I think the reflective nature of this draft was precisely the right step. You've seen why "proving" a constitutional proposition on an originalist premise, whether tendentiously or not, isn't much of a contribution to the political conversation with your father. This led you to a deeper conclusion, partly emotional and partly intellectual, wholly correct, that political conversation with your father deprives you of connection rather than contributing to it. Both of these are valuable steps, in differently important directions.

I don't know whether you care to continue on this line. If so, I think the next draft would deal not with the substance of your political differences, and not even with the underlying similarities in commitment to what you call "principle" in daily life (what on the basis of your examples I think Veblen would have called "instinct of workmanship). It is rather the different roles that thinking about politics plays in your two lives that would be the additional subject.

Your father has accepted an invitation offered by forms of mass media that grew up after the demise of the Fairness Doctrine: he has made politics the domain of team confrontation. He brings to the interpretation of politics around him the same unmeasured emotional investment, the same external projection of visceral motivations, that twentieth-century American men largely invested in spectator sports. This is not a characterization he would accept: he is, after all, The Thinking Man. That he is manipulated, in his role of Republican-rooting Thinking Man, into supporting governments and policies that are not only bad for him but bad for you, is what he must not allow himself to see. This is achieved via the process Arnold described. Creed, which defines the boundary between inside and outside social organizations, is redefined to put "outside" anyone who would challenge the thinking man's "conclusions." The "libs" become not merely people with different ideas, but people trying to destroy what can only be kept safe by not thinking too hard.

Your emotional structure for thinking about politics is different. I leave you to characterize it for yourself, if you're so inclined.

995 words.

You think? It's always a tough sell to law students, who are ego-invested in the strength of "LAW" now that they have paid all the tuition. But I can't remember a bunch more troubled by the reality than this one.

Structurally, that defines all other forms of social control as more effective. Of these, religion was one of the most effective and widely used for thousands of years; its effectiveness was found in utilization of the threat and promise of theological salvation by a higher spiritual authority, enforced by a temporal earthly authority, and backed up by the social approbation or approval of our social peer group, who long-ago, were generally clustered geographically with others of the same faith.

Religion is a stronger form of social control, indeed, than law. But there are many forms of social control, and religion too is a form of control operating at the symbolic layer, where human beings have located more and more of their social activity over the last several thousand years. But human sociality is much older than homo sapiens, let alone older than writing or the form of religion you are depicting. And it cohered then and coheres now for reasons deeper than religion and more powerful still.

And, especially before the American Revolution, governments embodied the principle cujus region, ejus religio (“whose realm, his religion”); essentially, tying governmental law to the stronger social control of religious authority enhanced overall social control.

Who told you that 18th century British North America was like 16th-century Europe after the Peace of Augsburg? It's nonsense. I'm surprised you didn't make any effort to check. Now the rest of what you build on this substrate will necessarily be untrue.

Is this the conclusion you formed by reading Madison's Notes, or Yates, or someone's description of the Convention? One could rearrange the speeches under these heads, to be sure, and create a checklist of "things considered" that would have these categories boxed. But I don't think it would put forward a historically-sensitive account of the Convention. For this, and the nature of the religious structure and politics of post-Revolutionary America as they affected the making of the Constitution, the best single-volume introduction would be Richard Morris's Forging of the Union.

This is not factually inaccurate. But it's interpretively wrong-headed. The "Framers" didn't reject theocracy, anymore than they rejected Buddhism or antigravity. They never for an instant considered it. There wasn't a debate about the question. They were making a government that they did not for an instant conceive would have any religious policy, or any effect on the religious policies of the States. They made clear there would be no religious tests for office under the Federal Government, and they made sure that no oath of office for the Presidency would be drawn that would exclude a Quaker from being President (a step necessary to prevent the failure of ratification in Pennsylvania). With the exception of the members of the House, all federal officeholders were mediated by the state legislatures, which appointed the Senate and controlled the Electoral College. Of the House elections, the rules of election and control of the franchise rested with the state legislatures. Religious issues in state politics would no doubt affect state legislative elections: they regularly did so in some States, and occasionally did so in others. But the parties who wrote the 1787 Constitution in Philadelphia spent no significant time talking about religion in politics, and I can't think of a single moment in debate that could be characterized as about "rejecting theocracy," let alone arguing about whether to reject "theocracy."

I don't know what to do with the problem of historical inaccuracy here. I don't know what's left of the draft's main idea if its reconstruction of American constitutional history is (as it must be) reconsidered.

I'm not sure that's fair summary of the proposition. Do you need to this point at all?

But the Framers had to come up with a system that a geographically and theologically diverse group of people would all submit to.

Once again, this is a very strange formulation. In the first instance, the Philadelphia Convention was commissioned to do no more than report to Congress. The decision to break with their charter, and to present a plan of federation directly to state ratifying conventions was extra-legal. But even in doing so, I don't think it would in any way convey the nature of the sources to say that ratification was presented as "submission" to a new government. Your reading of the _Federalist Papers_ varies substantially from that usually given if you find their language advocates or even describes submitting the citizens of the States to the Federal Government in any way at all. I don't see how one could spend any time with the records of the state ratifying conventions or the memorials submitted to them that would suggest that the most ardent Federalists thought they were submitting State citizens to a new national government. I don't know what the content of Jeffersonianism is in your reconstruction, any more than I understand your Federalism.

Holmes, in “The Path of the Law,” recognized that “the bad man” will not be guided by morals, only by what the law actually does.

He's not a sociological description; he's a pedagogical device. What's he doing here?

So the Framers articulated principles, and eventually (by popular demand) a Bill of Rights, premised not on religious morality but on the idea that we (now everyone and not just white males) are endowed with certain rights that cannot be nullified or abrogated by the rights or actions of others.

Now you're having them invent the constitutional development of England from 1215 to the Glorious Revolution.

Performing a contemporary functionalist investigation of whether humans are actually equally endowed with certain inalienable rights generally reveals instead that society best functions when we all enjoy rough parameters of equality. So now we could justify the endowment (or recognition) of these rights by utilitarianism.

I don't know how you established that proposition. All I could see was an assertion. If you need to make this point, you need to show something in its support.

The Framers would have had no access to data that would reveal such justifications; they relied instead on their educations and common sense. In other words, they relied on a bit of transcendental nonsense to convince each citizen that certain rights were naturally inherent in each of them as well as in each of their countrymen, and if they wanted their own rights to be protected, they had to ensure everyone else’s were too.

This attributes to the makers of the Federal Constitution the creation of the long-developing 18th century British North American view of natural and political rights. Here one would want to consult, for an accurate view, Garry Wills' wonderful book on the intellectual background of the Declaration of Independence, Inventing America, and the first volume of John Phillip Reid's Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority of Rights.

As I say, you can't save the conclusion once it rests on so much historical inaccuracy.

The editorial mystery for me is why you didn't see the requirement to consult sources on the historical claims you were making.

Why Is American Government Based on the Weakest Form of Social Control?

-- By KatySkaggs - 16 Feb 2012

Law is the Weakest Form of Social Control

Functionalism Guided the Exclusion of Religion from the New Government of the United States

Why Did the Framers Turn to Functionalism?

What the Framers Rejected

How to Gain Legitimacy Without Theocratic Authority

Why We Need to Keep Some of the Framer's Nonsense

(978 words, not including headings)

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