in the Constitution are reserved to the states or to the people. Show me where in the Constitution it says that the federal government has the power to run a compulsory retirement program. And if that's OK, where are the constitutional limits on government? I think a couple of things that may have influenced the court there. First of all, that was shortly into Roosevelt's second term when he had won reelection by a pretty significant margin so the court could see the political tie going against him. And there was also Roosevelt's court packing plan, which ultimately didn't work. However, it did send some notice to the court. But when you look at the growth of government, a lot of what went on as far as the growth and the scope and power of government, and also the increasing democratic pressures that government was subject to, came as a result of crises and lesser events that the government was responding to. If we think about the growth of government, we can see big episodes in the growth of government as a result of the war between the states, as a result of the two world wars, as a result of the Great Depression. And responding to these conditions, people seem to be willing to give more power over to the government in order to let them try to deal with these crisis situations or these emergency situations. But late in my book, what I call the ultimate triumph of democracy, I see as Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. And the reason why is that if you look before that, again at the world wars, at the depression, other problems that the government was responding to, there government was increasing its scope of power in response to crises in order to try to prevent things from getting worse or in order to try to turn conditions around. But if you look at Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, there, the problems that we were attacking, they were areas that were already getting better. Johnson declared a war on poverty. But if you look at the poverty statistics, for decades, poverty rates have been declining in the United States. So it might be noble to try to fight poverty, but this is not a sudden problem or something that's getting worse. It was actually something that was improving. You look at the housing programs in urban renewal that were part of the Great Society. And there, again, housing conditions were improving in the United States. They weren't getting worse. You look at health care issues, and Medicare and Medicaid were instituted. But health care and the health of Americans were improving during the 1960s. So here, for the first time, at least in such a dramatic way, we have a situation where conditions are improving, but yet the government gets increasingly involved in these programs. And why? It's because most people want it, because it's the will of the majority. And so we had this ultimate triumph of democracy in the Great Society, where government's not responding to any increasing problems. Things are getting better in all these areas. But nevertheless, because of popular opinion, these Great Society programs are undertaken. And at that point, I see that we had completed the transformation from liberty to democracy. And we now view that the appropriate role for government is to carry out the will of the majority. If we go back about 10 years ago when the Clintons had rolled out their national health care plan, it really came home to me in that debate over the Clinton health care plan, where the argument that the Clintons were putting forward to try to support that program is this is going to make health care better. It'll be more accessible to people. We'll have better health care. There won't be all the red tape. So the system is going to work better. It's really going to be good for people. Of course, they had their opponents who eventually won. And the argument that their opponents made was, no, this is going to make things worse. And they remember that chart that they had with all the layers of bureaucracy and everything is going to make things worse. It's going to make our health care system a nightmare. Never once did I hear anybody argue about the constitutional limits of government, whether it was constitutional to have that kind of a program. It had already been clearly established by the precedent in preceding decades. Yes, it's constitutional. We're a democracy. There are a lot of problems with democracy. And let me just cite one problem in closing. And that is, if we view ourselves democratically in this way, what it does is it conveys a certain legitimacy to government and government actions. Because if we're a democracy, we've elected our leaders. And those leaders are carrying out the will of the majority. So even if you or I might object to something that the government's doing, so I'm not in favor of this program, nevertheless, if we have that democratic mindset, the counterargument to that is you might not be in favor of it, but the people who are undertaking those programs were elected by the majority. They're carrying out the will of the majority. And so in a democracy, this democratic mindset gives legitimacy to just about any kind of program that people in government want to undertake. So I'll close my remarks there, and I'll be very interested to hear your comments. Thanks very much, Randy. I went to find some commentators for this book, and it turns out I found two political science professors. And that's, I think, by the current standards of the university. That's a fair fight to political scientists versus one economist, maybe. Our first word will be, I can say that, as a political scientist. Our first guest today will be Dennis Coyle. Dennis is an associate professor in the Department of Politics at Catholic University of America. His teaching and research interests include liberal constitutionalism, property rights and regulation, social science theory, and generally the interplay of institutions, cultures, and values in law, policy, and administration. Dennis is the author of Property Rights and the Constitution, and co-editor of Politics, Policy, and Culture. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Catholic University Law Review, and the Public Interest. He's also been a visiting scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, and I'd like you to welcome Dennis Coyle today. Thank you. I was impressed that Professor Holcomb spoke so coherently without any notes. I'm not going to attempt to do that. I've done that on occasion in class, and the results often aren't pretty. I'm just going along, and I think I'm doing great, and get to the end, and everyone has this bewildered glaze. And I hope they're thinking that that was so inscrutable it must have been profound, but since I hope you actually understand what I have to say, I'm just going to read prepared notes. I would say I like the book. There are several things to like about it. Beginning with its breath, it covers most anything you'd want to know. Its readability and its relevance. Holcomb provides a very insightful, accessible, one-volume, grand tour of American political economy, precisely the sort of material that all students of economics, politics, history, and other disciplines ought to be exposed to early in their careers before they are lost in the fog of specialization and lose track of what's important. His book is a step forward, or perhaps a step back, toward meaningful social science. From liberty to democracy works because Holcomb identifies a theme, summed up nicely in the title, and sticks with it. And he's gotten the big picture of largely