Founderstein: How to Turn Eight Dead White Guys into One Political Monster

Anybody who spends enough time digging around in the graveyards of American political theory knows about “Founderstein”—an ideological monstrosity that, like Frankenstein’s monster, borrows bits and pieces from those safely dead—from, that is, the the speeches, published essays, letters, and journals of any number of different Founding Fathers slapped together with absolutely no concern for context, rhetorical intent, or the tremendous differences between the individual Founders.

The most common Modern version of Founderstein looks something like this:

·      Thomas Paine’s belief in small government

·      Patrick Henry’s religious devotion

·      Benjamin Franklin’s scientific mind

·      Thomas Jefferson’s classical learning

·      Alexander Hamilton’s support of business interests

·      George Washington’s leadership vision

·      John Adams’ incorruptible integrity

·      James Madison’s love of the Constitution

          One could certainly be forgiven a bit of idolatry in the face of such a political saint! That such a fellow never existed might dampen our enthusiasm a little bit, but this is pretty much the central-casting version of all of the “Founding Fathers” in books like Tim Lahay’s Faith of Our Founding Fathers, Larry Schweikart’s What Would the Founders Say? And just about anything by Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, or Sean Hannity.

            However, if we take these same eight men and combine another set of characteristics, we end up with a very different Founderstein—one just as monstrous as the first but designed for a different kind of political argument:

·      Thomas Paine’s strident atheism

·      Patrick Henry’s implacable opposition to the Constitution

·      Benjamin Franklin’s sexual adventurism

·      Thomas Jefferson’s deism

·      Alexander Hamilton’s desire for large, centralized governments

·      George Washington’s lifelong ownership of slaves

·      John Adams’ naïveté

·      James Madison’s shifting political allegiances

            But this creature never existed either.  “The Founding Fathers” were not all well-educated, devout Christians who sought to limit the power of government any more than they were slave-owning atheists who wanted to expand the power of government. They were actual human beings with insights and moral lapses, virtues and vices, and, perhapsm most importantly, little ability to agree with each other about much of anything. That is how human beings operate in this world.

The Founderstein phenomenon, however, does not come from this world. It comes from the world of myth, where virtues are amplified and disagreements are suppressed. And it is only by invoking the world of myth that anybody can say “the Founding Fathers believed. . . .” and end up with anything like a coherent argument. Other than a vague feeling that the American colonies were better off ruling themselves than being ruled by the British, there is not a single belief that can be attributed to everybody who can be reasonably termed a “Founding Father.”

The fallacy in the Founderstein phenomenon lies in the fact that it relies entirely on three false assumptions:

1.     That the term “Founders” represents a specific group of men (women need not apply) who have been universally recognized as the framers of the Constitution and the designers of the government that has endured for more than 230 years.

2.     That these men agreed with each other on all, or even some, of the major political issues of their day, thereby making a quote by any one of them adequate proof of “what the Founders believed.”

3.     That these men—some of whom lived into their 90s—held consistent opinions about important issues during their entire public lives.

These assumptions are not just false; they are all profoundly wrong. Together, they create an ahistorical, one-dimensional version of the Founding Fathers that is good only for creating proof-text arguments—strings of quotations that pay no attention to the ideological differences of the Founders or the rhetorical contexts of their words. Want to prove that the Founding Fathers were orthodox Christians? Easy. Quote a line from one of Hamilton’s youthful love sonnets, a phrase from one of George Washington’s ghostwritten speeches, and something that ended up in the Kentucky Constitution that may have been put there by Madison. Want to prove that they were all non-Christian deists? Grab Franklin’s autobiography, Jefferson’s letters to Joseph Priestley, and quote liberally from Paine’s The Age of Reason.  It's easy, it's fun, and no matter which way you decide to go, somebody else has already looked up the quotes. All you you have to do is Google.

And reading is hard work.

