Title: The American Constitution among other national charters
Original CoS Document (slug): among-other-constitutions
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Created: 2019-09-01 19:35:48
Updated: 2020-08-12 17:43:34
Published: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Converted: 2025-04-14T21:04:19.838448511
America’s Constitution remains the oldest enduring governmental charter, because its authors were as apprehensive of government as of human avarice in general.
It provides rules for political contention but guarantees no outcome. This is typical of constitutional governments.
But America’s Constitution was written for a people that had gestated in a frontier colony without a hereditary king, aristocracy, or castes that prevailed over the rest of the world from earliest memory.
Even more exceptional, they all read the Bible and didn’t rely upon ecclesiastical intermediaries required by less literate Europeans of the day. This may not appear exceptional, until taking the rest of the world into consideration.
The French Jacobins sought nothing less than a “New Man,“ principally by liquidating the old one. Rebellion against Louis XVI was also considered a rebellion against God and the prelates of the state religion that had crowned him.
The guillotine and “Infernal Columns” liberated tens of thousands who remained enslaved to such superstition. Napoleon brought order to the madness in 1799. But in the face of Allied Reaction, he turned “Liberte! Equalite! Fraternite!” against Europe.
Easily mistaken for American ideals, this was actually the slogan of an enlightened despot offering French hierarchical efficiency, not American civil liberties.
The French Revolution failed along with Napoleon in 1815. This set Europe on an even more dissimilar course from that of his contemporary, George Washington.
The Congress of Vienna settled on the Charter of 1814 as the single concession to a lasting, workable peace by the most completely reactionary reversal in history. Parliament ratified laws and budgets, as in the American system, but only the King could write legislation and remained central in general.
Protestants and Catholics put aside quarrels, as did Ottoman Muslim clerics. “Obey the state” became the creed of Occident and Orient, lest another “Usurper of the Peace” usurp the peace. Peace, however, lasted little more than a decade.
Barricades went up across Europe. Serbia and Greece revolted against the Ottomans, who liquidated their aristocrats the Janissaries. Pious Charles X abdicated for Liberal Louis Philippe, the “Bourgeoisie King” of France.
Catholicism lost its official status, and the king lost his power to instigate legislation. Mercantile empire and the Ancient Regime retreated before bourgeoisie laissez faire nationalism.
Peasants and workers who had manned the barricades gained little, however. By the time liberal reformers attempted even more reforms, Karl Marx had organized his “proletariat.” This drove the bourgeoisie into the arms of reaction which turned field artillery against the barricades of 1848. Class warfare was a reality.
Emperor Louis Napoleon III dominated Europe from mid-century until 1870. Nephew of the Great Bonaparte, Napoleon III introduced universal male suffrage but circumvented his representative body. New banks like the Credit Mobilier subsidized commercial adventures Napoleon III favored.
It all came crashing down in the War of 1871 when the Germans captured Louis Napoleon. The Paris “Red” Commune revealed even deeper proletariat antagonisms until the Third Republic established itself by liquidating the Communards and inheriting the onerous duty of surrendering to the Germans.
Italian and German nationalists unified their nations in 1870-1871 under charters similar to that of 1814, essentially leading succession movements from the Hapsburg Empire while the American Confederacy lost its bid for independence. Significantly, Czar Alexander II emancipated his serfs in 1861 and provided government loans which set them up with family plots.
In 1918 it was the turn of Germany’s Weimar Republic to surrender to the French after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated, and another red revolution broke out, this time in Germany.
Weimar’s Constitution could rule only with a majority in the Reichstag, which was difficult with a multi-party system and impossible in the turmoil that ensued. The plebiscite, managed economy and Enabling Act made a repetition of Napoleon III difficult to escape.
The French Third Republic also required more consensus than it could ever achieve, torn between ultra-reactionary, communist, and liberal factions. It careened through the interminable Dreyfuss Affair, the First World War, Army Mutinies, and into the Pyrrhic victory of Versailles, until the Germans finally put it out of its misery in 1940.
Survival required strong nationalists to front weak, constitutional governments no longer able to resist Lenin’s Jacobin revolution in Russia. But they were all essentially Napoleons, including Enver Pasha, the Turkish Napoleon of the East who led the Ottomans in the First World War along with ritual Jacobin sacrifice: the Armenians.
By now, the point might be clear. Liberals like to write constitutions, and America’s Founders were no different. It's exceptional that the constitution they wrote for their people not only worked but has defined Americans ever since.
It codified exactly the liberties America’s early European colonists sought and what prevented they sought to escape. It prevails today, despite all the gerrymandering and the world wars.
For no other people has a Constitution formed so central an element of its character and its history. But where individual liberty is esteemed, community appears exotic, enticing, or suspicious.
Americans attribute far greater cohesion to our enemies than they ever enjoyed. Not even Bernie Sanders can resist conspiracy theories and would be just as unhappy under a European Communal regime as any other American, if only he knew it.
An unfortunate consequence of American civil liberties is that we can talk ourselves into the worst of times, even during the best of times.
“Imagination rules the world,” said the Great Napoleon, “Stupidity is no handicap in politics.”