You're a Good Man, Justice Roberts, and a Conservative

       Like many liberals, I have gained a new respect for Chief Justice John Roberts this week. In both Monday’s decision on the Arizona immigration law, and today’s Affordable Care Act decision, Robert’s broke with the Conservative wing of the court and sided with the liberals. Conservatives are not amused. Rush Limbaugh  and Mark Levin, of course, are going craz(ier). Half of the right-wing bloggers in the country want to impeach their former hero for disloyalty. And Glenn Beck is driving all over the country looking for an edge that he hasn’t already gone over. In general, white men in America haven’t been this upset since M*A*S*H* got cancelled.
       Strangely enough, my newfound respect for Justice Roberts comes from the long-suppressed conservative side of my split political personality. Unlike most of my liberal friends, I was genuinely ambivalent about the Constitutionality of the individual mandate. I supported (and continued to support) the idea of universal health care, but I was not convinced that the commerce clause could legitimately be extended to requiring a commercial transaction. And while I thought that the mandate was a very tax-like thing, I did not think that the government should be able to get away with calling it a tax only when it served their purposes. Like most commentators, I was fairly sure that the mandate was going to be struck down, and I was resolved to see the entire Affordable Care Act go along with it.
       And then John Roberts happened.
       I am still not sure that I agree with the core of Roberts’ decision today. The court basically ruled that if it waddles and quacks it’s a duck, and if it redistributes income to purchase services it’s a tax. I can see the point, but, on the other hand, Congress could have made this process a lot simpler if they had admitted that it was a tax to begin with and structured the legislation accordingly. However, once Roberts came to the conclusion that the mandate was essentially a tax, he could not have ruled other than he did without becoming an in-your-face judicial activist—as the Congressional power to tax is virtually unlimited by the Constitution.
       In his Federalist papers on the subject—especially #34-#36—Alexander Hamilton makes two things very clear: 1) that we cannot safely limit the power to collect taxes because we cannot accurately predict our need for revenue; and 2) that the political difficulties of raising taxes are sufficient to prevent excessive taxation, even with unlimited Constitutional authority. This second point has generally held true. People don’t like taxes, and when members of Congress forget this, they usually end up losing their jobs.
       It is precisely because tax increases are so politically difficult that the Framers felt that they could make them, Constitutionally speaking, slam dunks. This was actually pretty sneaky on their part. By granting Congress complete authority over taxation and spending, they made these issues completely political--questions to be confronted by the people who depend on the electorate for their jobs. Had they created a list of Constitutional and Unconstitutional avenues of taxation, they would have given a great deal of interpretive power to judges with lifetime appointments. As the Constitution stands, however, the courts are simply not part of the revenue-enhancing process.
        Roberts did a good job of bracketing all of the non-Constitutional questions involved with the Affordable Care Act. He did not ask “Is it a good idea?” or “Is it an effective policy?” He did not try to determine whether or not health care was a right. And while the four liberal Justices wanted to tie the mandate to the Commerce Clause, Roberts absoltuely refused to go there. He confined himself the very narrow question, “is the individual mandate a tax?”--a question with clear Constitutional implications. My favorite passage from the decision goes like this.

Our permissive reading of these powers is explained in part by a general reticence to invalidate the acts of the Nation’s elected leaders. . . . Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.

          In his landmark decision today, Chief Justice Roberts exercised formidable judicial restraint. He presented the Court's role with humility, and he framed the question at issue as narrowly as it could possibly be framed. He declined to legislate from the bench or to overturn the decisions of elected officials without a clear Constitutional mandate to do so. He tied his decision entirely to an interpretation of the Constitution that he had the authority to make. And (breaking with the liberal justices) he did nothing to expand the power of the federal government.
          Until about a week ago, we had a word for judges who thought this way. We called them “conservatives.”

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.

Why Obama Is Not, Actually, Destroying the Constitution: Thoughts on Federalist #31

“Not every intrusive law is an unconstitutionally intrusive law.”

—Bush appointee Jeffrey Sutton, writing for the the United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, in its June 29, 2011 decision to uphold the Individual Mandate clause of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. 

The last few years have been a good time for whoever does press clippings for the US Constitution. Polling data suggests that the percentage of people who have heard things about the Constitution is greater today than it has ever been. People know, for example, that the Constitution was designed to prevent the Federal Government (which had become out of control under the Articles of Confederation) from encroaching on the rights of the states. They know that it was never intended to give the National Legislature the power to collect taxes. And, most important of all, they known that (last summer's misguided appellate decision aside) the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is patently and completely unconstitutional. Read the blogs and the letters to the editor; America is chock full of people who have heard things—often a whole bunch of things—about the Constitution.

The problem with relying on what you have heard, of course, is that whoever you heard it from probably has an interest in not telling you the whole truth. Constitutional law is actually somewhat complex; it’s a bit more involved than reading a sentence or two out of context and imagining that you know how it fits within a 200 year old legal tradition. But our political system is not friendly to complexity. We don’t want to be lectured by professors, we want to be entertained by clowns; and all clowns know that they have to keep things simple. But the process of simplifying complicated arguments often results in the loss of crucial distinctions. Tolstoy’s War and Peace contains over 500 distinct characters. The Wikipedia entry for the novel gets by with a few more than 20.   

