Ganesh Sitaraman

There are no surprises here: wealth influences politics. In the US, most elected officials to national office spend more time raising money for their next election than they spend in the committee rooms of government. It's safe to say the donors will have a say in just about everything. As will the corporate lobbiests, the Goldman Sachs financiers appointed to Cabinet positions, and (although Sitaraman does not mention it) professors at elite institutions.

In this miasma of corruption, Professor Sitaraman conjures up an innocent time when American public servants devised a constitution intended to foster a polity based on a fair distribution of wealth and income in the economy. He cites proof that the framers of the Constituion were influenced by traditions of political thought grounded in economic fairness, that they avoided models of class warfare and instead found a balance of competing influences in the polity.

The assumption here is that a reasonably strong middle class will govern fairly and effectively.

That's a pretty big assumption. What if you think it's the middle -- or the middling -- classes which got America into the fix it's in now? Stalemate on Capital Hill. A White House occupied by a lunatic. A judiciary controlled by people who want to purify the law according to the original intentions of the framers of the Constitution, whatever those were.

I honestly don't believe that the Constitution was grounded in an economic model of fairness at all. It came about in an era of political crisis and was intended to improve upon the political articles of Confederation which themselves were direly incomplete.

Moreover, it was drawn up in a country of seven million inhabitants, not 350 million inhabitants.

And today Americans stick to their amendments like flies to flypaper. As if they came from the mouth of God.

American political history is grounded, whether you like it or not, in an unfair system of slavery, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, and the rape of countryside. Did I mention systematic disenfranchisement of women and the working poor?

I personally don't agree that the American Constitution is place to look for agreement on fairness in the political decision making. The Constitution is a very living document to help protect the government against the very real problems abuses in political power. Americans are faced with just such a challenge now.

Democracy is sustained by participation. The US Constitution is but one expression of that participation. Neither Rome nor Athens are such great examples of participation, certainly not in light of contemporary communications, mobility, or social thought. Things are much, much different today.

I find the American obsession with their Constitution, much like their obsession with the Presidency missing the point. And It annoys me to no end to listen to political commentators complain about "elites" who supposedly make all the decisions but don't work for a living. Everybody works in that goddamned country, except maybe my Auntie Sadie.

These people are simply going to have to compromise because they are never, ever going to agree with each other on some fundamentals.

This is not political science. (How scientific is "political science" anyway?)

This is common sense.… (meer)