How a new elite thinks

 I finished Nate Silver's On the Edge a week ago, but I didn't write this planned post then because I was too preoccupied with a forthcoming piano recital that took place yesterday (and, I am happy to report, was well received by a small audience.)  I plan to tape a studio version of it and make that available on line.  I will not be able to do justice to On the Edge here, but I highly recommend it.  It deals with complex and very important topics, lays out key different ways of thinking in today's world--especially among the younger generations--and is very entertainingly written.  I plan to summarize it very quickly and then turn to what I regard as its most significant contribution--an attempt to see inside the souls of a younger generation of entrepreneurs and thinkers like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the now-infamous Sam Bankman-Fried, who wield enormous power in our society today.

Silver, to begin with, identifies two distinct communities, "the River" and "the Village," into which, it seems to me, the elite of Gen X and Millennials are divided.  The River includes gamblers (like himself), venture capitalists, tech giants like Jeff Bezos and Musk, and "effective altruists"--a hot new term--who want to use new tools and ways of thinking to improve the world.  The River thinks and acts according to probabilities, especially probable expected value (EV), upon which it relies to make decisions. The Village includes most of our academic and journalistic elite and most of the Democratic Party, and relies far more on a particular set of moral values that it reflexively applies to every problem--values also known as woke.  The two are often at odds, which may explain why Silicon Valley, a center of the River, is now split politically, with an important minority favoring Donald Trump.   Based on my own increasingly ancient perspective I think that Silver has certainly identified real groups, but they seem to me far from all-inclusive.  I am certainly closer to the River than the Village in how I think, but I don't think that wokeness is the only possible set of moral values, much less the best one from which to question the relentless value-maximization of the River.  The problem with EV in the marketplace, it seems to me, is that the V for value represents anything that people will spend money on--the more the better.  That includes addictions such as gambling and drugs, which are playing a bigger and bigger role in our lives and our economy, with disastrous consequences.  Our whole health care system, including Big Pharma, is now largely focused on increasing its expected value, and that is not improving the health care we are receiving or making it cheaper and more efficient--even though, to take a Village perspective, the health care industry is increasingly diverse.  I'll return to this problem a little later.

The first four chapters of the book survey the gambling scene--casinos and sports betting--and the kind of thinking that goes into it.  Two chapters are about poker, and show how mathematical sophistication--the kind of analysis familiar to many via the book and movie Moneyball--has to be balanced with game theory, which relies on identifying with one's opponent and trying to figure out exactly what he is trying to do.  Then the casino business gets a fascinating chapter, telling us that slot machines are the most important casino profit generator, because the house has the  biggest edge, as well as the most addictive casino product.  There is even a way to try to beat certain slot machines that tend to pay off big when they haven't given much to the customers for a long time--if one can identify them.  Then comes a highly technical chapter on sports betting, which among other things illustrates Silver's particular perspective.  Despite the deluge of sports betting ads on every televised sporting event nowadays, few people realize, I suspect, that the new books and the sports books at casinos will either severely limit or stop taking a customer's action if they turn out to be consistent winners.  This "only losers need apply" strategy--which casinos also use to try to ban card counters from blackjack--is, to me so incredibly unfair that it's amazing that no state has tried to ban it.  Silver talks a lot about what he and others do to try to get around it, but he simply accepts it as a fact of life.  In decades past, illegal bookmaking operations relied on their 10 percent commission on all bets to make money and manipulated the odds and tried to lay off bets to insure against risk.  (The manipulation of the odds was designed to get the public to bet equal amounts on both sides.)   I do wonder why none of the legal books seems to be using that strategy now.

           The second part of the book is about risk and risk management, beginning with a chapter on venture capitalists and largely focusing on Silicon Valley.  Having written that sentence it occurs to me that this tells us a lot not only about the book, but about today's economy, which is marked by truly fantastic concentrations of capital.  Silver isn't looking at how people design superior products.  He's looking at how zillionaires try to profit from superior product designs.  And the answer is, it seems, that they take a chance on a lot of new ideas, knowing that most of them will fail but that a very few will be worth billions.  And that leads me, now, to my main critique of the book, which is really a critique of contemporary capitalism.

