Appealing to Our Better Nature

Guest Opinion

By Stewart MacLeod | Jan. 29, 2022

With the lack of movement in Congress regarding what our country needs today, there is much we can learn from those 56 men who gathered in that hot summer in Philadelphia, 1787, to draft our Constitution. 

We should take lessons from their bold attempt to conceive and form a new government. More importantly, we should learn that “compromise” and “change” are not dirty words, as they seem to be considered today, and that we are, in fact, a government of the people.

These lessons stand out to me because they show our founders’ ability to compromise, their ability to anticipate and allow for change, and the fact that they specified “We the people … ” first and not “We the wealthy and propertied people ... ” All three seem to be lacking in today’s political culture. 

The men who gathered in 1787 came to Philadelphia with divergent ideas on what our new nation should look like and how it should be governed. But instead of the “my-way-or-the-highway” style of today’s politics and meetings, they were able to reach something they could all sign on to; they were willing to compromise.

Not getting all you want, but rather, getting something you can live with — for the good of our country — is not so bad. In today’s partisan politics and culture, we have lost sight of doing things for the good of our country and its people as a whole. 

Just because something is the way it has been done does not mean it has to be done that way forever.  Our founders did this in Philadelphia by scrapping the Articles of Confederation and coming up with a novel idea for a new nation: the Constitution. 

Not only did they make a big change, but they did it all in 89 days. Current elected officials need to emulate this efficiency.

By allowing for amendments to our Constitution, the Founding Fathers also recognized that what they created might need to be changed — and it has. 

Right off the block, they added the Bill of Rights, our first 10 amendments. Through the years we have continued to amend the Constitution to make our rules of government more egalitarian. 

Black men and women have been emancipated and legally made equal citizens with the right to vote. Senators are now elected by popular vote rather than by state legislatures. And women were, albeit belatedly, given the right to vote.  Though such things are now enshrined in our Constitution, we as morally upstanding citizens have to enshrine them in our hearts. From all I see happening today, this is not happening. 

 

There was much debate in 1787 about what religious and/or wealth/property rules applied for those allowed to vote or hold office. What the founders ultimately designed was the world’s most egalitarian system of its day, and we should strive to keep it so. 

Starting out the Constitution with “We the People … do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America,” our founders meant we should all have a stake in how things are run. 

Also, “We the People … ” means it is the government of every U.S. citizen — not just some partisan clique. We should hold our elected officials to account because we elected them for our own and the country’s good.

 

This said, today’s “originalists” are straying far from the mark of what our Founding Fathers intended for our country.  No official note of record was taken at the Constitutional Convention, though many of the 56 attendees took their own notes. Also, we have the final document itself and The Federalist Papers.  

These were interpretations by three of Founding Fathers — Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison — of what the Constitution meant and why it needed to be ratified by all 13 states. So what, of all this material, do originalists use as a basis for their position? 

Originalism’s very weakness is its stance against compromise and change, both of which are the very heart of our Founding Fathers’ intention for the nation they established with the Constitution. 

If our Founding Fathers could work things out during such difficult times, why can’t we do so today? Sadly, we appear to have lost the ability to pull together for a better tomorrow. As Benjamin Franklin put it at the time of our founding, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”  We might not get everything we want, but by coming to a compromise, we should be able to move forward to a better future. 

I challenge everyone to read our country’s Constitution — not only to understand the letter of legal arguments about governance but also to absorb the spirit and vision of our founders. They took a leap of faith, trusting that what they were doing would create a nation that “…should not perish from the earth.”  All U.S. citizens should learn from what the founders set out to do and respect it by working together to build a better tomorrow.

Stewart MacLeod earned a BA in History at Albion College and an MA in Ottoman History at the University of Michigan. He spent 30+ years as a Turkey area analyst for the U.S. government. Now in retirement in Traverse City, he is indulging his interest in U.S. history, bettering his understanding of where we came from, where we are, and where we might be headed.