Insight

It is one of the ironies of history that a nation that has endured under the shield of democracy for more than two centuries gained its direction in secret from an oligarchy of elite white men.

They were educated, sophisticated. Their letters and commentaries proclaimed that they subscribed to the ideals wrought from the Age of Enlightenment, when medieval suspicion and superstition were tossed aside by logic and reason.

They spoke the language of classical philosophers. Well into the night, they debated the role of religion, a supreme being and whether a greater good could come of the human experience.

So, when the Founding Fathers decided the Articles of Confederation — the first codified government of the newly liberated United States — didn’t work, they took it upon themselves to shut the door on public opinion and hammer out what many political scientists call The Great Experiment.

We call it the U.S. Constitution.

Created 220 years ago from the melding of many minds, and many days of compromise, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights provide the blueprint for the Founding Fathers’ vision of the new country. It’s what many politicians refer to when they promote the idea of incubating democracies in the Middle East or other developing countries that, for generations, have been ruled by dictators or torn by civil war.

It’s also an experiment that would likely fail in today’s world, be it on North America or any other continent.

“It wouldn’t work here,” observes Glen Browder, a former congressman from Jacksonville and a professor of American democracy at Jacksonville State University and the Naval Postgraduate College. “We’ve developed too far as a political system.

“It’s a lot easier to design democracy when you have a clean slate. Once a system is in place, it’s almost impossible to rework it.”

As the country celebrates its birthday, the concept of freedom — and the origins of American democracy — takes center stage this week. In a polarized nation, how does democracy endure and can that concept be transplanted to another place when it was created in another age?

Birth of a nation

Contrary to the conventional beliefs surrounding the Fourth of July, the United States was not a nation that spontaneously rose from a disgruntled people. The French did that in 1789 – two years after the Founding Fathers gathered for their Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, That new French republican government went through many incarnations and bloodbaths as it found its footing.

The United States’ founders bypassed the court of public opinion.

In that Philadelphia meeting, the 55 men drawn from the ranks of the country’s upper echelon shut the door. They began hammering out a document that was far from perfect. They compromised on issues that, had the meetings been public, likely would have had them pilloried: slavery, church-state separation and federal finance.

For instance, Browder says, they first determined if there was enough in common throughout the former colonies to determine if it made a nation or just another arrangement of England. They set up a structure that, by its representative and elected nature, would ensure that elites and those able to gain attention would be the consistent ruling class.

“They asked do we have more in common than we have differences?” Browder says of those early fomenting discussions. “That wasn’t true, but they declared it, created this document and said let’s see if we can hang in there long enough to actually become a nation.”

They had the advantage that the rest of the country affected by the Revolutionary War was too busy earning a living, clearing land and following its own self-interest to pay attention to the goings-on in Philadelphia. The Founding Fathers created their document and said that if nine of the 13 states ratified it, it would be the law of the land.

In the end, 1,071 men in the 13 states voted to ratify the Constitution, with 577 rejecting it.

There were about 2.7 million residents in the United States at the time. Less than 1,700 determined their national power structure.

“I don’t know whether it would be ratified today,” says Paul Abramson, a professor of American politics at Michigan State University. “It was a close call when it was ratified the first time around.

“Thankfully, we don’t have to ratify it again.”

Today, the glare of CSPAN and media coverage would smother healthy debate. Special-interest groups — powerless if not nonexistent in the 18th century — would dissect the Bill of Rights like a high school science class. And even a tepid U.S. voter turnout by today’s standards would be far beyond the .06 percent that ratified the Constitution.

The sheer activity of modern democracy in action would rip a Constitutional Convention apart.

“I think the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, on a referendum today, would get defeated,” Browder says of the current climate in the United States.

As far as exporting that democratic ideal to Iraq, he, Abramson and other political scientists counter that it would have been a difficult proposition, even under ideal circumstances.

“But,” Browder says, “just because something is very, very difficult doesn’t mean we don’t try.”

Law, American style

Iraq does not have a clean slate that its constitutional framers could use to craft a nation, democratic or otherwise. It was cobbled together from three provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire, and those three factions have been warring since the 1920s.

Other countries that have birthed democracy — or had the seeds sown for it — started with populations that were largely homogenous, Abramson observes. That’s true for the post-colonial United States as well as the war-torn nations rehabilitated by the Marshall Plan after World War II.

“Japan and Germany — especially Japan — had among the most ethnic homogenous populations in the world,” Abramson says of the Marshall Plan’s success at transplanting a spirit of democratic reform. “The notion that democracy could be exported and sustained in Iraq was pretty far-fetched.”

For instance, the Founding Fathers — and post-war Europe — could draw from the ideas of the Enlightenment and the premise of a social contract. The men who crafted the Constitution could cut and paste from governments that had worked. What they didn’t like, they left out, using the theories of preceding philosophers as their guiding stars.

“I doubt the average Iraqi has read Locke and Rousseau,” Abramson says, alluding to John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, two leading political philosophers of the Enlightenment Age of the 18th century.

There probably isn’t the spirit of compromise today that existed in the era of the Founding Fathers, Browder and Abramson say. That’s true here and abroad.

For instance, the U.S. Constitution’s framers deliberately kept it short. Today’s political grandstanding and agendas would nullify that prospect. It was written with a great deal of flexibility built in. Today’s political climate smothers flexibility.

“There were all sorts of clever compromises built into the Constitution,” Abramson says. “One is that the presidency appeared to be elected by a group of elites. Eventually, that gets transformed into the practice of a popular-vote election. The whole system really gets transformed over the course of 200 years.”

It’s also good to remember that Americans had considerable experience with representative institutions, even before the break with Britain.

“We have all sorts of anticipations to what freedom was,” Abramson says. “The Declaration of Independence almost makes no sense unless it was directed to other Englishmen, who understood what these rights were supposed to be.”

A lesson close to home

To illustrate how difficult it is to bring order to a war-torn land, historians might point to the South after the Civil War, Browder says. The South’s wounds were a combination of external destruction undercut by shards of class and racial division.

“You’re talking about unseating a very resistant culture,” Browder says of defeated Confederate states and their dominant white populations. “Reconstruction failed, utterly, at building a fair, equal society.

“And these were Americans who, largely, shared the same culture and had a similar background of being Americans.”

The difficulty in reconstructing the old Confederacy — which had insurgents after some 12 years of Federal troop occupation and was violent and deadly to minority populations for a full century afterward — should have given President Bush a clue as to how hard it will be to export American-style democracy today.

“I think the Founders, the men of that age, would have looked at Iraq and told him, ‘Mr. President, be very careful. This is a long, long-term process that will take tremendous time and resources. And you may not be pleased with the result.’”