Everyone Is to Blame, but Everyone Is not Equally to Blame

          The Standard and Poor’s report came out today, and, as expected, America’s bond rating was lowered from AAA to AA+—moving us from the “good neighborhood” inhabited by Canada, the United Kingdom, and France and placing us in the company of Bermuda, Abu Dhabi, and Slovenia. The likely result of this move is that the United States will pay higher interest rates for future bond debt, making it all the more difficult to dig out of the hole we are now in.

        The eight-page report from Standard & Poor’s assigns plenty of responsibility to all of the parties involved in last month’s debt dispute. Interested readers can find reasons to be angry with Congress, the Obama Administration, Republicans, Democrats, and Tea Partiers. Honest readers will find plenty of reasons to blame themselves, their consumption patterns, and their political assumptions for, not only the downgrade, but for the thirty-year history of overspending that brought us to this position in the first place.

        However, while the report faults the actions of all of the players in the recent crisis, it does not fault them equally. The report makes very clear that the behavior of one faction bears more responsibility for today’s decision than that of the others. I do not offer this as an opinion, but as a straightforward reading of a report that makes no effort to pull its punches.

        The first thing that the report makes clear is that the size of the debt alone is NOT responsible for the downgrade. America’s current debt-to-equity ratio of 74% is lower than that of other nations with a AAA rating, such as the U.K. (80%) and will remain so through 2015. At that point, however, the ratings agency feels that the debts of other AAA countries will begin to decline. They do not believe that this will happen in America. Understanding why is key to understanding today’s action. We need not look too far for the answer, however, as it is in the first-paragraph of the report:

We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S. because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed and will remain a contentious and fitful process.

Standard & Poor’s, in other words, downgraded America’s credit rating because they do not trust our political process to reach the compromises necessary to reduce the debt—compromises that will require both “containing the growth in public spending” AND “reaching an agreement on raising revenues.”

        Taxes come up again in the report explaining that the projections behind today's decision was influenced by the perception that the Bush tax cuts would continue indefinitely:

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

       Finally, the report makes absolutely clear that its decision was influenced by the actions of those in Congress who openly threatened to allow a default if their demands for spending cuts, with no tax increases, were not met:

The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.

     

      This is as direct a statement as S & P could have made against the arrogant, irresponsible way that the once-uncontroversial debt ceiling issue was turned into a hostage situation by a group of legislators determined to press one way of addressing the debt (entitlement cuts) while steadfastly refusing to consider the other (tax increases).

        Democrats are certainly not blameless in this mess. The entitlement programs that they love are breaking the country, and, if they can’t find ways to get those programs under control, there is probably no way that we will ever make a significant dent in our bonded indebtedness.

        That said, however, the Standard & Poor’s report makes it very clear that the size of the debt is only one of the reasons for the downgrade, and not, at the current historical moment, even the most important one. It is the state of our political process, more than the size of our debt, that produced today’s action. With that in mind, consider that

•         Only one of the parties in the recent dispute turned “the statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default” into “political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.”

•         Only one of the parties “continue[s] to resist any measure that would raise revenues.”

•         Only one of the parties signaled an absolute unwillingness to compromise its position and bragged to the media that it “got 98% of what we wanted.”

        So let the blames begin—there is certainly plenty to go around. But let us not fall for the comforting fiction that, because everybody is at fault, everybody is equally at fault. That is simply not the case, and no serious reading of the actual text of the Standard & Poor’s report could argue that it is. 

You Only Get One Main Point: Choosing between Low Taxes and a Low Deficit

You only get one main point. This is the first thing that I tell my Freshman Composition students every semester. They can make several arguments in their papers, but only one of them can be the main point--everything else has to somehow be subordinate. This is not just a silly little rule for English class. It is how reality works. Only one thing can be most important; that’s what “most important” means.

Most college freshman, I am happy to report, eventually get the message.  Most congressional freshmen, on the other hand, do not. And this failure to understand how reality works has brought thelargest economy in the world to the brink of fiscal disaster.

