I’ve recently had a great conversation with one of my former youth group members who is now a very successful surgeon. He is a very intelligent man, and so I love reading his thoughts about life. He often presents wonderful ideas about how civic society should operate. The other day, though, he was praising the virtues of Democracy. If you are a long-time reader of this blog, then you know how much I do NOT like Democracy. It’s a long story which I won’t repeat here; just suffice it to say that I stand with our Founders.
In our chat about it, I was reminded that part of the Founders dislike was in their strong desire to keep the majority leashed. To them, a Democracy was the “majority unleashed” to the point that mob-rule ensues. Now, if we stopped there, we could conclude that the Founders were merely elitists and just didn’t trust the regular folks.
Nope.
OK…yes, many of the quote-unquote Founders (meaning the two groups of signers of our famous Declaration and Constitution) were fairly elite. Not all…but many were. But the idea of “The Founders” really extends to the 2+ million people living at the time of founding the country in the 1760s-1800s time. The vast majority of the Founders, then, in that case, were not rich elitists. Rather, they equally had a common fear of both “snob rule” and “mob rule.” They supported the construction of government, both at the city, state and national level, in a way that clearly showed that they didn’t trust each other…they didn’t trust themselves.
This fact is, to me, is one of the most amazing “no longer remembered” concepts about the founding generation. They understood what so many people fail to understand today….power is a corrupting thing.
OK…well, that wasn’t my main point, so I’ll let that sink in as we sit among yet another election cycle with at least twenty different people who seem to eagerly WANT to have the power of the Presidency. It should scare you, as it did the Founders. Yet, here’s my main point…when we say that the people couldn’t be trusted, a better understanding is that they knew that the average person could be so easily misled.
It wasn’t that the writers of our Constitution thought the people were too dumb or too stupid or too lazy to participate in government. Rather, they understood that in a country this size with 2 million citizens, there was no way for every person to know everything to be aware of all that was going on. Moreover, it was far easier for the people to be betrayed by what little information they were told.
Fast forward from 1776 to 1862. The Civil War has been underway for a year. In April, the horrific battle of Shiloh had occurred. More casualties happened in those two days of death than the nation’s previous wars of the last eighty years combined. In the face of those facts, the lead Union General U.S. Grant was taken from command and excoriated in the press for sloth, poor preparation of the troops and drunkenness. While Grant largely stayed quiet in the face of this criticism, his close friend William Tecumseh Sherman came to his aid. Sherman wrote letters to politicians demanding that they support Grant. To Sherman, the fear of the Founders was evident right in this moment.
The people had been betrayed and led into an anger for Grant that wasn’t deserved. The people are too far easily misled, most often by the Press, but of course also by whoever else commands the information, like politicians. In a letter to his wife, Sherman said it very clearly.
“[The Press] are the chief cause of this unhappy war–they fan the flames of local hatred and keep alive those prejudices which have forced friends into hostile ranks. In the North the people have been made to believe that those in the South are horrid barbarians, unworthy of Christian burials, whilst at the South, the people have been made to believe that we wanted to steal their negros[sic], rob them of their property….If the newspapers are to be our government, I would prefer [Southern Generals] Bragg, Beauregard…or any other high Confederate officers instead.”
Later in another letter to his brother, Sherman wrote, perhaps slightly with hyperbole, “The American press is a shame and a reproach to a civilized people. When a man is too lazy to work, & too cowardly to steal, he becomes an editor & manufactures public opinion.”
I don’t think the Press alone was responsible for the war, and that notion of what started the war belongs in another much longer post. But, one of the core factors leading into every Great Crisis is a change in communication that makes things more rapid. In my book Tracking The Storm, I wrote
Another aspect visible from the patterns is that as we closed in on each Great Crisis, there had been a significant change in communication. Before the full crisis emerged, rapid communication had become the norm in a new and exciting way.
That rapidity just meant that what the Founders feared could happen more quickly. Obviously, today in 2015, we see this happening to us with the advent of mobile computing in our mini-computers (i.e., smartphones). We are engulfed in information—and yes I get the irony that I have written my opinion about this topic in a blog that you can read anytime and anywhere.
Information is important. We need it. The Founders believed in a free press and supported the freedom of any and all to write what they wished in sharing ideas. Yet, they knew that the leaders of the country needed to be free of the illusion of Democracy and, to a large degree, willing to ignore the noise from the crowd. Yes, I know how that looks in 2015. Think about it though, and you will see the wisdom of the Founders. The people are far too easily misled, and in that false information, far too willing to riot, to take from others, to proclaim some as evil and then….well, civil wars do not only happen over slavery.