             The ideas that will be worth a lot of money are those that will appeal to the public.  The problem is that they may appeal to the public's worst instincts, or even to their minds' and bodies' capacity for addiction to things like gambling, social media, or prescription drugs.   Silver acknowledges this in various asides but without spending much time on what might be done about it, or even speculating about whether the legalization of gambling in the last half century or so has been a good thing.  (He does repeatedly mention that it is a very regressive tax on poor people.)  In the same way, one might ask whether superhero movies are good for the public, even though they have become the studios' most reliable sources of profits.  Silver seems to me to believe in free markets but they unfortunately free consumers to give into, and merchants to exploit, the worst human instincts--and that in turn can have very negative social and economic consequence.

            And that leads me to the next few chapters of the book, which focus on the spectacular rise and fall of Samuel Bankman-Fried.  The son of two Stanford law professors and an MIT graduate himself, SBF, as Silver refers to him, founded a quantitative trading firm specializing in crypto-currencies in 2017, when he was 25.  Two years later he founded his own cryptocurrency exchange, FTX.  Crypto, of course, is a new form of asset, and I do not claim to understand it fully.  Its main advantage seems to be complete freedom from government oversight or regulation, and that, in addition perhaps to its novelty, has induced investors to put many billions of dollars into it.  It has already had wild swings of value and it may turn out to be one of the legendary bubbles of all time.  While things were going well, SBF made enormous contributions to various charities and many political candidates.  He was a disciple of Effective Altruism, which hopes to use new digital techniques, including Artificial Analysis, to solve all humnaity's problems quickly and cheaply.  In late 2022, however, FTX went bankrupt and SBF was arrested for a series of huge frauds relating to its operations, which had siphoned off a lot of the money investors spent on its digital assets.  Late last year he was convicted on multiple counts and he has been sentenced to 25 years in prison.  Silver spends quite a few pages wondering how all this could have happened, but without speculating, as far as I can see, that the episode reveals how much of our spectacular new economy may ultimately be built on sand.  He evidently knows a good deal of history, but not quite enough, I suspect, to be able to put our mad world in a real historical context.

Another chapter goes into the controversies over AI, and whether it has a good chance of extinguishing human life on the planet. While Silver declares himself, relatively speaking, an optimist about AI, he thinks that that danger is a real one.  I was very frustrated, though, that he never got around to explaining exactly how AI might bring the death of humanity about.  I see a somewhat different danger. Because of the collapse of history education in both high school and college, the younger generations--even the graduates of our most distinguished universities--have grown up without any sense of the kinds of great catastrophes that have befallen humanity in the past, even as recently as the first half of the twentieth century. Having grown up amidst extraordinary technological and economic progress, they think that this will never end.  That was what nearly everyone thought in the first decade of the twentieth century as well, and for the same reasons.  

Silver does raise important questions about values in his last few pages.  People, he says, need agency--the ability not only to make choices, but to make good ones that avoid pitfalls like addiction.  Plurality,  he says, means giving different points of view seats at the table, and rejecting any totalizing ideology--although whether that would include free market ideology isn't altogether clear to me.  And lastly, he calls for reciprocity, which amounts to treating other people as we would like to be treated, instead of just trying to manipulate them for one's own benefit.  This is an echo of Orwell's great essay on Dickens, where he argued that moral criticism of society's values could be just as revolutionary as structural criticism of its institutions.  

I learned a great deal from this book--and I have many questions about the future.  The changes we are living through provide capital with enormous new opportunities, which may or may not rebound to the public good.  They have also created a new aristocracy of which Elon Musk is now the most spectacular example--and he is not using his great power for the greater good.  Humanity is embarked upon a new great adventure which could end very well or very badly.  This will be an enormous challenge for all those now under 50, and those not yet born.

Thank you, General Mattis

 Five years ago I described a talk I heard given by retired General James Mattis, and the exchange that I had with him during the Q & A about Donald Trump, whom he had served for some time as Secretary of Defense.  Here are the key portions of that post.

