> Yes, but don't forget the secular equivalent -- the unthinking obeisance to
> the Founding Fathers, the pious invocation of the Federalist Papers, the all-
> prevailing notion that if Madison or Jefferson said something -- anything --
> it must be right, even though they contradicted themselves on innumerable
> occsions. Religious piety in the US rests on a solid foundation of
> constitutional piety.
But this is pretty formalistic; the founders are not taken as actual guides except when its convenient for present purposes.
>
> In fact, we can take this a step farther. Two things stand out about the US
> constitutional tradition. One is that it lacks any coherent concept of
> sovereignty as the term was defined by Hobbes and Bentham -- no concept that
> someone must be ultimately in charge, no concept of a people's government as
> the source of law rather than something subordinate to it.
You mean, as subordinate to the law? This is, as the software engineers say, a feature, not a bug: the system was designed so taht the government was not, pace Hobbes, above the law, but restrined by it. What's wrong with that idea?
Instead, power is
> endlessly fragmented, and the people ar hamstrung even in their ability to
> change the Constitution created in their name.
The endless fragmwentation which you speak is also a feature: it's called checks and balances and seperation of powers. This is a structural way of constraining the government. The difficulty of amending the Constitutuion is also a feature; it's supposed to put the basic astructure above the ordinary tug and pull of politics so that, for example, the First Amendment can't be repealed easily if people feel like shuttiong someone up.
Politics is an endless merry-
> go-round involving Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, etc.
This is supposed to be bad? You'd prefer an efficient dictatorship, maybe, with everyone following the will of the Fuhrer?
The
> other thing, as Hobbes and Bentham would have predicted, is that the govt that
> results from this absurd constitutional set-up is consistently dysfunctional.
> It continually breaks down, dissolves into rancor and confusion, and ends up
> in corruption and demoralization.
But it is the oldest and most stable Constitutional structure in the world, and pretty much the model for most new Constitutions. So maybe there's something to it.
Amid all this disarray, however, the US has
> emerged as the sole remaining superpower.
A mystery, given the ridiculous and impractical Constitution.
Hence, the widespread belief that a
> dysfunctional political system is somehow the key to greatness. The fact that
> the people are not sovereign in the US system reinforces the belief that
> sovereignty inheres in God.
What? The people are no less sovereign here than ina ny other capitalist democracy, say, Britain, with no written Constitutrion and Parlaimentary supremacy. And I do think that most Americans think that the people are, or ought to be, sovereign, and not God.
As a Russian political scientist named Moisei
> Ostrogorsky once put it, "God takes care of drunkards, of little children, and
> of the United States." The fact that political failure coexists with
> political triumph is a sign of divine intervention. Only God could take
> something so absurd and make it work. Therefore, all those lilliputians in
> Washington don't matter, because something higher is clearly guiding the
> American ship of state.
Maybe a differwent explanation is that the system is not so absurb after all.
--jks