correct. He's right to point out that democracy is a more pervasive value now and that it often has been associated with larger government and less freedom. He's also correct to emphasize the centrality of liberty to the founding and the type of government created then. He takes us on an insightful journey through American history and ideology, noting, among other things, the core influence of Lockean liberalism, the significance of the Constitution as a step toward a larger national government, the consequences of the Civil War for government growth and the erosion of liberty, the impact of the New Deal, and especially the significance of the progressive era. It does seem at times that talk of democracy is everywhere. The election of 2000 was widely criticized, not just because of the close vote in Florida, because nationally, a few more ignorant voters cast ballots for the losing candidate than for the winner, as if this should be the unquestioned standard of legitimacy. And democracy is our panacea for the world. Presumably, Afghanistan will have a stable and prosperous future, now that a brutal totalitarian regime has been removed and steps taken to implement democratic reforms. And if only Saddam Hussein would buy retirement condo into Haiti and make room for competitive elections in Iraq, we would have nothing to fear from that corner of the world. But what suggests a liberal society, classically defined, is essential for human flourishing and social stability and not at all guaranteed by ostensibly democratic mechanisms. Even the formation of our foreign policy is expected to be democratic, as defined by the latest opinion poll, or crowds of scruffy citizens and fashionably black attire protesting in the streets. This was vividly portrayed several years ago when then President Clinton sent his foreign policy team on the road to hear what the great American people had to say about sending troops to Bosnia or Kosovo or whatever the incursion was of the day. I don't exactly remember. But there is William Cohen, National TB, being shouted down by protesters in the chief seats in Ohio State Arena. And his response was to celebrate them. This is democracy, he proclaimed. What a scary thought. If rude protesters are the epitome of democracy, our problem today may not be simply too much democracy, but how debased it has become. And even if we accept this as democracy, more scary is the notion that such should be the basis of our foreign policy. In the academy, democracy and equality have largely eclipsed liberty as the standards of justice by which policy and institutions are to be judged. Ironically, perhaps, even the public choice literature, which has done so much to return realism to social science, seems excessively preoccupied with the functioning of democracy, and too little with the institutions and norms that create a zone of private autonomy beyond democratic reach. Even many so-called conservative commentators in their zeal to criticize the courts tout the virtues of democracy. When conservatism depends on the general will of the common man for legitimacy, it is a strange time indeed. So it may be true, as Hayek suggested, that we think too much about democracy and too little of its purposes. In contrast, the founders fear too much democracy. As Jefferson said, an elected despotism is not what they had fought for. And Holcomb shows well how they created mechanisms, and he talked about that. So now it's a limit democracy, and how these have then been eroded over time. But it strikes me that he's a bit too quick to dismiss the significance of some of the ancient thinkers. The theory of monastic, for example, as they owe some more to Aristotle than to Locke, and the importance of the Republican tradition with its democratic connotations for the founders. To quote from John Adams, where annual elections end, their slavery begins. The founding was distinctly democratic for its time, although it was democracy in the service of liberty. The very notion of we the people, which I can see has become a rather annoying mantra today, was remarkable and as Lockean as notions of liberty. And no taxation without representation was a rallying cry for democracy, not liberty. But the founders tempered their democratic innovations with a hard-headed sense of human nature and limitations, which coupled with their regard of liberty naturally made them wary of too much democracy. Lockean was also correct to highlight the progressive era as a time of fundamental shift away from government that secures liberty. But the progressive era, I would argue, is more about centralized coercion, controlled by high rationalist intellectuals than about genuine rule by the people. True, many democratic mechanisms were initiated, they often function to remove power from other democratic elites, such as the political machines of urban centers with large immigrant populations. They also were subject to domination by the new intellectual elites under the guise of democracy and were significantly minimized in their importance by the separation of government from politics. Politics after all is about competition and the progressives hated competition, especially the no holds barred sometimes nasty or unfair competition that characterize both politics and markets. It defies logic to read the vigorous condemnations of free competition and the romantic eulogies to centralized order by Lester Ward and Bernard Furnow and Gifford Pinshot and others and think that they were urban Democrats. At the core of their program was Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow's separation of politics from administration, which enabled governance by scientific principles applied by Ivy Leaguers. As Michael Spicer put it, the progressives in contrast to founders were rationalists confident of their capacity to govern intelligently in the public interest. I think this more than democracy per se was the primary threat that they posed to liberty. Current times, Professor Holcomb also overstates the contrast between liberalism of the founding and the democratic fervor of today. So the good news I hope is that the situation for liberty is probably not quite as bad as I might suggest. Most striking in its absence is that was discussion of current court doctrine. The story of the Supreme Court doesn't end with the abysmal collapse during the New Deal. The Warren, Berger and Rehnquist courts have raised such a ruckus precisely because they have gone against the evident general will by striking now federal and state laws. True, the Warren court had a dual personality, energetically expanding some first amendment criminal procedure and equal protection rights while wisely ignoring constitutional protections of property rights and federalism limits on national power. But the former are rights nonetheless and evidence that a liberal regard for rights remains an organizing principle of government. Half a loaf may be better than none. Not surprisingly, this unfortunate splitting of the loaf traces back to the progressive era which fractured the coherence that the founders saw between so-called personal and property rights. But James Madison joined together, John Stuart Mill tore a sunder. Of course, Holcomb is focused on the other half of the loaf, property and economic rights, which is understandable that he's an economist. But even in these areas, courts have been awakened from their stupor, occasionally striking down the walls under the contract and particularly the takings clause. The world of ideas, the defense of everybody is much stronger today than it was in say, 50, 