Letters to the Editor
-
Democritus
Exactly. North America in the late eighteenth century was hardly some Utopia where the Founders were free to experiment with refined political systems at their leisure. Yet the facile neoconservative mantra--"Things are different now"--seems implicitly predicated on the notion that checks and balances, limited government, and invidual liberty were all well and good "back then," but these terrible, dark times (The Age of Terror!) we find ourselves in now call for different civic values. See David Brooks.
When the Founders sought a governmental framework to ensure the survival of their new breakaway republic, they failed on their first attempt--Articles of Confederation, anyone? We forget that the Constitution, as much as it represented a limited view of government, was considered radical by many Founders and at the state level because of the power it invested in the federal government. It sounds crazy now, but the carefully enumerated powers of Articles I, II, and III were just too much for many early Americans. Hence the need for safeguards like the Ninth Amendment and poisonous compromises like the three-fifths clause in order to get a sufficient number of states on board.
I'm glad you mentioned piracy too, since it is something I bring up whenever a conservative intones ominously that we've never faced a threat remotely like jihadist terrorism. Really? We've never faced a stateless criminal and military actor with occassional state sponsorship? Funny, considering piracy is specifically mentioned in the Constition, and the first covert military action taken by the United States was against the Barbary Pirates (hence the "shores of Tripoli" in the Marine hymn). See The Pirate Coast for the definitive history.