The "Commonwealth" Edition

I’m very tired of getting sidetracked by what our Second Confederacy is doing when it would be so much better to talk about what we should be doing next. I don’t just mean “what we should be doing” in “resistance” terms: vote! Campaign! Donate! Volunteer! March! You shouldn’t need me to tell you all that. I’ll still talk about threats and discuss resistance, but it’s also really important to be thinking through just what we’re “for,” not merely what we’re “against.” It should be obvious we can’t be for the pre-Trump status quo, so what should we want next? I’m going to try to set aside the occasional issue, which I’ll headline with “Commonwealth,” to ponder what a more stable union might actually look like.

“A Republic, Not A…” No, Fuck You

“America is a republic, not a democracy” is the single dumbest, most annoying thing conservatives like to say when confronted with the idea of America being a more democratic country. It’s annoying because it’s simultaneously both self-evidently true, and yet completely inadequate to actually guide how our government and society should work.

Yes, the Framers opposed “democracy,” as that term was understood in their time. “Democracy” in their era was equated with “mob rule:” the will of the people, unconstrained by law or order. It could be very illiberal, and these were men who valued liberalism over democracy. They’d witnessed – even manipulated – the dangers of democracy in the decade before the Revolution, and while we call the decade before Lexington and Concord “non-violent” (compared to war), it wasn’t so non-violent if the mob broke your windows, or ransacked your shop, or tarred and feathered you. But then, in those days the state publicly flogged, branded, and executed people, so it was just a meaner time all around.

I get where they were coming from. Above other values, I think I consider myself a committed capital-L Liberal. If my only governing choices were a Liberal autocracy or an illiberal democracy, I’d take the autocrat. Problem is, history has vanishingly few examples of true Liberal autocrats, and even fewer examples of one being succeeded by another, and really no examples of a lucky third, fourth… you get the idea. As a system, Liberal autocracy is so impossible to replicate that it’s a fool’s errand to try. Once you’ve rejected Liberal autocracy, there’s no point in looking at other types of autocracies. They just get worse.

The Framers rejected both democracy and autocracy for a “republic,” a term they recalled from the classics and they saw in a few places at that time, like the Netherlands or Venice - places so small their models for governing couldn’t possibly be replicated across a continent.

But their understanding of “republic” raises as many questions as it answers: the only certain things you can say about a republic are that it has neither a) an autocrat; nor b) mass participation in government. That tells you what it isn’t, not what it is. So who does run a republic, and how are those people selected? History gives us several choices:

· Aristocratic: by far the most common historically, ruling power concentrates in the hands of a few major families who pass it among themselves. We’ve had some political dynasties, but none that even came close to the aristocratic level;

· Oligarchic: power concentrates in the hands of the wealthy. Were they all self-made, you could argue these might be smart people, deserving of leadership. But for obvious inheritance reasons oligarchies always devolve into aristocracies, so the distinction is hypothetical;

· Theocratic: power is concentrated among religious leaders guided by religious doctrine;

· Ethnic: power belongs to an ethnic group, often (but not always) the largest;

· Democratic: the people have the power to choose their leaders freely; or the most common today

· Bullshit: most so-called “republics” today are autocracies. They may have structures of republics and may claim to be one of the above, but in reality all power is concentrated in one unaccountable person. The “People’s” Republic of China and “Islamic” Republic of Iran are good examples. Iran claims to be a theocratic republic, but its law really is whatever the Supreme Leader says. Xi Jinping has no accountability to anyone despite what the structures of the Chinese government say.

It’s pretty clear what kinds of republics the Framers rejected: the Constitution bans titles of nobility, so aristocracy is out. They specifically banned religious tests for government, so no theocracy. Slavery aside (that’s a gigantic “aside,” I know), they did not empower or disempower a particular European ethnicity. The way the Framers’ generation of presidents conducted themselves shows none saw the republic as “bullshit” and tried ruling as autocrats.

The Framers certainly weren’t poor, but it’s too much to call them “oligarchic.” For every George Washington or Robert Morris who were extremely wealthy, there was a John Adams or Alexander Hamilton who had to work for income.

