Portal:Liberty and Constitution
Liberty and Constitution
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America became a federal republic in 1789 when the Constitution was ratified.  If you grew up in America, you were likely taught that America is a 'democracy'. 'Majority rule' was the referee we turned to on the playground and much of daily life, but we knew instinctively that 'majority rule' had it's limitations, that the majority could not require us to submit to something unfair - though 'rule of law' would have been a foreign and abstract concept to us. America is democratic - a good thing. Government needs the input of the people and to the extent that it turns away from that it becomes autocratic. But whether or not we are or should be first and foremost a democracy bears discussion. CW prefers to think of the US as a constitutional republic that enjoys a high degree of political and economic freedom. After growing up revering democracy, a rather startling realization is that a society can have liberty without a formal democratic process. In England it was 200 years after Magna Carta that an electoral system was introduced at the national level, and then it was a very limited franchise of well propertied males. It was another 500 years before the enfranchisement of males over 21 and the partial enfranchisement of women over 30. But the slow development of formal democratic input did not impede the recognition of fundamental rights and the development of personal liberty. Those were established, were continually enlarged and became Constitutional fabric with little or no input from democracy. England produced Magna Carta and its several revisions as well as the 1628 Petition of Right and the 1689 Bill of Rights with no real input from 'the people' in the form of an electorate. The democratic process was better established in America than in England in 1689 (citation needed). In 1215, the year of Magna Carta, there was no sense of 'the people' or a voting process. Magna Carta established rule of law and democracy was nowhere in sight. Such developments have done more to establish personal liberty than elections. Rule of law can exist without democracy. Democracy without rule of law becomes tyranny. We clearly see, as this is being written in November 2014, that a majority established by democratic election can suddenly change. The current minority is never more than a few percent of the vote away from becoming the majority. When that happens, can fundamental rights of the new minority (the former majority) be taken from them by the new majority? If the answer is yes, then rule of law is absent and what is left is tyranny of the majority. This points to the necessity of a constitution of liberty for liberty to exist. It puts the emphasis on rule of law. The founders of the US recognized that democracy played an important role and they were careful to spell it out and distribute it in a way that prevented it from becoming tyranny. The US is a constitutional, federal republic governed by officials that are democratically elected. America was not the first constitutional republic, but it was quite new in important ways. Like England it emphasized rule of law. To this it added sovereignty of its member states with and a very careful separation of federal powers between the several branches of government. At the time of the founding, federal powers were limited to those ceded by the member states. The Americans of the time drew on examples that came before and on a variety of liberal thought that had existed in Europe (going back to Aristotle) and in America. It drew heavily on the English examples of constitutional monarchy, the English Constitution, and Common Law and added the lessons of the colonial American experience. America was in a unique position - having an unusual collection of very agile intellects (Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jay, Madison, Otis, Paine, Washington and others), a history of previous examples to inform them, the recent history of events in America and England, and a blank (well, almost blank) page to write on. Perfection can't be achieved in such a complex endeavor involving so many interests, but it was the most perfect such union ever created - by whatever measure you wish to pick. Articles for this categoryIn the articles assigned to portal the CW contributors will discuss the roles of democracy, constitution, and rule of law in ensuring liberty. They will discuss America's democratic republic and why it was set up as it is.
There is some overlap between this and other categories, such as American Independence.
What makes the subjects of this category worth writing about is that America has been so successful for so long - due in large part to the work of those who wrote and ratified our Constitution. In today's environment of deep political divisions, it may help to remind ourselves of our beginnings and the problems and issues that our founders struggled with. They were not entirely different than the problems and issues we deal with today.
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