Sunday, November 03, 2019

The Impeachment Debate--a Barometer

Last week I attended a talk by General James Mattis (ret.), the former Secretary of Defense, at the JFK School in Cambridge.  General Mattis is a history buff, and he talked a great deal about how history can enhance your perspective and help you make better decisions.  His host was Prof. Graham Allison, the head of the school's applied history project, whose roots I helped grow myself about 40 years ago.  He also talked about the crisis in our democracy and the problems of tribalism and partisanship.  He did not specifically discuss his tenure as secretary of defense, although he alluded more than once to the great difficulty of making or executing any coherent policy in this administration.

I decided to participate in question time.

I began by introducing myself as a former member of the Strategy and Policy Department in Newport. "General," I said, "I share you concerns about the crisis in our democracy.  Recently it seems to have entered another phase.  During the next year, both the House and Senate and the American people will have to decide whether our President should continue in office.  One critical question bearing on their decision--and I don't think that it should be a partisan political question--relates to his intellectual and managerial competence and whether he is really capable of doing the job.  It seems to me that men like you, and General McMaster, and General Kelly, and Mr. Tillerson have a lot of information bearing on that point.  Whether or not you want to comment on this now, I hope that some of you will take an opportunity in the next year to make the information you have available to the Congress and the public so that they may make a more informed decision."  (That's a paraphrase but it is certainly very close to what I said.)

The general replied emphatically, making clear that he had already settled this question in his own mind.  The American military, he said, has a non-political tradition going back to the Newburgh conspiracy during the Revolutionary War.  It must not set itself up as some kind of Praetorian guard.  I certainly did not think that I was asking him to do that.  I suspect that if Donald Trump were a serving officer commanding a battalion in General Mattis's division, that he would understand that he had to be relieved, but he still feels that his years of military service debar him from exercising his rights as a citizen to pronounce upon his fitness as commander in chief.

General Mattis, then, refuses for his own reasons to enter into a discussion of whether Donald J. Trump can adequately perform the duties of President of the United States.  Yet the issue of why that question isn't at the forefront of our political discussion generally, and why it seems very unlikely that it will be the specific basis for an article of impeachment, goes well beyond his personal views of the duties of military officers.  It goes to the question of whether the citizens of the United States now have enough understanding of, or belief in, our government, to make it work effectively.  I feel more and more forced to believe--by evidence--that they do not.

In Bob Woodward's new book, War, former JCS Chairman Mark Milley took a different tack and labelled Donald Trump as "Fascist to the core."  and pleaded with Woodward to help stop Trump's bid for re-election.  According to Woodward, as reported here, General Mattis told Woodward that he agrees with Milley's concerns and encouraged him to bring the threat Trump poses to the attention of the American people.  I regret that it took General Mattis so long to come around to the view that the nation needs his testimony, but I appreciate that he finally did.  

Update

 I have been very busy with some other matters--nothing to worry about--and I am also most of the way through Nate Silver's book, On the Edge, which is entertaining and stimulating.  I will be blogging about it before long.  In the meantime I may get to something else here, or I may not.

The election remains, and probably will remain, a toss-up.

The crippled United States government

 Regardless of who wins the election, politics will continue to divide the United States into two nations defined by their hostility to one another.  The Democrats are very likely to win back the House of Representatives, while it will take a miracle--a Democratic victory in Montana, Texas, Florida, or Nebraska--for them to stop the Republicans from taking control of the Senate if Harris wins, and a double miracle if she loses.   In either case the filibuster rule in the Senate will kill the chances for any piece of legislation.  Trump's career as a presidential candidate will probably end if he loses--the more likely outcome at this point, but only to a very marginal extent--but Trumpism will still rule the Republican Party and J. D. Vance will be the heir apparent.  The situation has already wrecked our international position.

