The authors do their best imitations of Madison, Hamilton and Jay
The men who assembled at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had a daunting goal: to create a new Federal Government that would knit together jealously independent states. They had to be optimists, but they would surely be astonished at the success of their creation.
How ungrateful we are today for the miracle of their governmental structure. We live in a time of political discontent that goes even to our basic institutions. Radicals in Congress, calling themselves conservative, press for major surgery on the Constitution. Some demand an end to the judicial independence that has assured our freedom. The very idea of the Federal Government is treated with contempt.
This contemporary assault on our system led the 20th Century Fund to commission ''New Federalist Papers,'' essays in defense of the Constitution by Alan Brinkley, Nelson W. Polsby and Kathleen M. Sullivan, respectively professors of history at Columbia University, political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and law at Stanford. As the title of the collection indicates, the authors go back to first principles -- to the arguments made in the Federalist Papers to save the Constitution from defeat in the state ratifying conventions to which it was submitted.
We are mostly unaware now what a close thing ratification was. Americans had just carried out a revolution against the centralized power of an English king. Many feared that the proposed new Federal Government would bring tyranny again.
Defenders of the Constitution responded to that fear with what Bernard Bailyn of Harvard has called ''one of the great surges of creative political thought in Western history,'' most of all in the articles that constitute the Federalist Papers. This collection, by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, was produced mainly for newspaper publication, at the astounding average rate of 1,000 words a day for over six months. Yet it is rightly compared to the work of the greatest political philosophers.
The Federalist Papers' answer to the fear of power was that safety lay, as Madison put it, in ''the extent and proper structure'' of the proposed Federal Government. The very size and diversity of its constituent states and populations would make it safer than smaller, more homogeneous polities because ''the greater variety of parties and interests'' would prevent a passing political passion from overwhelming the system. A second defense against political extremism was that the constitutional system was not a direct democracy, with all the dangers of popular emotionalism, but a republic -- in which the people's views would be filtered through elected representatives.
But it was the governmental structure, the most ingenious of the Framers' creations, on which the Federalist Papers most heavily relied as assurance against abuse of power. Authority was divided between the states and the national Government. And within the latter there was the separation of powers among the three branches -- executive, legislative, judicial -- each on guard against overreaching by the others.
The wisdom of the Framers has been proved so often over 200 years that it should not be necessary to examine their views again. But it is necessary, as ''New Federalist Papers'' makes plain. For those who are attacking the constitutional system now make some of the same arguments that were made against the Constitution at the beginning -- in corrupted form.
Thus we are told that the Federal Government is inherently evil, that its functions should be turned over to the states. But for the reasons that Madison and his colleagues saw, it would be exactly wrong -- unsafe -- to leave Americans to the mercies of the separate states. Moreover, the cry for ''states' rights'' is hypocritical, in fact masking a desire to advance particular interests. The same people who denounce Federal power have federalized ordinary criminal law to an extent that would have appalled the Framers, and demand that tort law -- always a province of the states -- be federalized to protect corporate defendants from large judgments.
Brinkley explains how we have lost what was the premise of 1787: the belief that government can work. Fewer and fewer citizens perform their essential duty -- voting. Most see politics on a television screen, and regard it as a closed world ''in which nothing is real and nothing is true.''
Public contempt for government, he says, produces a vicious circle that makes government worse. Suspicion of scandal immobilizes bureaucracies. Official discretion is feared, so that we surround every potential decision with conditions that prevent action.
Sullivan examines the current attempts to impose social or economic policies by amending the Constitution. We tried that once before, she notes, with the Prohibition amendment: not a happy precedent. If we had had a balanced budget amendment in force for the last 50 years, she says, ''the nation's economic health would be a great deal weaker now.''
POLSBY asks Americans, movingly, to think about how well we have done in governing a continental nation: ''If one accepts the premise that tribalism is a human universal, then the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the exclusion of Jews from universities and the professions in the 1920's and 1930's, the ruthless persecution of Mormons, the removal of Indian tribes and the maintenance of a brutal, racial caste system in the pre-1960's South seem less remarkable than the eventual alleviation, reversal or abandonment of all these social policies by the American political system.''
It is not possible to give more than a few examples of the themes in ''New Federalist Papers.'' Some of it examines particular issues of only passing interest. But there is much here that goes to the roots of our political system and its present illness.
The authors do not offer easy remedies, and I do not suppose there are any. But the more Americans read and understand this wise book, the healthier our political society will be. We might become less cynical about politics. We might be less susceptible to political quackery about the evil of the United States Government.
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