60, 70s. As Holcomb and now theologist quoting Lord Keynes of all people, the power of the gradual encroachment of ideas should not be underestimated. And today, the influence of Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan, Nozick, Epstein and others can be widely seen. And of course, Cato and other institutes are pressing liberal ideas and policy circles. Center for Individual Rights, Pacific Legal Foundation and other entities are winning victories in the courts. The Federal Society has assailed as a nerve center of the vast right-wing conspiracy, partly because it promotes subversive constitutional principles of the founding, such as property rights and 10th Amendment limits on federal power. In academia, the rise of interest in political economy, constitutionalism and rational choice in part reflects growing skepticism that a democratic king can indeed do no wrong. So people still flock to America for freedom and polls continue to show exceptional support for notions such as right be left alone and do what one pleases. On the negative side, terrorists attack the United States not because we are democratic, but because we are free. And that freedom has enabled a prosperity and diversity of livelihoods and expression that they find offensive or threatening. The dramatic triumphs of Reagan in the United States, Thatcher and Britain, was seen to provide strong evidence of the enduring or resurgent appeal of liberty. But Holcomb minimizes their significance by asserting that any scaling back of government occurred, as he says, because popular opinion favored it, not because people wanted to reclaim liberty as the underlying principle of government. In other words, is another example of the triumph of democracy. This kind of left me a little puzzled, wondering, we want to encounter this evidence that liberty is the basic principle of government. And that's the only significant issue I had as a scholar was, can you falsify the argument if any trend that happens has democratic support? It must be that's democratic and not liberal. The examples of Reagan and Thatcher, although admittedly their bark was better than their bite, suggests that liberty and democracy are not so antithetical as Holcomb implies. This argument merits much more time to develop, but basically a regime of liberty, given human nature and limits, subverts dictatorship, but logically supports democracy, although in a limited constitutional democracy. So I would not agree that we're, and he says, an economic system of liberty exists that we know room for either democracy or dictatorship, as if the two are interchangeably insignificant. But he's right to suggest that politics of any sort will have a more limited role. The public private distinction is a bedrock institutional liberalism, and unlimited democracy would obliterate this distinction as in the republics of old and indeed destroy liberty. So pictures not entirely one sided. The founding was not that hostile democracy, nor is current political culture and practice entirely devoid of liberty, even as a governing principles. These counter trends don't refute Professor Holcomb's basic portrayal of the march from economic liberty to economic democracy. I think they qualified in ways that might blunt the poisoned arrows of more hostile critics. Kersover's statement is the occupational hazard of writing clearly on a large topic. As Tocqueville noted, God is in no need of general ideas. But for us mortals, generalization is essential to understanding, although inevitably some violence is done to the details. So waters may be a bit muddier than Holcomb implies, but I don't think this seriously undermines his basic thesis. Too often it is forgotten that in a free society democracy is a limited means and not an end. Holcomb reminds us that liberty was fundamental to the founding and has been under attack ever since and does so in engaging and informative manner. We can easily see forces today, terrorism and environmentalism to name a couple that are being used to rationalize new incursions upon freedom. But we should know that both of these examples threaten to undermine democracy as well and legitimate greater authoritarian rule by elites and experts, echoing the program of the progressives that Holcomb rightly identifies as the primary threat. So these looming challenges seem all the more reason to consider the interrelationships between liberty and democracy and that less democracy doesn't necessarily mean more liberty, thank you. Thanks very much, Dennis. Our next commentator will be Joseph Romance. Joe Romance is professor of political science at Drew University where he's taught since 1996. He specializes in American politics, political parties, elections and American political thought. Joe has published a book, A Republic of Parties in 1998 and has published articles on Lincoln and other political figures in American history. He is currently writing a book on the American founding. Joe received his PhD from Rutgers in 1995. Joe? Thank you very much. I'm honored to be here today and I enjoyed very much reading this book. I will say this much that to a certain degree I disagree with some things and that forced me to rethink some of my things, some of my thoughts. It woke me as Kant said, for my dogmatic slumbers, Kant was pleased that Hume did that and since I'm a lazy person I wanna say damn you, I hate having to rethink things. I hadn't, so. One of the dangers of going last of course is that many of the key points have been covered and on some of the things I'm gonna repeat although I think it was a slightly different spin on things so bear with me. Obviously the great thesis here is obviously the rise of democracy and the move from a liberal, lock-in, limited government to one of democracy, particularly with the emphasis on the move to economic questions. A very good summary is on page 159, if I may read it. The expansion of the franchise, obviously democracy, is also linked to the metamorphosis of government from an institution that protects individual rights to an organization that enhances the economic well-being of its citizens. And I think actually, just to say one thing right now, I think I can go even further than that. The author Holcomb is concerned about the move from democracy to rights to economic questions and that takes a central part of the book but we go even further than that. I remember in the 1992 debate in the Democratic primaries, Senator Saunders was debating Governor Clinton and I think in New Hampshire and it was a question from the audience and the question was about some young man who had felt slighted by his roommates and slighted by the environment he had at the University of New Hampshire he felt discriminated against. And Saunders asked for a specific example and he couldn't give one because Saunders would have had an answer of a sort of a legal problem, a violation of his rights possibly but it was further, he simply was being upset by his status and his position in society and I think you can go even further to go back to that quote. We may not even eventually be worried about the economic well-being of the citizens we may be worried about the therapeutic state of our citizens and this could go even further. We could move further along into the state being concerned with almost any aspect of our well-being. One of the nice things about this book is the emphasis on the way crises have furthered this process and particularly further the process in changing our understanding of the Constitution. It has resulted specifically in two things I think the book highlights