We would need a re-evaluation of our foreign policy even if one party really enjoyed a consensus.  Men and women like Anthony Blinken have had their entire careers in the post-Cold War era, and Joe Biden's career was less than half over when Communism collapsed..  As major addresses by every president confirm, the US foreign policy establishment in that era has assumed that everything it wants must occur.  Catastrophic outcomes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and the rise of a hostile China and Russia have done nothing to shake that view.  That perhaps is why Biden committed himself to supporting Ukraine while repeatedly delaying or refusing to provide weapons and tactics that would give Ukraine a better chance of winning, and why he has ruled out US intervention from the beginning.  He is accustomed to the idea that the word of the United States is law, and now, it isn't.

Nowhere does this problem loom so large as in the Middle East.   For nearly an entire year, the Biden administration has pretended that the Israeli government can be persuaded to see the current war the way the United States government sees it.  Yes, Israel had every right to retaliate for the October 7 attacks, but the US government still proclaims that the region needs a two-state solution, which in my opinion none of the parties want now.  Almost two weeks ago, an Israeli peace activist named Hagai El-Ad published an op-ed in the New York Times  arguing that the Israeli government is pursuing the long-term goal of driving every Palestinian out of both Gaza and the West Bank.  If that is true--and I think that the evidence indicates that it is--the United States government would have to impose significant restraints upon Israel to make peace in the Middle East possible.  (I am not suggesting that the Israeli government is the only or even the bigger obstacle to peace--I have written before that I do not believe that Hamas or Hezbollah wants peace either--but it is one obstacle.)  The US government did that under Eisenhower in 1957, when he insisted that Israel withdraw from the Sinai peninsula; under Nixon and Kissinger in 1973-4, when it forced the Israeli government to accept a cease-fire and begin disengagement talks with Egypt and Syria; and Ronald Reagan successfully pressured Menachem Begin to cut back military operations in Lebanon in 1982.  Biden has made his opposition to much of what Israel is doing clear during the last year, but he has never taken effective action to stop it.  Why  not?

Part of the reason is American politics.  Nearly twenty years ago the power of AIPAC over American elected officials of both parties became a subject of public controversy in the US, but it has faded from view even though AIPAC is more powerful than ever, using its influence and money to mount primary challenges against any Democrat who opposes Israeli government policy, such as Andy Levin of Michigan.  That influence is further magnified by the impending election, which Democrats feel they must not lose, and the closeness of the race, in which the marginally most likely scenario sees Harris winning 270-268 in the electoral college. The same political split delayed help to Ukraine for several months.  If Trump does return to the White House, the US government will probably renounce its world role altogether.

And as in the case of immigration, foreign policy is an area in which Trump has benefited from facing both political and actual reality.   I showed in States of the Union how carefully presidents from Truman through Reagan built up and sustained the Cold War consensus--which they did not interpret to mean that the US government had the power to decide any conflict on earth, or spread democracy everywhere.  That consensus has fallen apart among the public as it has failed to deliver results in one crisis after another.  We have not spent one-tenth of the time analyzing our failures in the Middle East since 9/11 that we spent re-evaluating Vietnam, but the more recent catastrophe is surely more significant than that first one turned out to have been.  The public knows what Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Rodham Clinton refuse to admit, that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya were total failures.  That is why Trump's open repudiation of the post-1945 consensus has not cost him very many votes.  

In both foreign and domestic policy, the Democratic elite remains utterly convinced of its own righteousness and the evil of the other side.  That characterization denies a lot of Democratic responsibility for our economic and other ills, and the public knows it.  And that is a big reason that Kamala Harris's best-case outcome is a very narrow victory indeed, probably without control of the Congress.

An Historical Masterpiece

 Perhaps a month ago I came across a reference to a book about the writing of the Constitution, The Framer's Coup, by one Michael Klarman.  (More on him much later.)  It took a couple of weeks to get the book, published in 2016 by the Oxford University Press, from the local library system.  It includes 631 pages of text and 181 pages of endnotes.  It is probably the single best work of American history published in the 21st century, and its appearance received almost no notice in the national press.