Letme be more specific. The current Tea Party Freshmen have come into office intent on advancing two policy positions: 1) that we must reduce the out-of-control federal deficit; and 2) that we must not, under any circumstances, increase taxes. Bully for them. Both are legitimate political goals that reasonable people could assert as a priority.They can both be important. They can both be really, really important. But, as they are not identical, they cannot both be most important. 

Information from the Congressional Budget Office, as represented in the chart on the left, makes it very clear that the Bush tax cuts (which the Republicans have prevented fromexpiring) have been the greatest single contributor to deficit increases since2002.

This does not mean that tax cuts are bad. That is a statement of value. It means that tax cuts produce deficits. This is a mathematical fact. A deficit is simply the difference between what you take in and what you pay out. There are two ways to increase it: taking in less or paying out more. There are, similarly, two ways to decrease it: taking in more or paying out less. To someone whose “main point” is lowering the deficit, both options (tax increases and spending cuts) should be identical, as they both have exactly the same effect on the deficit.

If, on the other hand, you believe that cutting taxes (or not raising taxes, which is logically the same thing) is the most important thing, then you must accept the possibility ofhigher deficits. Even if you believe that the tax cuts will eventually stimulate the economy and produce more revenue, you still have to accept higher deficits in the immediate future—in exactly the same way that somebody who believes that spending increases will stimulate the economy has to accept higher deficits in the immediate future.

You can do both (cut taxesand decrease the deficit), but you can’t do both all the time, and, sometimes you will have to choose between doing one or doing the other. 

It is fairly obvious from the negotiations that, for the new Tea Party freshmen, lowering (or not raising) taxes is more important than cutting the deficit. All of them, for example, have signed a pledge that they will never, under any circumstances, vote to raise taxes; they have signed no such pledge about the deficit. And when presented with a plan that would dramatically decrease the deficit with spending cuts and tax increases, they rejected it.

And let’s be very clear about this: the action that many Congressional Republicans are contemplating—allowing the US to temporarily default on its debt—would increase the deficit more than anything we could possibly do; it would drive our bond rating down, our interest rates up, and ensure that more of our taxpayer’s money would have to be spent paying interest on the current debt. From any standard of fiscal responsibility, voluntarily accepting higher interest rates (which is exactly what defaulting means) is stupid.

The actions show what therhetoric does not. The “main point” of the Congressional Republican Caucus—and especiallyof the Tea Party Freshmen—is “don’t raise taxes.” It is not “reduce the deficit.”  

Making a Liar out of Madison: The “McConnell Plan” and the Separation of Powers

“It will not be denied, that power is of an encroaching nature, and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.”— James Madison, Federalist 48

          Over the last few weeks of budget negotiations, we have seen partisan bickering raised to an art form. We have seen factionalism within one major party destroy a potential compromise and demagoguery from the other party destroy almost any hope of a negotiated settlement. We have seen legislators use their power over government borrowing to press for unreasonable concessions from the President, and we have seen a President use the threat of a veto to thwart the will of the people, as expressed in the most recent Congressional elections. 

         We have, in other words, seen the government work exactly as the Founders designed it.

          Government is supposed to be messy. It was designed to be contentious and inefficient. One of the clearest things that comes through in the Federalist Papers is that we are supposed to have a hard time changing big stuff. This is because the Constitutional design sets different interests against each other in an infinite variety of combinations, requiring constant negotiation, revision, and compromise. Madison especially believed that power had to be diffused through a very elaborate system as a check on the natural ambitions of human beings:

 Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. (Federalist #51)

          Madison’s gist here—which became a central design element of the Constitution—is that power will always seek more power, and that pretty much everybody in any branch of government can be counted on to want to increase their own power at the expense of others. The entire Constitutional system is built around this assumption.

