Every year around Independence Day, I carve out time to read and reflect on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; and every year I notice something new. This year it was the first clause in Article IV, Section 4: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." As with everything else in the Constitution, this "guarantee clause" has been analyzed historically, legally, and philosophically over the last 200+ years. Although I'm not a scholar of the Constitution and don't plan to become one, my curiosity was piqued, so I decided to gain a slightly better understanding of republicanism (with a small "r").
James Madison, the primary framer of the Constitution, defined republicanism as that form of government "which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people", thus opposing it to governments in which some or all of the powers are held by one person or a certain faction of the people. In his book From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, Forrest A. Nabors observes that "a key test of republicanism is whether the people for whom the law is made are the makers of the law", in contrast to the "imperial rule" that obtains "when an outside power makes the law for others who must live by the law" (p. 11) - which, of course, was the condition of the colonies before independence. He also notes that Madison was not impressed by the novel constitutional interpretations put forward decades later by John C. Calhoun and his ilk, whom he called "disciples of aristocracy, oligarchy or monarchy" (p. 13).
According to Nabors, perhaps the most daring innovation of the framers was to attempt the founding of a large republic; unlike the small republics of, say, ancient Athens or Renaissance Venice, the U.S.A. was designed to scale up indefinitely. A key constitutional construct intended to make large-scale republicanism work in practice was federalism: "'the division and organization of power' between the national government and the state governments" whereby "powers appropriate to national objects were enumerated and given to the national government in the Constitution" while "all others remained with the states" (p. 11) - or, as the Tenth Amendment says, even "reserved to the people".
Over time, the American people have progressively discarded federalism, so that more and more powers have been concentrated in the central government. It strikes me that this hasn't worked out all that well, since decision-making happens ever more distantly from the people, most things have been "nationalized" so tussles over policy seem increasingly existential, and more and more the laws and regulations promulgated in the District of Columbia feel like imperial impositions by an "outside power".
Even though a healthy dose of federalism might be part of the cure for our partisan death spiral, I'm not optimistic that collectively we'll come to that realization unless truly pressed to seek radical solutions to what ails the American body politic.
In any case, political musings like these, while interesting at times, touch on matters that are far outside my span of influence and control, so I try not to engage in them very often. Your mileage may vary. :-)
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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