Klarman, now in his mid-sixties, was not trained as an historian, and apparently learned the historian's craft by reading books similar to his own.  As he explains in his introduction, he decided to tell the story of the creation of the constitution in the founders' own words, and that is exactly what he did.  He freely lets his admiration for many of the key players shine through, and he provides lengthy biographical footnotes about some of the lesser-known ones.  Some of his conclusions in my opinion bow to contemporary trends in history, but those trends have militated against even attempting books of this nature, and he paid no attention to that.  Few historical cohorts have been studied or published about more thoroughly than the founders, of course, and he used a large team of skilled research assistants to find what they thought about what they were doing.  That is the way real history needs to be written, and I will try to summarize what I learned from this book.

The writing of the constitution was not an intellectual exercise designed to enshrine particular political principles, but rather an attempt to design new governmental institutions that could save the experiment of the United States from complete collapse.  The government established by the Articles of Confederation, which had almost no executive or judiciary, had failed to govern, with disastrous consequences at home and internationally.  Finance was the biggest problem.  Both the states and the central government emerged from the revolution with enormous debts, and the national government had no taxing power to raise the money to pay its own.  It had to beg the individual states for money, and the states, with their own problems, frequently refused to provide it.  Some of the states had begun to pay their debts in paper money that they printed, which had rapidly depreciated, driving gold and silver out of circulation.  That violated provisions of the peace treaty of 1783 with the British, and was losing all respect for the US from the European powers.  The British had refused to withdraw from forts on the US western frontier in retaliation, cutting off Americans from the lucrative fur trade.  

That was not all.  Having lost most of its trade with the British empire after independence, the new nation needed to conclude commercial treaties with other nations, but the Confederation required unanimous consent among the states to ratify any treaties, and differing interests meant that that was never forthcoming.  In the last years of the Confederation John Jay, acting as Secretary of State, caused a crisis by suggesting that the US might give up navigation rights on the Mississippi as part of a commercial treaty with Spain.  States were imposing tariffs on each other to raise their own revenue.  And last, but hardly least, public order was beginning to break down.  Trying to raise the money it needed, the Massachusetts legislature in 1786 had imposed several new taxes which farmers claimed that they could not pay.  Five western Massachusetts counties began Shay's rebellion, refusing to pay taxes and forcing the courts to adjourn rather than foreclose on indebted farms.  Rebels eventually formed military units and tried to seize the Springfield arsenal.  They were defeated, but the annual elections of 1787 produced a new legislature that gave the rioters much of what they wanted.  The leaders of the earlier revolution--Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, John Adams, and others--discussed these events in correspondence and agreed that they demanded changes in the government.  Led by Madison, they persuaded most of the states to send delegates to Philadelphia for the constitutional convention.

I came away from Klarman's book focused on one particular explanation of how the constitution turned out as it did.  The key players believed that the nation needed a much stronger central government to survive--a government with full taxing powers, the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, the power to coin money and define legal tender, and the capacity to negotiate and ratify treaties that the states and the population would have to observe.  In my opinion, they had correctly identified the key features of a state that could survive against both foreign and domestic threats.  They could only secure these provisions, however, by satisfying delegates who either feared that any strong central authority would become a tyranny, or worried that that new authority would benefit other parts of the country at the expense of their own.  Since for example southerners opposed tariffs because they thought they would hurt their agricultural exports while northerners wanted them to protect nascent industry and raise necessary money, it was impossible to please everyone.  The federalists (as they were already properly called well before their political party was formed)  got what they wanted above all by agreeing, after by far the longest and bitterest debates of the convention, to equal representation for large states and small in the Senate.  That critical concession, as we shall see, not only saved the convention itself, but also got the ratification process off to an excellent start, when several small states immediately approved the new document.  In my opinion, the leading federalists kept their focus where it needed to be: on the establishment of a strong central government for its own sake, as the sine qua non of the survival of the new nation.  They also had strong views about economic questions, about the desired extent of true democracy, and in some cases, about slavery, but only the economic questions, it seems to me, could really be compared in importance to the fundamental political ones that had led them to Philadelphia in the first place.

