Even as late at the Civil War..publishers/papers were clearly slanted but they made no pretense of their bias.
Actually it was as late as World War II. The Mainstream Media, as we know it today, espouses a bland, elitist, corporatist liberaralism far removed from the muscular liberalism of the New Deal generation. Today, eight companies control most TV stations, most radio stations, most general circulation magazines, most publshing concerns, all networks and all movie studios. If you research the organizational affiliations of the members of the boards of directors of these eight companies, your hair will stand on end.
Consent of the governed seems to be anachronism.
A disturbing thought. Latest polling indicates that most people believe the government no longer enjoys the consent of the governed, which is the American version of the Chinese "mandate of heaven." This would indicate that if elections don't solve the problem, "politics by other means" is the next logical step.
One of the failings of the constitution was it's lack of term limits...Obvious from these writings the founders anticipated the rise of a permanent political class but they failed to act on these concerns.
This was a major bone of contention at the Convention. There was a need to balance the threat of a permanent political class against the need for institutional memory, particularly the kind of memory that understands how the levers of power work.
During the first half of the 19th Century, presidents came and went, and most had little impact. The country was run by three men in Congress -- Webster, Clay and Calhoun -- and when they died within a few years of each other, events spun out of control, and the country broke apart.
Institutuional memory is important, but there needs to be a balance.
One of the other failings of the constitution was allowing a group of men...to exempt themselves from the laws that they saddle the rest of us with.
This is a good one. At the time of the Founding, the Framers could not conceive of the men in politics exempting themselves from the laws they passed. This was a matter of honor, and the code of the time simply could not imagine congressmen and senators behaving like the inherited nobility of England.
On the road or I'da chimed in earlier. A BTT for the evening crowd.
I've referred a couple of times now to the French Estates, and so for those who haven't googled it up or remember it from school it's this - the French government at the time was, of course, a monarchy, but its structure revolved around the First Estate, the clergy, the Second Estate, the aristocracy, and the Third Estate, the commoners. The King was nominally in no Estate at all, which led to problems when the Third estate started chopping up the Second and exiling or impoverishing the First.
Within the First estate there was, at the time of the Etats-General, a division between those clergy originating from the commoners and those, the "upper" clergy, who were from the nobility. That was actually a fairly late innovation, somewhat reminiscent of the striation that took place in Italy during the Renaissance. And it meant that the First Estate was, by the time of the writing of the Federalist Papers, enough of a reflection of the other two to disable it from intervention in the conflict between aristocracy and commoners.
That's the model reflected in DeWitt's imagery of the proposed Constitution and how it might reflect society as a whole. In the end, it did after a fashion, but it wasn't French society that it ended up mirroring, nor was it the English one whose Parliament and Common Law were the Constitution's obvious progenitors. It was truly a new society, still in the process of formation.
One notes with amusement that the French Revolution included, at least at this point, a press that was to name itself a Fourth Estate, equal in importance to but independent of the others. Our own media appear to have similar notions of self-aggrandizement but have yet to demand an actual chamber of Congress to themselves. That does not mean they don't think they deserve one. ;-)
“This would indicate that if elections don’t solve the problem, “politics by other means” is the next logical step. “
I fear we are getting close.
I know this is a huge amount of work.. I am grateful.
This is my first opportunity to take these through , but with the blessing of being able to do it both methodically and with a guide.. I am blessed.
These are formidable documents .