          This means that the system can handle any amount of partisan bickering and obstructionism. That's what it was built for. What it cannot handle, however, is one branch voluntarily giving up power to another branch because it fears the political consequences of exercising that power. The way the system is designed, you are supposed to want more power than you have, but you absolutely have to be willing to exercise the power that you've got. Otherwise, whoever is willing to take responsibilities that nobody else wants will end up with the power as well and have a clear path to dictatorship.
          The current Congress, however, appears more than willing to protect Americans from its own failure to govern by transferring to the executive branch the responsibility (and therefore the power) to make politically difficult decisions. We saw this last month in the vote to condemn the US mission in Libya (the symbolic vote) while, at the same time, caving completely on the issue of paying for it (the meaningful vote). As a result, the mission in Libya continues, and the executive power to commit troops without a Congressional declaration of war remains unchallenged. 
          While Congress frets and fumes about the War Powers Resolution, nobody has ever pursued a lawsuit about it long enough to let the courts weigh in on its Constitutionality. Nobody wants a clear Supreme Court victory giving Congress back its authority to declare war would--least of all the members of Congress, who would then have to start exercising the tremendous responsibility of doing so. Better to take a purely symbolic vote against the action in Libya and then abjectly refuse to take responsibility for that belief by actually doing something about it. 

          Given this dynamic, nobody should be surprised about Mitch McConnell’s plan to prevent America from defaulting on its debts and triggering another global financial crisis. The essence of the plan is simple: Congress transfers the responsibility for the debt limit to the President and gives itself a veto only if 2/3 of the members of both houses can agree (which, of course, they never will). The debt ceiling gets raised, America keeps its AAA bond rating, Obama takes the heat, and the Republicans can faithfully report back to their core constituents that they “voted against raising the debt ceiling”--even thought they will have done nothing of the sort. 

          The plan is good politics, and I suspect that it, or something very similar, will win the day. But it is bad statecraft. It represents yet one more legislative concession of power to the executive branch, not because the President wants the power, but because the Congress does not want the responsibility. And that is a very bad reason to make a liar out of Madison. 

What Federalist #1 Actually Means (And Why Glenn Beck Had to Change It)

An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good.

                              —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #1

In a recent post, I argued that Glenn Beck’s attempt to translate the Federalist Papers into “Modern English” was both unnecessary (because the text is already in English that is made difficult by its ideas, not its linguistic construction) and incompetent (because neither Beck nor his collaborator, Joshua Charles, know the first thing about how English worked in the eighteenth century). To make this point, I offered a close reading of the first paragraph of the first Federalist Paper, which the Beck/Charles translation bungles by misunderstanding the eighteenth-century usage of the word “interest”—a mistranslation that allows Beck to formulate a “main point” for Federalist #1 that is squarely at odds with the clear meaning of the text—namely, that (according to Hamilton), “America is special because our rights come from God.”

As bad as Beck’s reading of Federalist #1 is in what it proclaims, he serves Hamilton’s cause even more poorly by what he obscures--namely, the main point of the entire essay. To anyone who takes the time to read the original text (and I REALLY, REALLY suggest that you read the original text), the main point of the essay is not that God likes America best, but that a strong government is necessary to the preservation of liberty and that we have more to fear by anti-government activists who claim to be protecting individual freedoms than we do from the advocates of a strong federal government.

In his introduction to Federalist #1, Beck quotes the same passage that I did at the beginning of this post—a passage in which Hamilton argues for “efficiency” in government and criticizes “an over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people.” Right on cue, Beck ignores the (rather obvious) application of this criticism to his own ideology and dismisses it WITH YET ANOTHER INCORRECT TRANSLATION OF A COMMON WORD WHOSE MEANING HAS SHIFTED SINCE THE 18TH CENTURY:

Relevance to Today: Zealots for individual rights (which back then could be translated as anarchists) are more dangerous that those who believe that an efficient government is a good thing. But would anyone today refer to the federal government as “efficient”? After all, it took a 1,924-page bill to lay out the budget of the United States and another 359 pages simply to cut $38 billion in spending.

This time, the translation error is with the word “efficient.” In contemporary American usage, “efficient” means something like “with a minimum amount of waste”—much the way Beck uses it here. To the eighteenth-century political philosopher, however, it meant “powerful” or “capable of being an agent of action” with no hint of the contemporary emphasis on reducing paperwork—it simply does not matter to Hamilton’s argument how many pages it takes to cut $38 billion in spending.