very well. One is the change in constitutional interpretation with a particular emphasis on a re-emphasized renewed or a re-changed interpretation of the general welfare clause which radically changes our understanding of the Constitution. But it also various crises particularly the Civil War results in a change in the document itself with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment. I don't think it can be underestimated the extent to which the 14th Amendment fundamentally changes the document from its original nature and that it has profound effects. The sin of slavery and the effort to solve it has extraordinary effects on both the document and our society. As I say, the overall way I fundamentally agree with this book. Many textbooks in political science in my field are titles such things as the struggle for democracy and democracy is the default position of most textbooks. And I learned a great deal about how this happened in applying public choice theory and it was very useful. And it's very useful to synthesize both economic questions along with the way the court has interpreted things. I have three criticisms though. Ones that are important although I don't think they go to the heart of the overall argument but I think they are important. One of them is I think slightly pedantic but I'm entitled. One is a sin of omission and one is a very personal different take on things which I want to highlight. First of all, the pedantic criticism. A slightly pedantic criticism. The assumption, one of the problems with this book and again I don't think it's a devastating problem but it's something that raised a flag with me is the assumption about who the founders are. The United States is either blessed or cursed with many founders and it is unclear who gets to qualify as a founder. Now, I mean there's one way in which Holcomb very deftly solves partial of this problem by saying, well he's really focusing on the founders who wrote the constitution and the constitution becomes the founding document and the men who wrote the document are the founders. But American history is replete with tons of people who could claim to be the founder. Dozens and dozens might be hundreds of them and the founding document itself is open to interpretation. Just to give one example of my own personal interest Lincoln certainly read the constitution as an important document but he read it through the lens of the Declaration of Independence and that gave him his own unique reading of what the constitution in America was about. One of the problems with America, America is blessed in one sense compared to say England and that England's founding is buried in the midst of time. But America has got somewhat problematic, still problematic nature because we have lots of founders, we have a founding document but we have lots of founders and they had very fundamental disagreements about what they were writing and doing. And to get the document passed, the founders, those men who wrote the document had to write into it a certain bit of ambiguity. They had to harmonize the various elements of the day to assure ratification. Now, Holcomb goes through and provides various readings of how we should interpret the document constitution and all his readings are plausible. They are usually persuasive but I must say we cannot say we're absolutely certain because of the plurality of founders who were involved. As I say, I think ambiguity was built into the document. And the ambiguity, this is my second point, the criticism of a mission. One of the things that is somewhat missing from this book is a discussion of the Republican ideology about the American founding. The revolution is open and our founding is open to numerous interpretation but I think there are two sort of dominant schools of thought, one of them presented here which is that our founding is a Lockean liberal ideal of limited government. This is very plausible, I'm not disagreeing with it. I think the weight of opinion defends this point of view. But there was another point of view, the Republican founding, this is advanced by John Pocock and Balin and Gordon Wood and others that America should be read as a Republican founding. And this Republican ideology had to be captured by Madison and others. Had to be tamed if it will but to tame it in the right of the document they had to make concessions to it. And the Republican ideology is ambiguous enough that it's open to a lot of its own interpretation but it's certainly believed in liberty but it was more concerned with localism, more concerned with liberty, more concerned with a public spiritedness tied back to an almost Aristotelian notion of citizenship which is somewhat less amenable to Lockean liberalism. These two schools of thought, contemporary school of thought, fight it out and interpreting the founding. However, I prefer to see the founding as sort of blending these two schools of thought. I think the weight is probably with the Lockean liberal founding of limited government but there's still that Republicanism there. If you read the Federalist papers and leaving aside the famous ones, some somewhat less famous ones, Federalists 37 through 39 where Madison explicitly talks about the act of founding. The Republican notion of the Republican idea of America is defended but it's subtly redefined. Now he's subtly redefined to make it cohere with Lockean liberalism but I think also importantly he is making a concession to the Republicans out there. He's trying to, as I say before, harmonize the various elements of the day and to do this he had to acknowledge some of the democratic nature of our civil society. I think the previous commentator pointed out. In doing that necessarily the document becomes somewhat more ambiguous than he probably wanted to name just Madison. And in doing that he opens up the possibility of a democratic reading of both the document itself and American history. What I guess what I'm getting at here is maybe this isn't even a criticism but I just, I may be different emphases. I think that democracy is inherent in the founding not necessarily dominant but inherent and the potential was always there to allow it to open up and flourish. The only question was what would happen and who would do it and then of course then usually have the story of it happening. And then my final point and final criticism although I fundamentally agree with what I read is that I still see that the checks and balance system working largely and I agree with the previous commentator that there's still a lot of liberty out there in our society. What I think though is very well done in this book and I wanna just highlight both in agreement and just sort of underline in slightly different ways is the extent to which the checks and balance system that the effort to limit government has changed from elections, which you're right. By electing the Senate directly we would begin to democratize and there are other ways in which we've democratized. What now becomes key to any effort to limit government is time. And Madison actually talks about that in the federal's papers and I think it's important. The very fact that we have the branches of government slows things down. If the impetus of democracy is there and I think it is there, if Tocqueville is right that democracy is this great force that is sort of overwhelming and if it's there in the founding itself and just in the sense the potential coming forward that what's holding in check now is a simple existence of the branch of governments trying to come to some sort of agreement. The checks