The 1816 letter written by Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval can be claimed to validate to just about any political ideology. From his laments about abuses of power that would be positively received by conservatives and libertarians, to the need to actually change with the times that liberals and progressives can find agreement with, it is nothing short of a remarkable document. However, there's one passage that leaped out at me:
"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times."
His warning was illustrated as later in that paragraph he noted the turmoil going on in Europe at the time, where he described monarchs that were too interested in maintaining the status quo instead of listening to the people. He also warned in the few preceding passages how institutions, such as the United States, can fall victim to the "abuses of man".
In my previous post about shadow government, I alluded to the fact that systems are basically established and then exploited for gain. Basically, for every one system that is established there is going to be one person seeking to do whatever they can to get whatever ends they want to get out of it. The United States Constitution is no different. The Constitution established a system, albeit with unintentionally dubious interpretation, that was designed to give Congress more power and consequently the central government. Anyone that truly believed then, and even now, that the Constitution wouldn't be exploited is extremely shortsighted and filled with too much romantic vision that pushes themselves to delve deeper into the apparent sanctimony of the American civil religion. Robert Bellah was not crazy to coin such a thing -- there is a distinct nearly religious quality to the American historical experience, that (and this is my own conclusion here), leads to unreasonable, yet understandable, expectations. Sanctimonious mountains aren't being climbed; we're only dealing with hills.
The first big government advocate was none other than Alexander Hamilton, who actually came up with the implied powers of the Constitution. In truth, Hamilton, as opposed to Jefferson and James Madison, got it: if one sees the opportunity to take a rule as far as it can go, then they'll take it. Humans are opportunistic creatures, that's just nature. To insure the rest of humanity against our own natural habit has been a riddle since Urukagina, Ur-Nammu, and Hammurabi. The United States Constitution is just another document in the series of legal documents that attempted to address that riddle; however, the United States Constitution is a document for human beings, produced by human beings, to illustrate how human beings are to cooperate and coexist with other human beings.
As the world became smaller, the riddle became a race. As new social issues arose during the Enlightenment and later the Industrial Revolution, this riddle took on a new shape. Concepts of human rights, social liberalism, classical liberalism, and populism emerged. The social order changed as those that were accustomed to control had to answer to those that they believed to be in control of. The aspirations of positive liberty (the egalitarian state as the vindication of cooperation) and the demands of negative liberty (the individualist state as a rejection of forced cooperation) clashed. The evolution of the riddle continues to today: conspiracy theories, populist movements, Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, the government address of gay rights, governmental intervention in the economy, the Arab Spring, and so on. As the riddle evolved, so did the stakes, the awareness, and the constant willingness to exploit.
Insurance against exploitation is a curious goal, being that it takes further exploitation to counter exploitation. Exploit changing social attitudes to ensure more (or less) rights; exploit sputtering systems to advocate for more personal and economic freedom; exploit tragedies to create more restrictions. A lot of my friends often post things that note how the Constitution is being disregarded, ignored, shit on, and etc., posts stories and memes and whatnot, and in a way its hard to argue against their position for that the Constitution is still a system. A system is a system and a system will be exploited for gain, no matter what it is. The root of it is the aforementioned riddle; the reason its a race now is because, as Jefferson noted, as "new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances", the desire for triumph -- any triumph really -- becomes fervent. If the big evil corporation wants to bank roll candidates as a mean to secure the end, its an exploitation of the system; if feverish supporters of a certain candidate will want to challenge and stretch bylaws and conventions in desire for a preferred outcome, then it's an exploitation of the system.
The bottom line really is that it's impossible to insure against exploitation. Altruism is merely a hedge against exploitation, and to bank on it is silly. This post is not necessarily advocating for anything; its just an observation, for that I know pretty damn well that the pursuit for the optimal, functional system will continue, that the game will be continued to be played, and the riddle will modify and evolve exponentially.
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