In a passage that Beck does not quote from the original text, Hamilton takes the argument further and argues that those who argue against strong government in favor of individual rights are likely to become tyrants. For effect (and because I think it will be very instructive) I am going to place the original translation side by side with the Beck/Charles version offered as an “accurate and non-ideological” updating.

Hamilton A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

Beck/Charles Dangerous ambition often lurks more in those who have excessive enthusiasm for the rights of the People than those who believe in a firm and efficient government. History proves that the former more often leads to tyranny than the latter, and that the people who have trampled on the liberties of a republic often began their campaigns by being overly concerned with the rights of the People and helping to end tyranny.

Let me belabor a few fairly obvious points here:

1. The Beck/Charles version is neither a “translation” nor an “updating.” It is simply a paraphrase that changes some words for another, simplifying the argument but not modernizing the prose. One would be very hard pressed to argue that “trampled on” is a more modern, or even a more accessible, word than “overturned. ”What Beck and Charles have done is something that most teachers see regularly: they have taken an original source and changed the words around a little bit and submitted it as something new. We call this (when we are being charitable) a “half-baked paraphrase,” and it is usually considered a form of cheating.

2. Hamilton is a much better prose stylist than either Glenn Beck or Joshua Charles.

3. There is a MAJOR PARAPHRASING ERROR in the final sentence, in the portions that I have bolded. Hamilton says that most of the men who have “overturned the liberties of republics” have begun “paying obsequious court to the people.” His conclusion, that they are guilty of “commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants” is a remarkably clear attack on people who use the rhetoric of “individual freedoms” to foster anti-government sentiment for their own political and financial ends.

But look what happens when Beck and Charles get ahold of this stunning denunciation. Gone is the significant term “demagogue” to describe the targets of Hamilton’s attack. In the new version, these are not evil-minded opportunists from the outset, but misguided people who are “overly concerned with the rights of the People.” These non-demagogues do not end up as tyrants, as Hamilton so famously argued; rather, they concern themselves (perhaps a bit too zealously) with “ending tyranny.” Once again, the translation blatantly ignores the text’s usage of the word “ending” (ending up as) and replaces it with a more modern, but utterly incorrect sense of the word (trying to bring to an end).

The error I am describing here is not an obscure mistranslation of eighteenth-century arcana. The use of “ending” to mean “ending up” should pose no difficulty to a competent 21^st century reader. We use the word this way all the time. The fact that these kinds of confusing usages do occur regularly in the Federalist Papers is a strong argument for good footnotes, which are entirely appropriate in complicated texts whether old or new. It is not, however, an even remotely convincing argument for this "new translation," which, as we have seen, oversimplifies the argument without actually helping anybody understand eighteenth-century usage.

Beck's error is not just linguistic; it also has serious ideological implications, as it completely reverses Hamilton’s original meaning. The Federalist Papers were editorial rebuttals to other essays that had already been written under pseudonyms such as “Cato,” “Centinel,” and “Brutus” (collectively published these days as the “Anti-Federalist Papers”) that attacked the proposed Constitution as a destroyer of individual freedoms and the rights of states. By labeling the authors of these papers—including prominent revolutionaries such as Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, George Mason, and (in a limited way, as he was in France for the whole debate) Thomas Jefferson—“demagogues,” and charging that they would end up “tyrants,” he was opposing their ideology in the strongest terms he could think of. As the Beck/Charles “translation” puts it, however, he was gently chastising well-meaning patriots for going a little too far in their zeal to protect rights.

This distinction could not be more important in the current political climate. Beck himself, in The Original Agument and in much of his other public rhetoric, espouses views that are nearly identical to those espoused by the Anti-Federalists. He sees (as they saw) the government as an intrusive force bent on destroying individual freedoms. He argues (as they continually argued) that a strong federal system destroys the rights of states, and he has built these themes into a multimillion dollar media franchise by attacking the government, vigorously advocating for the rights of individuals to reject the authority of government officials, and demonizing anybody who disagrees with him.