and balance system as originally conceived was operated again through the electoral process being different from each of the different branches and now it's relying on the simple inefficiency of government itself the inability to bring all the branches together in agreement. Admittedly we've kicked out one of the props to limited government by democratizing the Senate for instance by changing the nature of our elections of president and that does significantly change things. I don't mean to minimize that but the very continuation of the branches of government allows for a slowing of the process and I think given the fact that as I read the American founding it's sort of a tension between democratic nations and notions of equality and liberty and limited government. It's inevitable this will happen and it is we still have a very powerful way in which the institutions of government can slow and check each other. As far as reversion though and that's as I spoke earlier there the courts have some movement there but I agree that there's not much of that. Overall I would highly recommend this book. It is more upbeat than I think the author is willing to say about things and I think there's more hope about things and I learned a great deal from it and I recommend it highly to all of you. Thank you. Thank you both for those comments. I think they're insightful comments. I just have a few things in response and I can't really say I disagree with anything that either of you said but let me make a couple of comments I guess starting backwards from what I heard but first of all I mean it is pretty remarkable after more than two centuries we're still the freest nation on the face of the earth and so I don't mean to suggest that all of our freedoms have been eroded but nevertheless we need to remain vigilant because I do see that potential for us seeing further erosions of our liberties especially these days when we seem all too willing to give up our liberties to fight the war on terror and so forth but yes it is remarkable how that system of checks and balances even after two centuries of exercise and use and special interests and so forth have survived so well. On the issue of who the founders were I guess it's an interesting thing to bring up because actually it didn't occur to me consciously the way that you had brought up that criticism but certainly in a lot of places I was thinking about the authors of the Constitution and obviously there was a democratic element that was built into the document from the beginning and the tension that I saw early on actually I didn't discuss it and neither of you brought it up but it was not really this tension of liberty and democracy so much as the scope of government that I characterized in the book I didn't make up the characterization but this idea of Jeffersonian versus Hamiltonian ideas this Jeffersonian idea of limited government and that's the side that I was trying to champion I suppose versus the Hamiltonian vision of a government that was broader in scope and that was looking out for people's economic well-beings in addition to their liberty and so I mean in a sense I guess if you're accusing me of taking a particular point of view here in the book well I mean I will plead guilty to that as far as what we've seen in the past several decades well I mentioned a few things in the book Post Great Society I talked a little bit about Reagan I think I did mention the Clinton Health Plan and so forth but really in a sense I think where I've ended things in American history anyway was with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society I said okay well here's the triumph of democracy and after that I mean I wonder 50 years down the road if we'll look back and we'll see the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as turning points and I hope that that's the case or whether we will just whether in fact that won't turn out to be so much of a turning point and I also wonder about the efficacy of ideas I guess as an academic I hope that ideas do have an effect and that maybe the growth of government that we saw in the 20th century might be the result of the ideas of thinkers like Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes and those ideas had pretty big impact and if so I think there's a reason to be optimistic and that today if you look at the people whose ideas really carry a lot of credibility people like Milton Friedman, Frederick Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, people who are arguing for a free society and so I hope that we do see another turning point and if we look at the progressive era that started at the beginning of the 20th century as a kind of a turning point in American government maybe we're at another turning point right now I hope so and I guess I'm thinking it's a little bit too early to judge on that but you all may have more insight on that than I do I'm guardedly optimistic and I hope that in time we see that things are turning back toward a more liberal form of government so I'll close my comments on that and for the first time I really understand the problem of President Faces and appointing justices to the Supreme Court you select these people and you never know what they're going to do I've selected these guys to give you a good scrap today and they agreed too much so I'm afraid I'm gonna have to shift the cost back to you to disagree a lot so we'll do that now in the question and answer period please wait till someone comes with a mic to you identify yourself in any institutional affiliation the gentleman in the front on the row had his hand up first My name is Mike Ravel, I'll hold it Mike Ravel, I head up the Democracy Foundation and I would like to take you all to task for what I think is a pre-sloppy academic focus and that is in the use of the word democracy Jack Barson who wrote a fantastic 500 year cultural summary and political summary of the world started the concluding chapter by saying there are no democracies in the world what we have are representative governments now maybe we wanna try and coin some phrase or some word that describes that better than representative government because it doesn't have the emotional impact that the word democracy has and so I would say that we don't have a democracy in the United States and when you attribute the fact of a liberal government to individuals who get elected when more than 50% of the people do not vote I do not think that is anything close to a democracy and I would even go back to the last democratic the closest democratic decision made in this country was in 1787-89 and when people focus on the inconsistency which I feel that Madison brings to the table where just only in 10 does he talk about the mob but when he was asked on four different occasions how will we get this constitution enacted when it violates the constitutions of the 13 sovereign states and his response was through first principles now first principles means the people just do it there is no external authority to the people plus when you look at the founders and I would distinguish between the framers and the founding generation because the people who oppose the constitution were just as important in what took place as a result in what evolved then were the framers themselves but when you look at what the decisions that were made they were made in a context to not permit the people to make a decision subsequently under government yet in order to get the government to go around the 13 sovereign states they went to the people and fashioned this process of conventions that had only one