By process of elimination, we’re left with “democratic.” Sure enough, the Framers derived the Constitution’s authority from “We, The People,” and built the government around a democratically-elected House of Representatives, which was the first body of government they discussed in Article One. Of the three checks they created to balance it – Senate, Presidency, Supreme Court – two are themselves indirectly elected. Those checks, plus the Bill of Rights, were supposed to preserve the “liberalism” in “liberal democracy.”

And the Constitution only got more democratic over time, from the Reconstruction amendments to the direct election of senators, women’s suffrage, and the vote for 18-year-olds. Every time we’ve thought the Constitution needed amending, we’ve made it more democratic. Of course, that’s exactly what MAGA wants to roll back; some of them are explicit about it.

It Had One Job

For all that, the Constitution was written to have one critical job that it pulled off flawlessly until 2016: it was supposed to prevent the election of a demagogue. Even more than illiberalism, the Framers feared democracy would lead to a demagogue seizing on popular passions to gain autocratic power for themselves. Every un-democratic check and balance in the system was intended to prevent democracy from making that mistake.

But when we look at how things have played out with Trump, our demagogue arose not because of democracy, but despite it. At every step of the way, the institutions designed to thwart demagoguery facilitated it:

· Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and only took office because of the Electoral College;

· The Senate failed in its duty to convict Trump via impeachment even after he publicly attempted the violent overthrow of the government;

· The Supreme Court failed to find he was an insurrectionist under the 14^th Amendment and later gave him immunity from any crime he might commit as President, up to and including murdering people.

While ultimately Trump won the popular vote in 2024, who’s to blame the people? Why should they consider him an unacceptable choice when every institution meant to block him did the opposite? The People didn’t fail the Constitution, the Constitution failed The People.

The conclusion is obvious: where greater democracy and our current constitutional order come into conflict, it’s time to choose Democracy over the Constitution. What would that look like?

Commonwealth

I’m going to call my new fantasy republic the American Commonwealth. I’m choosing “commonwealth” for very strong reasons:

· It is a term grounded in the European, and particularly British, Enlightenment that developed the very idea of liberalism, to say nothing of the idea that people didn’t need to be ruled by men who claimed their authority came from gods via their bloodline;

· It is deeply rooted in American values and traditions. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Virginia all are commonwealths, as are Puerto Rico and the Northern Marianas. The District of Columbia will rename itself the Douglass Commonwealth (after Frederick Douglass) when it achieves statehood; most importantly

· It’s not a mere description of a form of government, like “kingdom” or “republic;” it’s a statement of what government should be and should do. Provide for and advance the common wealth. It is a purpose, a resolve, a commitment.

The biggest obstacle to my Commonwealth is the Constitution itself, which is almost impossible to change – something many of its strongest anti-Federalist critics noted. Thomases Paine and Jefferson both specifically attacked what we’d now call the “Originalist” idea that the dead can set governing boundaries on the living, and thought the Constitution needed to be easier to change. “Rule by the dead” is just another form of unaccountable autocracy – really the ultimate in “unaccountability.”

Recognizing this challenge, when I propose changes that seem to go outside our constitutional bounds, I’ll do my best to identify ways that our existing institutions could modify themselves through “gentlepersons agreements,” much as how Great Britain functions. In theory, Charles III has all kinds of powers, but everyone involved – most importantly Charles himself – knows he won’t exercise them.

Where tacit mutual agreement won’t work, I’m going to say “screw the Constitution.” It’s not a religious document. It was not delivered on stone tablets. More to the point, the Constitution is its own precedent for overriding it.

Think about it. The Constitution itself was written by men tasked to revise the Articles of Confederation, who went on to completely exceed their brief and foisted the document on the Confederation Congress without any legitimacy other than the prestige of its signatories, most notably Washington and Ben Franklin. Anti-federalists emphasized the illegitimacy of the entire process. The ten Bill of Rights amendments passed through the onerous amendment process because it was a condition of ratification in several states. The Reconstruction Amendments passed because the victorious Union had a gun to the head of the defeated Confederacy. None of these moments were the “normal” constitutional amendment process. The Constitution is its own precedent for ignoring it, if it comes to that.

I’ll keep covering current events, and how we should be resisting them, but do keep an eye out for “Commonwealth” editions, because there’s no point in defeating Trumpism if we can’t build something better from it.