Glenn Beck is, in other words, exactly who Hamilton is warning us about in Federalist #1. Is it any wonder that his version of the text removes the part about about “demagogues”?

Publius O’er a Bottle: The Dangerous Hypocrisy of Glenn Beck’s "The Original Argument"

"Today, the series of newspaper articles that ran from October 1787 through August 1788 is known as the “Federalist Papers,” and, let’s be honest, the mere mention of them usually results in most people yawning. They’re written in terribly hard-to-read eighteenth-century English, they reference things that most of us have never heard about, and, let’s just say it: They seem irrelevant."
          —Glenn Beck, The Original Argument

"Even today, some people would prefer that you not read the Federalist Papers. Instead they would rather contort Publius’s words to serve their own narrow ideological ends. Some people have tried to rewrite history and the intent behind the Federalist Papers to create a false portrait of our Founding Fathers . . . . Those who are honest in their love for America should have no issue with anyone reading our founding documents and drawing their own conclusions. It’s people who want to speak in place of those documents that we should be wary of."
          —Glenn Beck, a few pages later

           I have been hovering in and out of high moral dudgeon ever since I saw on Amazon that Beck was releasing a version of the Federalist Papers in “updated American English.” As one who has actually read the papers in their original form, struggled with their ideas, and come away from the process enriched, I am deeply suspicious of any attempt to “update” the language. In my opinion, the language does not need to be updated. The eighteenth century is not the fourteenth century, and the Federalist Papers are not The Canterbury Tales.  English has not changed so much since 1788 (just a few years before Jane Austen) that it needs to be translated into something new.

The English of the Federalist Papers is perfectly readable the way that it is. This is not to say that the Federalist Papers are easy to understand. They are notoriously difficult, as Beck acknowledges. But it is their arguments, not their language, that make them difficult. The authors were well educated political theorists who expected their readers to understand difficult concepts and abstract ideas. The difficulty of the prose flows from the difficulty of the ideas, not their antiquity; difficult concepts often require difficult language. That’s how hard stuff works.

Beck, I should point out, did not create the “translation” itself. For this, he relies on the efforts of his collaborator, Joshua Charles, a piano performance major at the University of Kansas who (he informs us in the introduction) completed the translation project during his senior year of college and managed to get them into the hands of Beck, whom he considered a political idol.  Charles tells us that he undertook the “translation” because, when he read the original work, he felt “frustration trying to grasp what Publius was saying.” (I would simply point out here that most really good translators have sufficient familiarity with the origin language to understand what the author is trying to say already. We trust translators because they have an expertise that we don't, not because they share our linguistic frustration.) 

But, to be fair, both Josh Charles and Glenn Beck acknowledge that they are not scholars of 18th century literature. Their project is motivated by love (they suggest), not scholarly expertise.  For better or worse, however, I do happen to be a scholar of 18^th century literature, and, in that capacity, I spent this evening comparing the “translation” with the original. Beck claims in his portion of the introduction that  “great care was taken in the translation process to update Publius’s words in the most accurate, nonideological way possible.”

This is simply not true. While great care may well have been taken, the result is 1) as ideologically narrow as one would expect from Beck; and 2) wildly inaccurate in its choice of modern words for eighteenth-century concepts. In almost every case that I have been able to identify in which an eighteenth-century definition of a word has changed substantially over the past 200 years, the “translation” uses the modern (inaccurate) cognate rather than a modern word or phrase that captures the original meaning. As a translation, it is simply inept.

            Let me give just one example, which comes from the updated version of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist # 1 and contains egregious errors in both ideology and language.  Beck begins this essay (as he does all of the Federalist Papers that he reprints) with a summary “main point” that readers are to get from the original work and a “relevance to today” section that explains how this main point applies to America in 2011. In this case, the main point and contemporary relevance go like this:

The Message: America is special because our rights come from God, but those rights must be protected by a central government that serves the people.