task from the people to elect delegates to vote yes or no and so I would submit that scholarship needs to refocus on definitions liberty in my mind is obedience to law freedom is the ability to have an impact on what laws are passed and we people have very little freedom to really impact on what laws are passed because there's no vehicle except at the state level and an improper one at that where with initiatives people do make decisions directly now that's democracy but we have none of that at the federal level of this country Randy? I agree with almost everything that you said first of all and maybe I'll throw in my caveat first and that was when you said liberty means something like obeying law but that's not the way that I would view liberty because I view some laws as infringing on liberty to a great degree okay with that aside I agree with everything that you said but let me say first of all yes I agree we don't have a democracy and I'm pleased that we don't because I would be very afraid of the tyranny of the majority and I think there are founders wisely tried to insulate us from those democratic pressures and I take your argument to mean that with our representative government we still are somewhat insulated from those democratic pressures and I'm happy that we are and I agree that we have a democratic government and what I was talking about when I referred to democracy was in the contemporary sense is really more of a mindset than anything else that people think that we have a democratic government they think that the role of the government is to carry out the will of the majority and therefore they're willing to concede a lot of power to our representative government because those people are the representatives of the people so yes I agree we don't have a democracy and I'm also happy that we don't have a democracy in the way that you're describing it and that there still is some insulation between the will of the majority and the activities of government. Dennis? Yeah I guess I would just second that there's and democracy is a somewhat voted term and it is nice to clarify what one means by that but institutionally a basic democracy usually if we have a rotation in office competitive elections we classify as democracy my year suggesting is much more along the terms of a strong democracy where you really have broader and more effective rule by the people that brings up the problems they're saying but certainly a judge there is kind of a sense on what democracy has that that very broad meaning and you can probably agree on that and insist that our system is not all the way there I sometimes think of it as there's like three versions of democracy kind of of the people by the people and for the people and since the founders were kind of of the people that indirect ways in which their legitimacy was gained from the public but not very broad or direct involvement that what you think of democracy today and the very egalitarian kind of pushing democracy among many activists and academics is much more about by the people that they can be doing about us through polls or deliberation or broad voting they have to be doing it themselves and I think that you're quite right that we're not that far we could go much farther than that way but agree that there may be reasons not to and third quickly just throw in because it was responding to a point that Randall's making earlier in regard to progressives in a sense I think if they're Democrats they're kind of trying to be Democrats for the people a sense that they can act dispassionately in the interest of everyone and that is somehow democratic without having to direct participation and roll over people themselves there's a lot of ways to slice that up you're talking about direct democracy which is one kind of notion of democracy and I think you're right I guess for clarity's sake I will amend my comments everywhere I said democracy I meant representative government on the aisle too and then we'll come down to Nigel Chris Grebe I'd like to ask was there any fight over the direct popular election of senators all I get from history is this kind of idea that it was the Senate was a corrupt body and it was dominated by rich people which isn't too different from what it is now was there what was the discussion like I can't believe that this amendment just passed required three quarters of the states and two thirds of the House and Senate what was that like was there any opposition was what was Randy I don't know too much about the opposition to that to that what was part of what was happening during that time I mean there's certainly the progressive element in that that the idea of more direct representation by people electing their senators but another part of what was happening is that there was increasingly bitter fights in the state legislatures about who was going to be seated as senator as a result of that sometimes states didn't have any senators sometimes they only had one senator because the legislatures couldn't agree on who they were going to seat as senators prior to the 17th amendment passing in 1913 some states had already gone in effect to direct elections of senators and what they would do would be to hold votes in their states popular votes in the states and then the legislatures would just appoint whoever won that popular vote and that predated the 17th amendment by maybe a decade or so so there was already a movement in that direction and as far as vocal opponents I really don't know so I'll plead ignorance on that Nigel Ashford down here in the front we'll get to everyone Thanks your thesis is the emphasis on the significance of a shift from liberty to democracy and I take a different view what I think is crucial is a shift in our understanding of both the conception of liberty and democracy to be something very different today if we simply take democracy I think at the founding democracy was seen as one of the means of acting as a check of government in a Madisonian sense and I think now democracy is seen as a means by which the people rule in a Russoian sense as reflected in one of the earlier questions it seems to me that is the crucial question is the way in which our understanding of these terms shifted and that is why I disagree with you when you want to place the key turning point as being located during the New Deal it seems to me the key turning point is actually the progressive era because it was in the progressive era that we saw a radical attack I think on the conventional accepted views of what liberty and democracy meant Now you're absolutely right and I didn't mean to convey the impression that the key turning point was the New Deal in fact what I tried to say there was that was the straw that broke the camel's back as far as constitutional limits on government and I do discuss the progressive era at some length in the book I think you're absolutely right about people having a different view of both those terms liberty and democracy originally liberty meant freedom from oppression and mostly government oppression because it was government that violated people's liberties nowadays we have this idea about freedom from hunger and that sort of thing all these positive rights so we think freedom means people have good healthcare and they're free to go to good schools and that sort of thing so yes I think there is a shift there and as you mentioned that shift in the view of democracy and I think that one place in American history that comes very clear I think is in the administration and the politics of Andrew Jackson so Andrew Jackson was the first