With respect to those economic questions, Klarman, I think, substantially vindicates the great 20th-century historian Charles A. Beard, who shocked the nation during the Progressive Era with his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution.  In a key provision, Article I Section 10, the Constitution prohibited states from coining money, making anything but gold and silver legal tender for debts, or passing any law impairing the obligation of contracts, that is, arbitrarily reducing or eliminating debts. As Klarman notes, critics in the 1950s essentially refuted Beard's implied claim that the founders were trying above all to help themselves, since many of them held government securities which were only redeemed at face value thanks to the Constitution and the policies that Alexander Hamilton implemented under it.  But Klarman's book makes it very clear, it seems to me, that Article I Section 10 and other provisions were indeed designed to allow our already-capitalist economy to function, which inevitably meant, as Thomas Piketty demonstrated a decade ago, that it would tend to increase the wealth of the already wealthy.  Klarman does not ask whether the inflationary policies of some of the state governments could have worked in the long run--a question that goes far beyond the history he was trying to write--but he makes clear that many antifederalists continued to favor them and that their opposition had to be overcome to secure ratification, as it quite narrowly was.  The antifederalist argument in favor of inflation as opposed to "sound money" came up again more than a century later when agrarian interests called for "free silver," another inflationary strategy that doomed the Democratic Party to minority status when William Jennings Bryan ran on it in 1896.  Franklin Roosevelt did pursue different inflationary policies to battle the Depression, however, and the nation tolerated some inflation from the late 1940s through the 1970s, after which the Federal Reserve adopted draconian measures to stop it.  That, however, is another story.  Beard was right: key provisions of the Constitution favored dominant economic interests.  That may have been necessary, however, to create a functioning economy at all.

Klarman also demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that most of the key players had relatively little trust in the mass of the people and inserted many provisions that were designed to control their influence.  The states were routinely re-electing their governments every year, but the convention, after long arguments, settled on two-year terms for the House, six for the Senate, and four for the President.  They rejected forced rotation in office, which many states and the Confederacy had practiced.  A proposal to elect the president by direct popular vote lost by a vote of nine to one, and they created the electoral college.  Yet partly because so many citizens favored more democracy, many key issues remained unsettled and subject to decision by the voters themselves.  Many delegates favored property qualifications for voters and/or office holders, but since these varied so widely from state to state, the final text leaves the qualifications for voting for the House of Representatives up to the states. As a result, universal male suffrage became the default within a few decades.  (Klarman does not mention, I think, one of my favorite points: that there is still nothing in the Constitution to prevent property qualifications for voting, should a state decide to impose them.)    Nothing prevented state legislatures from turning the choice of presidential electors over to the voters either, and by 1860 every one of them but South Carolina had done so.  Delegates who did not want salaries for senators to ensure that they would be well-off men lost that battle, as well.  The framers may have distrusted the common people but the document that they wrote did not freeze them out from political influence for very long.

Not surprisingly in a book written in the 21st century, The Framer's Coup devotes a whole chapter to the issue of slavery.  Once again the author delivers the facts so thoroughly and clearly as to allow the reader to draw slightly different conclusions than he, which I did.

The whole revisionist onslaught portraying the United States as irretrievably racist from 1609 until the present depends upon denying reality in several periods of American history, including the 1780s.  The delegates and their constituents obviously held at least three very different opinions about that institution.  The northern states were in the midst of abolishing it--some of them gradually--and some of them regarded it as an unqualified evil that the Constitution must in no way endorse.  Slaveowners in the Carolinas and Georgia, on the other hand, were determined to protect this cornerstone of their economy to the maximum extent possible.  And in the upper south and mid-Atlantic, many, including prominent slaveowners such as Washington and Jefferson, regarded it as a regrettable evil which they hoped and believed would disappear with the passage of time.  In addition, even some of those who defended slavery had come to regard the shipment of new slaves from Africa as barbarous.  

Given these views, it is not surprising that the Constitution provided the Congress with the power to outlaw the importation of slaves--but only after 20 years had passed after the ratification of the Constitution.  Jefferson had the honor of recommending the outlaw of the trade to Congress and signing a measure that did just that, after a long debate, in 1808.  Only the spread of the cotton gin and the admission of Deep South states into the union, along with the growth of a new generation, turned many southern leaders into heated advocates for slavery and paved the way for the controversies that led eventually to the Civil War.