Relevance to Today: The Founders believed America to be exception [sic.], but some students are now being taught “multiculturalism,” the idea that no culture or country is superior to or better than another.

According to Beck and Charles, then, Federalist #1 is about American exceptionalism—the fact that America was chosen by God to be something different, and better, than other nations (the required contrapositive to "the message" is that other countries are not special because their rights don't come from God). This is a core component of Beck’s own political philosophy. And whether or not it was a core belief of the Founders is certainly a debate worth having. We can say with some certainty, however, that there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in Federalist #1 that argues for, supports, or even hints at American exceptionalism—and especially not divine favor—as Beck understands it. Don’t take my word for it please. Read it here or here or one of the thousand or so other sites on the web that archive the original document. 

          The quote in the original text that Beck cites for this interpretation is from the first paragraph:

The subject [the importance of the debate over the Constitution] speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world.

So, how do we get from the statement that the current debate about the constitution is important to America and to the rest of the world (because a lot of other countries are watching America to see what happens) to “America is special because our rights come from God”? I admit that I can’t quite trace the logical leap here (since this is all that Beck quotes from the original text), but I suspect it has something to do with the way that Mr. Charles translates the first paragraph of Federalist #1:

The importance of this discussion is clear—nothing less than the Union itself, the safety and welfare of all of the states, and the fate of a nation, one which is in many ways the most interesting in the world, is at stake.

  

          The clear mistranslation here is the word “interesting.” To the modern reader, something is interesting if it has an inherent interest-producing property, such as a three-headed raccoon or a ten-thousand-year-old bar of soap. But this is a relatively recent connotation of the word. In the eighteenth century, "interest" meant something more like "stake in"--the way that we might use the word when talking of an investment property. Thus, the correct “translation” (if one were really serious about updating the eighteenth-century language) would be something like “. . . the fate of a nation—an outcome that, in many ways, other nations feel that they have more of  a stake in then they do in the fate of any other nation in the world.”
            To point out what Hamilton made abundantly clear in the latter part of the first paragraph: America is not "the most interesting country in the world" because it is exceptional. Rather, he believed that the fate of the 13 colonies (which were not yet "America" or any other country) was something that other countries had an "interest" in (felt a stake in) precisely because this fate was NOT "an exception," but a rule--an experiment whose results could be repeated because it was based on universal, and not exceptional, principles of human nature.

            So, though I do not quite understand how Beck gets “America is special because our rights come from God” out of his own translation, I think we can say, without any qualification, that there would be no way to pull such a statement out of the actual text. It just isn't there. (Did I mention you could read the original online in places like this). The original must be simplified for the ideology to slip through the Founder’s actual thoughts.

These sorts of mistakes pervade the Beck/Charles version of the Federalist Papers. They are the very predictable result of not being up to the intellectual demands of translation. Clearly, Charles, Beck, or somebody on Beck's staff looked up all of the hard words in The Federalist Papers and provided a gloss. That's the easy part. It is the words like "interesting"--words that seem easy but whose meanings have shifted over time--that plague this project from beginning to end. Understanding these words requires more than three years of piano performance at the University of Kansas. It requires substantial experience with primary documents: letters, journals, works by the same author and others of the same time. It requires (dare I even say such a thing) scholarship.
         But even if Beck had employed every pianist in Kansas and really did make the text of The Original Argument accurate and ideologically neutral, it would still not be a "translation," which the Federalist Papers do not require, but a simplification. And herein lies the problem. Simplifying “the original argument” is an inherently ideological task. The proposition itself says to people, “the words of your Founding Fathers are important, but they are too hard for you to understand. You mustn’t try to read them yourself; you would just hurt your head. Let us make them easy for you.” I do not consider myself a conservative, but if I did, I would consider such a notion something akin to treason--a betrayal of the very principles for which "originalism" is supposed to stand. As a left-leaning centrist with a healthy respect for the Founders, I simply consider it a really bad idea.