Democrat and he was a Democrat capital D and lower D but he went back to Thomas Jefferson's principles he thought of himself as a Jeffersonian in favor of limited government and what Jackson viewed was that the government was being run by these elites who were basically running rough shot over these Jeffersonian principles and the way to control the growth in government was through democracy through greater accountability to the general public and there it seems to me that while Jackson was successful in making a more democratic government it actually ended up working against his Jeffersonian goal so I quite agree with you on both of those things that we view oh we don't even use the term liberty anymore very much I mean it has a quaint sound to it we talk about freedom from hunger and that sort of thing and that's the way we view liberty and freedom these days and I think you're right about democracy also and I think that Jacksonian era really focuses in on the old view of democracy as a means for checking the power of government yeah I was gonna say that I think that in fairness maybe the summary and discussions of the book by three of us and sometimes haven't done it justice I mean one of the things you said at the very end in a few minutes ago was in response to me was that there's a discussion of both of democracy as a method of decision making and also discussion which as a method of decision making used in the Jacksonian era limits government actually it's not just a method but it's also the scope of government these two things together which by the way means democracy in and of itself taking all the assumptions that you use can be a neutral thing under certain conditions I mean it can be an effective check on the Jacksonian era on the other hand democracy aligned in an era with a government which has extensive scope of powers already fundamentally changes the whole political equation I think that's in the book maybe we just didn't do it justice here in this discussion let's start in this next row next to the wall and then come toward the aisle you just hand it one to another the name's Dan Lieberman you talked about the government operating according to the principles of liberty or the principles of democracy but doesn't the government really operate according to where political power is you seem to have left that out of the equation I mean Clinton's whole operation was on polls and where the power was in order to get them elected isn't that independent of both liberty and democracy I think these days that's a part of the way that democratic government operates certainly interest groups have a huge amount of power in government and the way that the founders originally designed the government was to try to insulate the workings of government from those democratic pressures including the pressures of interest groups and that was partly as I mentioned by the way that the leaders were selected and also they had hoped that the government would have strong constitutional constraints that would limit its scope of action the data institute is this microphone on yes okay I want to pick up on Nigel Ashford's always perceptive point namely that it struck me when listening to Dennis Coyle talking about the fecundity of the word democracy that this debate is in a fundamental sense miscast as contrasting liberty and democracy because democracy has always been the characteristic of American government although we often call it self-government and it is as Nigel says a check on expansive government and the real contrast is between limited government and expansive government and it strikes me that what has happened there is that the principal check on expansive government namely the constitution of limited enumerated powers is where the real erosion took place and it took place because of the courts failure to secure that as you rightly said Randy during the new deal although you focused only on the general welfare clause the commerce clause also took a real hit in that same year 1937 and with that we've had the modern regulatory state then a year later with the Caroline products case the Bill of Rights was bifurcated and that restraint was lost and so at the end of the day it seems to me that what we're facing is not so much a democracy or self-government but the demise of the constitution of limited government that stands a thwart the effort to use self-government to aggrandize the majority or whatever special interest is able to use that mechanism to enhance its own power and the scope of government in the process and so it seems to me that we're going to have to focus more on the courts as being the institution that has broken down over the years. I say that on the 200th anniversary of Marbury v. Madison. I mean I have to ponder the importance of the courts versus other breakdowns in constitutional government that's an interesting idea. I think I address at least partly your comments in an early chapter in the book when I think titled something like liberty and democracy as economic systems but I look at a continuum from very limited government to a very expansive government and I don't know that I have the time to go into the details now and I've got a few diagrams in the book also but maybe I've addressed those points in the book and maybe not but I take your point I think those are good points so I take them as good comments, thank you. Dennis? I would agree. The key shift is the breakdown of constitutionalism but I don't think that thoroughly wipes out his larger point that one can see his tension between liberalism and democracy that was there at the founding as constitutionalism that tried to work that tension out in a way that was feasible once that breaks down you have problems with that. I think there is still a tension of the liberal and democratic elements that go way back through the founding. Joe? I just want to make one quick response to that. I mean and I'm not making a principle point I'm making a political observation. I'm curious if the courts were to reassert the divisions you'd like. I'm wondering what the reaction of the other branches the government would be regardless of the republicans or democrats controlled them. I think that would set up a real crisis in our system. We have it right now. In the Miguel Estrada confirmation which has to do with the democrats refusal to confirm someone who they fear may stand for limiting congress' power. And that's explicit on the part of Schumer, Leahy and others in the democratic party. They will not stand for this new federalism which limits congress' power. Yeah but I'm curious what the republican party response would be if you had a serious invalidating of some of the let's suppose leave aside the Estrada case. Let's suppose you actually have a decision which we go back to Schechter and we actually go back which by the way is still the law of the land officially. I mean you've never been rejected. We go back to that. I'm curious what either party would do to that. I mean the democratic party has a coherence here that they would be upset with us. The republican party officially may be against it but I'm really curious what their reaction would be if they really had to go back and deal with this question. Which gives the bigger point. Democracy is a, we've already heard from many in the audience democracy is a complex point but I'm really interested in the way which democracy has become part of our culture. And I really don't, I see as a way as pervasive throughout the culture. And I, you know, if we had, leaving aside the Estrada case if we had an invalidation