Glenn Beck and the "Original Intent" Fallacy

Divining the intent of the Constitution’s framers through the use of extra-Constitutional sources has become a major part of the fringe-conservative position, as we can see in books such as David Barton’s Original Intent (5/e 2008), which examines the religious beliefs of dozens of Founding Fathers in an attempt to prove that the Constitution was never intended to restrict religious expression in the public sphere, and Larry Schweikart’s What Would the Founders Say, which tries to divine the Framer’s opinions on hot-button issues from environmental protection to health care. 

In both books, the original intent argument leads—as it must always led—to the uncritical amalgamation of opinions that we have been discussing. Inherent in the assertion that the Framer’s had an original intent is the assumption that they had the same intent—otherwise there would be no way to use it as an interpretive standard to begin with.     

In his just-released Being George Washington, Glenn Beck spends one chapter discussing the Federal Convention. He insists that “original intent was the only intent” and that we must (like George Washington) bind ourselves to the original purposes of the men who wrote the Constitution. In summing up the convention, Beck tries to put this the original purposes of the Constitution into four succinct statements, the first and last of which illustrate the fallacy of the original intent position more than my own analysis ever could:

(First Principle) The Constitution recognizes the existence of natural law. In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson referred to “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Natural law recognizes the existence of God and acknowledges that God established a natural order of things for this earth and the people of this earth.

(Fourth Principle) The Constitution was created on the assumption that America would function under a free-market economy, recognizing and protecting property rights. John Adams wrote: “All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of . . . protecting property.”[1]

            Both of these propositions give us a lot to argue about. It is not at all obvious, for example, that the Jeffersonian notion of “natural law” included a God that modern American Christians would recognize as such. As an Enlightenment Deist, Jefferson saw God as something like the sum total of the laws of nature rather than as a personal deity who interacted with the human race. Furthermore, neither Jefferson nor Adams would have even understood the term “free-market economy” as we understand it today. Jefferson in particular saw America as a primarily agrarian economy, and he viewed all kinds of financial markets with suspicion.

            Two facts, however, are beyond dispute: 1) that Jefferson did not attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787; and 2) that Adams didn’t attend it either. At the time the two men were ministers to, respectively, France and England, and they knew only as much about the Constitution as they read in letters from home. Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of Massachusetts (the source of the Adams quotation) are very different things than the U.S. Constitution, and there is no historically acceptable way to use the words found in one of them to support an originalist interpretation of the others. Such an interpretive strategy only makes sense if we assume absolutely ideological unity among the Founders, which is a really dumb thing to do.

I believe that “original intent” is a spectacularly bad standard for interpreting the supreme law of the land. I do not say this as an America-hating liberal who sees the Constitution as a “living, breathing document” that can mean anything that we want it to mean. I believe that we must interpret the Constitution according to the meaning of its words, with careful attention to how those words were used in their historical context. Words mean things, and those meanings matter. Where the Constitution is concerned, meanings matter very much; if the Constitution does not have fixed meanings, we do not live under the rule of law.

But interpreting the Constitution according to the meaning of its words—the jurisprudential standard known as “originalism”—is very different than interpreting it according to the intentions of its authors. Nobody has drawn this distinction more clearly than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who, though often cited as an exemplar of the Framer’s intent standard of interpretation, rejects that standard in no uncertain terms:

It is simply incompatible with democratic government, or indeed, even with fair government, to have the meaning of a law determined by what the lawgiver meant, rather than by what the lawgiver promulgated. That seems to me one step worse than the trick the emperor Nero was said to engage in: posting edicts high up on the pillars, so they could not be easily read. Government by unexpressed intent is similarly tyrannical. It is the law that governs, not the intent of the lawgiver.”^[2]

The view of original intent propounded by the fringe conservatives is directly at odds with the democratic principles they espouse, the common sense they advocate, and even the Supreme Court Justice they revere. This difference between “original meaning” and “original intent” may seem slight, but it separates Scalia’s mainstream conservatism from that of the right-wing fringe. Scalia himself alluded to this distinction in a 1997 lecture at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. When asked whether or not he would consider scaling back the application of the Bill of Rights to the states through an originalist reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, he replied, “I am an originalist. I am a textualist. I am not a nut.”^[3]

            Unfortunately, many of those driving public opinion and government policy in the era of the Tea Party cannot say the same.

