The world’s finest example of rhetorical statesmanship: morally responsible, intellectually profound, and practically-oriented.

Reflection and Choice or Accident and Force

by David Corbin and Matthew Parks

Two hundred twenty-six years ago this May, the Constitutional Convention was scheduled to open in Philadelphia. While it took eleven more days for a quorum of delegates to assemble, it took those delegates less than four months to answer the question that had brought them together: what can be done to make the Articles of Confederation “adequate to the exigencies of the Union”? Their answer: nothing. And so they proposed an entirely new frame of government, justifying this revolutionary act with an appeal to the document that justified the original American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government….”

But since this was the people’s right, not the Convention’s, and since the Declaration had also asserted that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” nothing would be settled until the public at large, acting through specially-called state conventions, ratified the new Constitution. And since ratification was by no means certain, the authors of The Federalist Papers, over eight and one-half months, made the case for the Constitution in eighty-five carefully-reasoned essays. Theirs is perhaps the world’s finest example of rhetorical statesmanship: morally responsible, intellectually profound, and practically-oriented. It is also profoundly republican.

Whatever their claims to political preeminence–and they were great–Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay made no appeal to authority in laying out their case for the Constitution. Publius, their collective pen name, would be only as persuasive as the reasons he gave. This was natural, since from the opening paragraph of the first essay, they recognized that the debate was not just about whether the United States would adopt the Constitution or even whether the union of the states would continue, but also, and most fundamentally, whether “societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

Too often our leaders are not so magnanimous today. A poster in the New York City subway tells it all. Beside a stick figure picture of a man slumped against a support column, the text instructs: “See someone in need? Get help!”and then directs the hopeless citizen to the nearest subway employee or police officer. Let the professionals handle things. From the subways to the State Department, our modern bureaucratic state has been designed to make popular reflection less and less meaningful and choice less and less real. As President Reagan said, “The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program”–guarded by a phalanx of experts impervious to all November election arrows.

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