of 60 years of jurisprudence it might be intellectually pure but I'm really curious what the political reaction would be from every single political actor, including George Bush. I think he'd be scared as hell. Next gentleman. Andy Stevens, I'm writing a biography of George Mason and I'm curious is there anything that you think the founders could have or should have done differently to ensure that the government remained true to their vision? That's, that's too hard of a question. So let me evade it in this way. One of the, when our nation was founded we had another constitution already which was the Articles of Confederation. And the constitution that we have now replaced the Articles of Confederation. When you look at the Articles of Confederation the Articles of Confederation had a lot more significant constraints on the actions of federal government than the current constitution. Indeed, the demand for our current constitution was because a lot of people thought that the federal government was too constrained. And the system of checks and balances under the Articles of Confederation essentially was the states checking the power of the federal government. They appointed the members of the Continental Congress. The funding for the federal government was requisitioned from the states and of course many states weren't paying up. So one of the things that we could have done to limit the power of the federal government at that time was just to leave the Articles of Confederation intact and not to have approved the new constitution. Now it might have been, I mean the fear was that the federal government was too weak and that it might collapse unless it was given additional powers. But even there the whole reason that the federal government was constituted to begin with was to fight the Revolutionary War and to gain our independence from Britain. And after the Revolutionary War had been won maybe the federal government had served its purpose and we would have done just as well if with the 13 states had retained most of their power and there was a very limited federal government or even if the federal government had dissolved. So that's a good question and it's an interesting question and I don't know that I have a good answer to it but I think if we had stuck more to a limited government as specified in the Articles of Confederation rather than the new constitution. I mean even in the Constitutional Convention the constitution we now have was brought to the Convention as a Virginia plan and there was an alternative New Jersey plan which would have provided for a much more limited government and I'm feeling like I might have fallen more on the side of that New Jersey plan than the Virginia plan. Dennis? That's a really interesting question if we have a couple more hours. And ultimately maybe constitutionalism is somewhat doomed to failure and it's amazing that it succeeded as well as it has for as long as it has because the whole idea of constitutionals that's going to limit what the people can do through government. But it's the same people. I mean you don't just have a bunch of gods coming down making the Constitution and enforcing it and so in drawing up and ratifying it and interpreting it in the courts it's all people who have their narrow interests and responding to various pressures and what have you and constitutionalism, I mean it breaks down I mean yes before a new deal and right the progressives are really the key shifts there but I mean once John Marshall gets on there it's going down the tubes already. So what are you going to do? I think in a way it's surprising and to read the founders and I think there are at least a number they can kind of apply including the anti-Federalists too, yes but it's striking how much like I have a student doing a paper on the founding and fear how much they were wary about what they're doing recognize that humans are fallible and think boy we can really screw this up and I think that helped it to succeed as well as it did. If there's something could have done differently one thing that's interesting is as you mentioned the constitution is to fix the articles it's just supposed to amend it, right? So it's kind of like Windows the computer system when really what's happening underneath it is the CD world of DOS and Windows got this kind of dressed it up because you read all the constitutions there are all these constitutions there before the US Constitution, right? All these states had constitutions and what do they have? They have a declaration of rights and they're very lock-in they establish the point of government and then they structure it so as to serve that purpose and US Constitution doesn't do that it just had a structure of government to make it work which in a way gives a misimpression what the understanding of the role of government was the founding and then they throw the bill rights on later because the anti-Federalists are so worried but I don't think they were viewing it as a constituting document in the way that we view it today it was kind of like Windows there to gloss it over make it work a little bit better and that probably did it help but ultimately I think it's amazing it works as good as it did So Bill Gates' fault then The Bill Gates of the Constitutionalism The gentleman in the rear there This will be it ladies and gentlemen My name is Charles Lowe to build ever so slightly on the first questioner and the last one I liked his introduction of the word framers and founders I wonder what the three of you consider Thomas Jefferson who wasn't in Philadelphia and Mason to be are they founders? I guess as a short answer I would include them as members of the founders Yes Yeah I have an extremely expansive notion of I have an extremely expansive notion of the idea of founders and I think they all are Now the first question used a much more precise wording framers Now framers is a very clear or a much more clear word and Jefferson is not a framer but he's a founder Specifically With George Mason with the Declaration of Rights Jefferson was the Declaration of Independence and you get a whole thing on how significant his decoration as a founding element but even though they're not framing the Constitution and Mason went and signed they're very key as founders One last question Juan Carlos Iago Keira Institute How come the framers how come the founders were so skeptical of democracy? Democracy hadn't been tried before much In a short answer Athens Yeah Clearly they intended to build in democracy as a check on the scope of federal government so they viewed democracy as one of the tools to limit the powers of government and to preserve liberty and that's a different way from the way that we tend to view democracy now as the idea that the government carries out the will of the majority It's where I don't probably go with Roger emphasizing the shift in the understanding of democracy because they also had well-steeped in their republican vision and also remember the growth of self-government in the Lincoln towns and all that a large experience with that they understood it and feared it Well I don't think you just saw it as a mechanism to limit but yet so Athens I mean they read that history of this unceasing nurseries of discord and all that of republics blew up and they feared that I mean I think just my favorite quote in all the federal's papers is if every Athenian had been Socrates and every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob whether that's right or wrong that encapsulates Madisonian fears and concerns and it's a great passage for better or worse