Part II of this post is here: What Federalist #1 Actually Means (and Why Glenn Beck Had to Change It)

Review of Ann Coulter’s Cannibals: How Liberals Kill People, and Eat Them

I usually don’t do straight book reviews on this blog, but this week’s publication of Ann Coulter’s new book—Cannibals: How Liberals Kill People and Eat Them—is so relevant to some of the issues that I have been talking about that I have decided to make an exception.  Cannibals is a book that people will be talking about for years, and I, for one, am happy to begin the conversation right here on Boys Named Tzu.

Let’s face it: Coulter had some big shoes to fill in coming up with a sequel to her previous bestsellers Slander (2002), Treason (2003), Godless (2006), Guilty (2009), and Demonic (2011). Just coming up with a title alone must have been agonizing. Having already used most of the good words in the English language, she had to come up with yet another zinger while, at the same time, coming up with new ways that liberals are wrong about everything and are ruining the world. Given the laudable exhaustiveness of her previous critiques, this could not have been an easy job.

I am happy to report that Ms Coulter has succeeded. Not only is Cannibals a really neat word, it is a word that has been seriously underutilized in 21^st century political discourse. It is now so common for politicians and radio host to accuse their political opponents of “slander,” “treason,” or “godlessness” that there seems little point of an agent provocateur like Coulter even bothering with such words. Even her penultimate venture—Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Ruining America—seems somewhat cliché in an age when more than 50% of the Republican electorate believes that it is either “likely” or “somewhat likely” that the President of the United States is the anti-Christ. But, until Ann Coulter, nobody had ever even thought to examine the cannibal connection.

Coulter remedies this situation immediately in her introductory chapter, "The Roots of Obama’s Taste for Human Flesh," which is part social anthropology, part evolutionary psychology, and all Coulter.  Obama’s true birthplace, she argues, is not only the modern post-colonial nation of Kenya, but the ancestral home of the Korowai, one of the oldest and fiercest cannibal tribes in the world. “We are hard wired to enjoy the taste of what our ancestors liked to eat,” Coulter argues, “that’s how evolution works. It’s a way to make sure that children will eat what their parents are able to provide. For me, that means dark chocolate and very expensive cheeses. For Barack Hussein Obama neė Sotero, it means the flesh and the internal organs of human beings” (12).

In Cannibals, as in her previous books, Coulter is best when she makes historical arguments. In Demonic, she demonstrates that that the constellation of character traits we now call “liberal” have always been tied to irrational mob behavior. In Cannibals, she takes a profound, but actually quite logical step forward to show that these same characteristics have always been tied to the desire to eat other human beings. What is cannibalism, really, but just a very successful food stamp program that eliminates the middleman?

Throughout Cannibals, Coulter connects cannibalistic behavior to real evidence of liberalism in the past. She does this very effectively in her second chapter, titled “Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch with a Side Order of Bob.” In this chapter she looks at the primitive tribes of Amazonia and successfully demonstrates that they were 1) among the world’s most committed cannibals until well after the European redemption of the New World; and 2) that they did not own property and considered all tribal lands to be the common birthright of everybody—making them (according to Marx himself) “primitive communists.” Her argument is equally strong in “Babylon Babylon: Gay Marriage and Human Vivisection in the First Evil Empire.” The evidence in this chapter, however, really deals more with human sacrifice than with cannibalism--though the Babylonian priests admittedly did eat the livers of their victims in a post-sacrificial religious ritual that Coulter accurately describes as “kind of like a community-organizing session.”

Readers will find nothing about Cannibals to be politically correct. Indeed, I predict that her chapter “The Blood Libel Libel: Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Stop Kvetching” will be roundly condemned by all of the usual suspects in the New York Times-NPR-Huffington Post Axis of Evil. But people don’t read Ann Coulter for political correctness. They read her so they can learn about all the ways that liberals have been ruining the world since the beginning of time.

For such people, I believe, Cannibals might be the most correct book ever written.