By BILL CHAISSON
An important aspect of the federal system of government is to give the individual states significant powers within a larger national government. But not too much power, because then that would be a confederate system. Between 1781 and 1789 the Articles of Confederation were the constitution of the United States. It was initially approved by the Second Continental Congress in 1777 and used as an unratified working document during the American Revolution. A confederate mode of organization includes a very weak central government and a group of activists called the Federalists began to see problems with it. The lack of a strong central government meant that the new country was not constructing a national identity; factional divisions kept a lot of decisions from being made about relations among states and with foreign countries. In making the transition to our present constitution, the states didn’t even observe the provisions of the Articles for abandoning it because so many of the states had already violated the Articles in so many ways, so many times.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” With these words Y.B. Yeats contemplated in 1919 the coming of a new more fragmented era. The Great War had just destroyed or severely weakened several empires. He was not in the least looking forward to it.
The image of a falcon that is too far from the falconer to hear the call to return is chilling. The falcon and falconer have forged a relationship in which together they are greater than they are apart. When the falcon fails to hear or heed the call of the falconer, it is not free, it is lost.
It is important to acknowledge the importance of a shared history when one is forming and then preserving a government. The American colonies were all established by English settlers albeit from different parts of the British Isles. Historian David Hackett Fischer lays this out in his 1989 book “Albion’s Seed.” Through the 17th century coastal New England was settled primarily by emigrants from the east coast of England in and around Anglia. At the same time people from the Midlands of England settled Pennsylvania and the tidewater South was settled by people from the southern counties of England. These peoples were in the process moving inland in the 18th century when a second wave of immigrants arrived from the borderlands of England and Scotland and also from Northern Ireland. With much of the coastal land claimed, most of them went inland and settled the Appalachian up country.
While these populations had different folkways — explored at length in Fischer’s book — they had all shared centuries of history in the British Isles. They had distinct traditions for handing property from one generation to another, varying ideas about the role of women in the family, and any number of other vernacular differences. And it was likely these divergent urges that drove them to create the Articles of Confederation in the first place. But in fighting a war together and then needing to forge a national identity afterward to establish relationships with the European powers, the former colonists remembered their shared history, which included everything from the Magna Carta and the philosophy of John Locke and Francis Bacon to the more recent ideas of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke.
And they reconvened to produce the Constitution of the United States of America, a truly remarkable document that manages to create a strong central government while still reserving — in the 10th Amendment — substantial powers and responsibilities to the states, a federal organization instead of a confederated one. This document made it possible for a republic to become a great nation.
It is the public that in a sense owns the government in a republic. (In a monarchy, the monarch owns the government; the government is privately owned.) The American republic has been remarkably stable, with the notable exception of the Civil War. But even that did not destroy the republic and require it to be rebuilt, as has happened in France, which is on its Fifth Republic (begun in 1958).
Americans tend to take this remarkable stability for granted and are fond of complaining about the inefficiency, obtuseness, and general dullness of the federal government. One should remember the proverbial Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” It is the very lugubriousness of the federal government that allows the states to assert themselves and retain their own individual cultures and ways of going about things.
For example, our newspaper covers both Vermont and New Hampshire, so we pay attention to school administration in both states. How each state goes about overseeing their schools could not be more different in these two states that people from Iowa can probably barely tell apart. This kind of thing simply doesn’t happen in European countries, where education is the province of the national government and everyone gets the same curriculum everywhere.
Just the other day I read that Germany has decided to shut down all 84 of its coal-fired power plants. That, of course, could not happen in the United States. Germany is a federal system too, but its states don’t have as much autonomy as ours do. When I lived in Denmark I was confused to find out that the central government periodically changes the lines on the political map for the entire country all at once. This is a country smaller than New Hampshire and Vermont combined and has the same population as Chicago. But still, wouldn’t it be strange to be told that Washington had just decided that you don’t live in Sullivan County anymore, but for bureaucratic efficiency you now live in a unit that incorporates parts of Sullivan and Grafton counties and has a new name. If you were Danish, you would be used to this. But we’re Americans, where it has never been like that.
Has the federal government grown over the years as a regulatory entity? Definitely. But it has been in the service of preserving the stability that allows the nation to persist and, frankly, thrive. In the deregulatory era since the Reagan Revolution the banking industry has had two colossal meltdowns and energy industry has flooded the market with product, making prices oscillate wildly.
We do not want to drift toward a confederacy. We do not want to be falcons without a falconer. We want to be free, not lost.
Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times.
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