---

[1] Beck, Being George Washington : the indispensable man, as you've never seen him: 240-44.

[2] Antonin Scalia and Amy Gutmann, A matter of interpretation : federal courts and the law : an essay, The University Center for Human Values series (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 17.

[3] Antonin Scalia, "On Interpreting the Constitution,"  http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/wl1997.htm.

I Am George Washington and So Can You: A Review of Glenn Beck's BEING GEORGE WASHINGTON

It has finally happened. Glenn Beck has written a whole book in which I can find nothing with which to disagree. Really. I find his newest offering—Being George Washington—to be perfectly innocuous. And what’s more, it is clear that Beck is trying to use his powers for good instead of evil. Gone is his usual stridence and arrogance. Here, he deals generously with those he disagrees with, and he genuinely tries to present George Washington as a suitable model for Americans of all political persuasions. 

That said, it isn't a very good book.

It is hard to say what kind of book this is trying to be. The text fits into three distinct genre categories, any one of which could have made for a promising book about George Washington. The three categories are:

Historical Fiction: About 60% of the book could best be described as a historical novel written on the 5th-8th grade reading level. This novel deals very unevenly with Washington's life, beginning with the French and Indian War and focusing principally on the American Revolution before jumping to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and and the Farewell Speech in 1796. I call this portion a novelization, rather than a biography, because the author goes frequently into the minds of the characters and pulls out thoughts and motivations that go well beyond what any biographer could surmise. Take the first sentence of the book: "The colonel's horse was terrified." It is the novelist, not the biographer, who knows what goes on in the mind of a character's horse.


There is nothing particularly objectionable about the novelization portion of the book, but neither is there anything remarkable. Much the same narrative could be found in any one of dozens of young adult versions of the George Washington story. 


Historical Analysis: A second component of the book--one not clearly delineated from the first--aims to analyze the significance of George Washington's life for the modern reader. Again, there is little to object to here. Most of the analysis fits within the general received wisdom about George Washington’s values: the importance of conviction, the need for fixed principles, an abiding belief in the justness of one's cause--that sort of thing. Much of this analysis comes in somewhat annoying grey boxes plopped in the middle of the novelization with titles like "Thinking Outside the Eighteenth-Century Box" and "What If He Had Been King?" 


Leadership Manual: Beck begins the book with the assertion that all Americans can "be George Washington," which is to say that everybody can, by studying Washington's leadership principles, be the kind of person that Washington was and make a positive difference in the world. To help us along, he pauses the novelized narrative every now and then to point out some aspect of Washington's leadership that we should strive to emulate. Once again, there is nothing earth shaking here--much the same ground has been covered in such books as George Washington on Leadership or George Washington's Leadership Lessons. From Beck, we learn that we should be on time, believe in God, be willing to compromise, and not sweat the small stuff. Pretty basic stuff, really, but its always nice to have reminders.

As I said, any one of these elements could have made for an interesting book. And there are probably ways that they could have been combined together coherently to create something unique and interesting. Beck and his team, however, have simply thrown them together haphazardly with no real thought about how to give coherence to this odd collection of Washingtonian bric-a-brac. Almost everything that the book does is done much better in other (and less expensive) volumes, and the whole thing feels like uncorrelated notes that have been hastily assembled and placed between cardboard covers in time to make a Christmas killing--which, in fact, it is. The credits for Being George Washington list six different people as writers and thirteen more as "contributors & researchers." Beck himself was simply the compiler of random bits of work that other people did. And it shows.

Ultimately, what this book shows us is that Glenn Beck has ceased to be a shrill ideological firebrand and become a factory. Being George Washington was not so much written as produced on an assembly line. "Glenn Beck" (tm) is simply the brand name that guarantees book sales. I fully expect that this franchise will expand--that, in the next few years, we will see similar books on Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers. And from there: cat food, salad dressing, and beer. The good news is that the world has little to fear from Glenn Beck in the future. The bad news is that we have nothing to learn from him either.

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.