The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ The “aristocratic interest” would then be set against the “popular interest,” so that the two would check and control each other. Morris hoped the delegates had “strength of mind eno’ . . . to look truth in the face” and acknowledge what really motivates people, rich and poor. “He did not hesitate therefore to say that loaves & fishes must bribe the Demagogues.”¹² In his brashness, Morris failed to take the measure of the delegates, and Madison was especially annoyed. On July 11, he admonished Morris for continually insisting on the “political depravity of men, and the necessity of checking one vice and interest” against another.¹³ Within a short time, however, the two had made up, and Morris persuaded Madison to support the idea of a popularly elected president in a system of checks and balances.

Filtering Virtue

      Up to this point, Madison had subscribed to a very different theory for restraining corruption. The voters, he thought, might be made to elect their betters through a process of filtration, an idea first proposed by David Hume. Madison would have read Hume’s essays as a student at Princeton and would have come across his “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth.” There, Hume proposed a highly artificial scheme of government that began with a division of Great Britain and Ireland into one hundred counties, and each of these into one hundred parishes, and then built up from there with county-town assemblies, county magistrates, and senators.¹⁴ Ordinary voters would elect local representatives, who in turn would elect a higher level of representatives, and so on up the ladder. At each rising level, the electors would presumably have better judgment than those who elected them, resulting in a superior set of representatives at the highest levels. The cream would rise to the top.

      Madison suggested this concept of filtration or refinement of representatives in “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” his essay on the defects of the Articles of Confederation. What he envisaged was “a process of elections” designed to ensure that the most senior places in government would be occupied by “the purest and noblest characters” in society.¹⁵ Such a system would “extract from the mass of the Society” those who “feel most strongly the proper motives to pursue the end of their appointment, and be most capable to devise the proper means of attaining it.” People like Washington, in short. People like Madison himself, come to think of it! And so he proposed a constitution in which the voters would directly elect the House of Representatives, which would then choose the Senate, and both bodies jointly would pick the president. At the convention he described this as a “policy of refining the popular appointments by successive filtrations.”¹⁶

      This process would be a remedy for the defects of democracy, argued Madison. Ordinary voters would have little information about candidates and wouldn’t know how to choose wisely. They could easily become pawns in the hands of a corrupt demagogue “veiling his selfish views under the professions of public good, and varnishing his sophistical arguments with the glowing colours of popular eloquence.” In addition, self-interest would blind people to the common good. Washington, himself the paragon of virtue, privately agreed that governments could not rely upon a disinterested citizenry, for as he wrote to Madison’s father, “the motives which predominate most in human affairs” are “self-love and self-interest.”¹⁷

      Many politicians since Madison have questioned whether the voters, unaided, choose well. After the 1994 Republican landslide, Rep. Barney Frank was asked what he thought of the election’s message to his fellow Democrats. “The voters,” he exploded. “They’re nothing to write home about either!” When the Framers looked at the American electorate of 1787, they also didn’t see much virtue. They saw the confederation falling apart through an “excess of democracy,” with its “turbulence and follies.”¹⁸ In George Mason’s view, “it would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper character for chief Magistrate to the people, as it would, to refer a trial of colours to a blind man.”¹⁹

      In parliamentary systems of government, the voters do not choose the chief magistrate. The voters in Britain do not elect the prime minister. Only the voters of the Maidenhead constituency have the privilege of voting for or against Theresa May. What makes her prime minister is the support of Conservative MPs in the House of Commons, and that’s a form of filtration. It might be a minimal kind of filtration, since the MPs who chose May have run for election as members of her party in modern media campaigns. But Madison wanted this type of parliamentary or congressional government for the United States. He didn’t get what he wanted at Philadelphia.

      On July 16, 1787, the delegates voted for the Connecticut Compromise, under which the state legislatures would appoint U.S. senators, and the states would have equal representation in the Senate. There would be filtration, but the states would do the filtering. As a strong nationalist, Madison hated this plan. The next morning, the dispirited nationalists from the large states of Virginia and Pennsylvania met over breakfast to consider their options. Some thought they should make the best of the situation. Others argued for a walkout, and as Madison more than anyone else wanted to draw power from the states, he was likely of this number. The Connecticut Compromise had caused “serious anxiety,” he wrote,²⁰ but the group of nationalists came to no decision. “The time was wasted in vague conversation.”²¹

      Virtually all of Madison’s ideas had been rejected. He had lost, and he knew it.²² He must have wondered whether anything could still be rescued of the convention.

      That breakfast meeting was on July 17, arguably the most important day in American history. There would be no walkout, and the convention would produce a constitution. The delegates had settled on how to choose the House of Representatives and the Senate, but they had yet to decide on the executive branch, and that would turn out to be the most important question of all. The debate over how the president would be chosen is the most fascinating story of the convention, and it began with a speech about corruption that Gouverneur Morris made that day.

Choosing a Virtuous President

      Madison doesn’t tell us who attended the July 17 breakfast meeting. Morris was likely there, as a representative of a large state and as one who spoke more than anyone else during the convention. He must have argued against a walkout, for he had a fresh card to play, and later that morning he would deliver one of the most consequential speeches in American political history. Over the following weeks it would be Morris’s convention more than anyone else’s, as he rallied his side, stick-handled the puck, and polished the language of the text. The convention would have another two months to go, and during that time Morris returned again and again to the danger of corruption.

      By the time Morris made his speech, the structure of the new government had largely been agreed upon. The states would not be abolished, as Hamilton would have wished. Instead, they would retain broad powers in their internal affairs, and would be represented on an equal basis at the heart of the federal government, in its Senate. Seats in the House of Representatives would be allocated by population, and the members elected by the people. Still to be decided was how the president would be chosen. “This subject has greatly divided the House,” said James Wilson, “and will also divide people out of doors. It is in truth the most difficult of all on which we have had to decide.”²³ It was also the most consequential, for today we have a government that is dominated by the presidency.

      Over the course of the convention, the delegates voted six times for a congressionally appointed president, once unanimously, and they also voted once for a president chosen by state legislatures. (The convention didn’t follow strict rules of procedure, so the delegates returned again and again to matters previously voted on.) We would have a president appointed by Congress today, but for the way Morris cleverly turned the delegates by appealing to their fear of corruption. He had initially wanted a congressionally appointed president, for like Madison he was suspicious of democracy. Also like Madison, he was a nationalist СКАЧАТЬ