Lorne Gunter reflects on American Independence Day
It takes the mob to put liberty to paper.
Lorne Gunter - July 4, 2008
In his superb 1985 volume on the intellectual origins of the U.S. Constitution, Novus Ordo Seclorum (Latin for “a new order for the ages”–it’s written under the pyramid on the U.S. dollar bill), historian Forrest McDonald explains that one of the problems the American Founding Fathers encountered was that few of the people supporting their cause were well-educated or worldly. Their commitments to liberty and small government were instinctual more than intellectual.
“Most Americans who had had political experience beyond the local level... had become Loyalists,” McDonald recounts. Those devoted to the Revolution, then, were largely inexperienced in drafting statutes beyond bylaws or municipal ordinances. Moreover, they believed liberty needed no defining. It’s meaning was obvious to everyone and once George III was vanquished its future would be ensured. So it was difficult to convince them to commit protections for liberty to paper. The mere attempt to define liberty made them suspicious that the drafters had hidden motives.
Fortunately, though, the Madisons, Jeffersons, Masons, Hamiltons, Adams and other great minds of the Revolution were able to convince their ordinary co-revolutionists to write and ratify first the U.S. Constitution and later the Bill of Rights.
In his 1929 book on Canada-U.S. relations, Canadian historian Hugh Keenleyside looked through the same telescope from the other end. Keenleyside postulated that the origin of Canadian antipathy towards Americans (especially our elite’s condescension toward their populism) stems from the fact that many of the United Empire Loyalists forced north in the latter days of the Revolution had had to abandon substantial property and social standing.
“Privations such as they had never known were now their daily lot,” according to Keenleyside. Long, cold winters spent in log cabins and even tents made them bitterly resentful, a trait they passed on to their descendants through their political genes.
The Loyalists’ snobbish mistrust of the masses led 80 years later to our Fathers of Confederation eschewing formal protections for individuals against the rapaciousness of the state in our own constitution. Government and liberty were compacts among English gentlemen who needed no reminder from the rabble on the limits of either.
While judicial activism has moved both countries towards a European view of liberties–that rights exist only at the pleasure of the state–the Americans hurtle towards that abyss less quickly because their constitution is more formally suspicious of big government.
If it takes low-brow, insular yokels to produce such a liberty-friendly document, I say “bring on the mob.”
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