Sheldon Richman - America’s Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited

Americas Counter-Revolution

AMERICAS COUNTER-REVOLUTION

The Constitution Revisited
Sheldon Richman
Griffin & Lash

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Copyright Sheldon Richman2016

Published by
Griffin & Lash
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Americas Counter-Revolution is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike3.0United States License.

The cover image is taken from Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States (1940), by Howard Chandler Christy. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that persons official duties under the terms of Title17, Chapter1, Section 105of the U.S. Code.

The photograph of the author is Sheldon Richman (2015), by Cheryl Richman. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike3.0United States license.

This book was printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

This is the second, corrected, printing of this book. ISBN978-0692687918

Sheldon Richman.
Americas Counter-Revolution:The Constitution Revisited 1. Constitutional historyUnited States2. Constitutional law United States3.Anarchism I.Title

To the constitutionalists of all parties

A nation which makes greatness its polestar can never be free; beneath national greatness sink individual greatness, honor, wealth and freedom. But though history, experience and reasoning confirm these ideas; yet allpowerful delusion has been able to make the people of every nation lend a helping hand in putting on their own fetters and rivetting their own chains, and in this service delusion always employs men too great to speak the truth, and yet too powerful to be doubted.Their statements are believedtheir projects adoptedtheir ends answered and the deluded subjects of all this artifice are left to passive obedience through life, and to entail a condition of unqualified non-resistance to a ruined posterity.

Abraham Bishop (1800)

Contents

Foreword

This much I can assure the reader: after reading this book, you will never think about the U.S. Constitution and Americas founding the same way again. Sheldon Richmans revealing and remarkably wellargued narrative will permanently change your outlook.
Richman, one of this countrys most treasured thinkers and writers,digs through a period of American history that manages to be almost invisible to most people. He brings the whole period to life in ways that upset core tenets of the American civic religion.

If you ask the average American to summarize the founding in a few minutes, you will hear a story about a bad foreign king, a tea party, a defiant declaration, a war, and then the immaculate conception of the glorious U.S. Constitution that has guarded our liberty ever since.The entire period called the founding is smashed together into one short span, from conception to birth to the greatest document in the history of humankind.At best, the short period between the war and the Constitution is dismissed as merely transitional.

As it turns out, theres a missing 12years in this conventional account: the time between when the Articles of Confederation were sent to the states for ratification and its replacement in 1789 by the new Constitution. What were the Articles? Why were they replaced? Who replaced them? Was there a debate, and did opponents make valuable points? These are the questions that Richman addresses here. In doing so, he draws on the most contemporary and important scholarly research, while putting the evidence in prose that is accessible and compelling.

His argument at first appears shocking.The small elite who won the day didnt actually share the values and ideals that drove the war for independence from Britain.These founders plotted and schemed to impose a new government that dramatically enhanced and centralized

ix x Americas Counter-Revolution government power.Their stroke of genius in pulling off this coup detat was selling the Constitution as a means of guaranteeing freedom and limiting government. In fact, it was the opposite: the imposition of a new statist yoke to replace the one just cast off; the complete reversal of a hard-won freedom.

Provocative, isnt it?Yet its all true.Also striking is Richmans thorough documentation of the arguments of the Constitutions opponents, the Anti-Federalists. (These terms can become very confusing.The socalled Federalists were actually the centralists, while the anti-federalists were dedicated to the decentralist ideals of the federalist tradition.) As it turns out, the Anti-Federalists warned about the provisions of the Constitution that they believed would eventually erode rights and liberties.They went further to explain that the structure of the Constitution itself was designed to achieve this very result, benefitting a ruling class at the expense of the people.

While todays conservatives are routinely shocked at how government violates the Constitution, Richman has a different take: the intrusive and parasitical government we have today was baked into the original design, which is precisely why Richman argues that the AntiFederalists were right all along. As for the protection of rights and liberties that comes from the most famous section of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, it wasnt even part of the original draft sent to the states for ratification.

To reduce the argument here to its essence: the Constitution, far from limiting government, was actually designed to bring about a new one that betrayed the ideals of the Declaration of Independence itself. The ratification of the Constitution was a counter-revolution.There is areason it has done a poor job in protecting freedom: it was never intended to do so.

Finishing his detailed and exciting argument, Richman turns to the alternative. Must we reject constitutions completely? Not at all.We just need to dispense with the myth that a state can be restrained by a document. What actually restrains power in society is freedom itself, and that includes freedom over the choice of rules we adopt in regulating our lives. Under freedom, these rules are emergent and evolutionary, subject to a market test of trial and error and unending exploration of better ways of living and getting along.

The careful reader will detect in Richmans conclusion the emergence of a highly sophisticated and distinctly 21st century form of libertarianism. For him liberty is not an alternative set of central plans, pre-packaged laws, and visions of justice and truth that are imposed from above by wise intellectuals who know whats what. Richmans libertarian anarchism defers to the wisdom of social processes themselves.

In all my years of thinking about these topics, Ive wondered if there was a way forward that could blend the best of the insights of Albert Jay Nock, F.A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and contemporary polycentric legal theorists. Must we follow some one thinker to the end or can we extract their best insights to improve our conception of what freedom looks like? In so many ways Richman has provided that answer. He has done it, and its a breath of fresh air.

On a personal note, Richman has been a mentor to me since I first started really thinking, and I know this because he is the person who taught me how. For longer than a year I was privileged to spend time with him talking about ideas. In this period he taught me to avoid dismissive slogans and preset dogmas. He taught me how to be at once open to new ideas and committed to permanent principles.Time and again I saw him as a model of how to think through issues carefully, drawing on logic, experience, and evidence. As the years have gone by Ive seen how he has maintained this intellectual discipline, never becoming lazy about his thinking but rather finding delight in the process of coming to ever greater understanding. He never ceases to challenge us to new heights of intellectual integrity and rigor.