One very important distinction that is being lost in the current political climate is the distinction between a “bad idea” and an “unconstitutional action.” The term “unconstitutional” has been thrown around on both the right and the left (but, let’s be honest, in this historical moment it is coming more from the right) like a casual greeting. Bestselling books now proudly trumpet the President’s secret “blueprint” for subverting the Constitution one cherished principle at a time. And the charge that Obama is bent on “destroying the Constitution” (here, here, here, here, and here) is made so frequently in the conservative media that it has become an article of faith for millions.

When we hear exactly what the President is doing to destroy our beloved document, however, the answers are, quite frankly, a little bit silly. Obama, we hear

·      Is appointing powerful policy advisors called “czars” without the advice and consent of the Senate (when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia—nobody’s liberal activist—was asked about this at a Congressional round table, he responded, to the chagrin of the Tea Party activists present, simply that  “the President is  entitled to hire advisors”).

·      Is bent on appointing only liberal activist judges to the Supreme Court (as if the Constitution did not actually give presidents the power to appoint whomever they want to the Supreme Court, subject to Senate approval).

·      Has rammed an unpopular health care law down our throats in direct violation of the constitutional prohibitions on an overarching federal government (despite the fact that the health care law is currently working its way through the court system—like thousands of other laws have in American history—and will ultimately either be declared Constitutional and enacted, or declared Unconstitutional and rejected according to policy that the Constitution sets up for resolving precisely these kinds of issues). 

The assertion that these policies are wrong because they are unconstitutional is, BY THE TERMS OF THE CONSTITUTION ITSELF, the wrong argument. Call in radio hosts and bi-weekly columnists are simply not given the power to issue binding statements about the Constitution. Even television hosts are not given this power. In the system that Messers Beck, Levin, Blackwell, and Klukowski supposedly like, the power to determine the constitutionality and unconstitutionality of a presidential or legislative action resides in the court system—which is where all of these issues, especially health care reform—will ultimately be decided.
 

In the mean time, the people who don’t like these ideas owe it to the rest of us to give real reasons for their opposition. "X is unconstitutional" is quickly becoming, not so much an argument itself, but a way to avoid an argument--a way, that is, to avoid doing all of the things that arguers are supposed to do, like presenting evidence, establishing criteria, appealing to shared values, and persuading people to a coherent point of view. Arguing persuasively that something is a bad idea can be difficult. Reflexively calling what you don't like unconstitutional, and saying that your opponent hates America, is much easier on the mind.

Nobody understood the difference between a bad idea and an unconstitutional one better than Alexander Hamilton, who was especially eloquent on this topic in his series of Federalist Papers on taxation (30-36). Though it does not come through clearly in the recent Glenn Beck “translation” (or, more accurately, simplification) of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton felt that the Federal government should have almost unlimited power of taxation. He makes this case primarily in #30 and #31 (both of which somehow ended up on Beck’s cutting room floor). In one particularly important passage, Hamilton addresses the issue of “double taxation,” in which the federal government taxes something that the state taxes as well. Look carefully at what he says:

As to a supposition of repugnancy between the power of taxation in the States and in the Union, it cannot be supported in that sense which would be requisite to work an exclusion of the States. It is, indeed, possible that a tax might be laid on a particular article by a State which might render it INEXPEDIENT that thus a further tax should be laid on the same article by the Union; but it would not imply a constitutional inability to impose a further tax. The quantity of the imposition, the expediency or inexpediency of an increase on either side, would be mutually questions of prudence; but there would be involved no direct contradiction of power. The particular policy of the national and of the State systems of finance might now and then not exactly coincide, and might require reciprocal forbearances.

Had this passage made it into the Beck translation, it might (I hope) have come out sounding something like: “It is entirely possible that the federal government may want to tax something that the state government is taxing too. And this could (or could not) be a really bad idea; but it would not be an unconstitutional one.”

However, when Mr. Beck actually does speak of “double taxation” in his book, this is what he says:

While the Founders argued in favor of the federal and state governments’ each having the power to tax, they were convinced that neither would tax the same thing at the same time. But now? Plenty of items, from gasoline to alcohol to tobacco, have federal excise taxes along with state sales taxes. In addition, of course, there’s income tax, which is often charged at the federal, state, and sometimes even local level. These concurrent taxes were never part of the Founders’ plan. (360)

This is wrong in the “that’s-clearly-not-what-he-said” sort of way. The Founders had a clearer vision, and a better plan, than Glenn Beck gives them credit for. Hamilton clearly foresaw the possibility of double taxation —and he was not at all “convinced that neither would tax the same thing at the same time.” Quite the reverse, he thought that they probably would. And his answer to the problem still applies to many, if not most of our informal Constitutional debates today: “this is a political issue, not a Constitutional one, so take your fight outside where it belongs.”

This, ultimately, gets to my biggest problem with the Beck-Levin-Coulter-Limbaugh-etc.-etc.-etc. assertion that President Obama (or anyone else) is “destroying the Constitution.” It presents the Constitution as a remarkably fragile document and the Founding Fathers as bumbling idiots who couldn’t figure out that some forms of government would sometimes try to overstep their bounds. It turns out, though, that they had it covered all along.  And actually respecting the Founding Fathers means having faith that the system that they designed will work—as it generally has worked in the past—according to its design specs.

One of the most ingenuous aspects of the Constitution is that it sets up a process for adjudicating disputes about its own meaning. That system—we call it the judiciary—is fully capable of resolving all of the current disputes about what is, and what is not, Constitutional. We should register our opinions, of course, but we also owe it to the Founders to allow their system to do its work. And while it does, the rest of us should get busy arguing about what is, and what is not, a good idea. 

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)