“American superpower,” “the greatest power in history,” or, more recently, “America first” have become part of American political values. What about constitutional democracy?
| This post is part of a reading series on Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin. To quickly access all chapters, please click here. Disclaimer: This chapter summary is personal work and an invitation to read the book itself for a detailed view of all the author’s ideas. |
Americans are raised in the idea that their main political institutions, the Constitution, and the protections of citizenship are firmly established because the United States is, after all, “the world’s oldest continuous democracy.” But expressions such as “American superpower,” “the greatest power in history,” or, more recently, “America first” are objectively referring to something other than the principle of constitutional democracy. Sheldon Wolin states, “Instead of a system in which governmental powers are measured by a constitution of enumerated powers, there appears to be an expansive conception of power and a triumphalist ideology alien to the Constitution.”
This ambivalence in exercising power is nothing new in the United States history. This chapter describes how the shift from its constitutional background to its expansive one was made possible.
A national Constitution is not the word of God. Far from being the hieratic statement of some absolute law, it is a political document handed down from one generation to the next as a set of necessary guidelines for the achievement of a state of law. Being a work of reason, it is bound to evolve in time, either by extending its protection to new categories of people or by amending what is dated and not acceptable anymore.
Moreover, as Sheldon Wolin explains, “In general, while a constitution may “constitute” power by creating institutional authorities virtually de novo—as in the invention of the presidency and the Supreme Court—more often it demonstrates flexibility by recognizing and investing de facto power with authority—as when, in 1933, the Weimar Reichstag declared Hitler to be chancellor (or prime minister) but only after changing the law that had declared Austrians ineligible for the office. . . . A constitution may also serve as the means of deflecting external powers: for example, a supreme court may zealously turn back ‘attacks’ on property rights and business interests from the regulatory powers of state legislatures, as happened from roughly 1871 to 1914 in the United States.” There is a painfully clear example of that last instance in the fact that “challenges to racial segregation were resisted by all branches of government and the two major political parties until the mid-twentieth century.” Whether or not the interpretation and implementation of a constitution answer the requirements of a fair and just society, the document itself is usually supposed to remain the necessary template for the coherence and authority of political power.
Opposed to that constitutional order is an “expansive conception of power and a triumphalist ideology alien to the Constitution.” Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) and James Harrington (1611-77) notably “proposed a distinction between a political system content to preserve itself rather than expand and a political system, such as that of ancient Rome, eager to ‘increase’ its power and domain.”1 The United States combines both. On the one hand, the Founders established a government of limited power and modest ambitions. Conversely, their intention is overridden by an unlimited dynamic “embodied in the system whereby capital, technology, and science furnish the sources of power.”
In a society strongly encouraging technological innovation, “definitions of constitutional authority tend to lag well behind the actual means of power and their capabilities.” Typically, “A war power may be authorized by a constitution drawn up more than two centuries ago, but ‘advances in weaponry’ have altered dramatically the meaning of warfare without formally rewriting the authorization to use them.” This formal discrepancy bears a predictable outcome: “When a constitutionally limited government utilizes weapons of horrendous destructive power, subsidizes their development, and becomes the world’s largest arms dealer, the Constitution is conscripted to serve as power’s apprentice rather than its conscience.”
Unsurprisingly, this ambivalence between a regulated exercise of power and what is seen as its legitimate expansion always tends to play in favor of the latter: “. . . when certain reformers, such as environmental activists and anticloning advocates, seek to use constitutional authority to control the powers associated with the ‘constitution for increase’ (e.g., regulating nuclear power plants or cloning labs) they find their efforts blocked by those who invoke the conception of a constitution as one of limited authority. But typically when representatives of the ‘constitution for increase’ press for favors from those who man the ‘constitution for preservation,’ they get their way.”