The infamous three-fifths clause, which allowed the slave states to count 3/5 of their slaves as part of their population when congressional seats were apportioned and direct taxes levied, was not, as so often claimed, an attempt to define black people as inferior beings.  The southern states wanted to count them all to increase their representation, and some northern delegates wanted to count only free persons.  Klarman shows that this debate was closely connected to another southern demand: that commercial legislation require a supermajority of perhaps two-thirds in Congress to pass, allowed the southern states to veto any unwelcome measures as they had under the Confederation.  They lost that battle but got the 3/5 clause.  The Constitution did require states to return "persons held to service or labor" to the states where their masters lived--a provision that applied to apprentices and indentured servants as well as slaves.  In addition, the federal power to suppress insurrections could apply to slave insurrections--but on p. 164 Klarman, scrupulous scholar that he is, tells us that no one ever brought up that possibility in Philadelphia, focusing instead on uprisings like Shays's Rebellion.

Two other facts, both brought out Klarman, cast significant light on the founders' view of slavery and its relation to the constitution.  First, while the delegates were sitting in Philadelphia, the Confederation Congress, sitting in New York, passed the Northwest Ordinance, banning slavery in all the unorganized territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi.  In addition, when the first Congress met under the Constitution, it passed that ordinance over again, leaving no doubt that the founders recognized a federal right to ban slavery from specified territories.  And secondly--and here is one point where I would have appreciated more elaboration--the northerners steadily and successfully resisted any attempt to get a specific endorsement of the institution of slavery into the Constitution, or even to refer to it by name.  That is why they resorted to circumlocutions--"persons held to service or labor" or "three-fifths of all other persons"--in provisions relating to it.  All this left slavery in the same position that it had already occupied in the British Empire:  legal only where local law and custom allowed it, as in the West Indies.   Despite their reservations about the political capacity of the common man, the framers did not want the word slave in their new charter of liberty.  Indeed, the original Constitution contains no racist or sexist language at all.  The recent biopic of Ruth Bader Ginsburg shows a Supreme Court justice pointing out to her, while arguing a case before the court, that "The word woman does not appear in the Constitution."  "Neither does the word freedom!" she replied, as if to discredit the founding document.  It would have been more telling, it seems to me, for the character as portrayed to reply accurately, "Neither does the word man!"  "Person" was invariably the word the Constitution used to refer to the citizens of the United States--a fittingly universal word if ever there was one.

And here is where I feel a difference of emphasis with Klarman.  "Finally," he writes in his last pages, "the Framers held certain values that are abhorrent to most Americans today.  Most of them accepted that human beings could be held as property, and they believed that African Americans and Native Americans were inferior in various ways to Caucasians.  None of them thought that women should enjoy full political or civil rights.  Most of them doubted that poor people should be permitted to vote or hold political office."  All of that is true, but I still want to credit them for not writing any of those beliefs into the document that they gave us and using universal language that others almost immediately began using to demand rights for the groups that did not yet enjoy them.  And one by one, from poor people to slaves to women, those groups secured them.

Klarman's account of the ratification process is very enlightening.  The Constitution itself prescribed that it be ratified by state conventions, not state legislatures, who were most unlikely to agree to a document that deprived them of so much power and influence.  I don't think he raises the argument--critical in my view--that this also deprived the southern states of the right of secession in 1860-1.  Their people had willingly transferred ultimate sovereignty from their state governments to the new federal one.  The ratification battle was long and difficult, and the final votes in the three largest states--Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts--were very close.  They all decided to ratify, partly because the countryside was underrepresented in the selection of delegates.  Indeed, the ratification process, like the debates over paper money, revealed the split between town and country that has played such a big role in different periods of US history, including our own.  “One can generalize to a certain extent about which sorts of people supported and opposed ratification," Klarman writes (p. 395). "City dwellers, across class lines, overwhelmingly endorsed the Constitution, while backwoodsmen largely opposed it. Small farmers whose land was encumbered with debt were vastly more likely to oppose ratification than were lawyers and merchants, and their objections were frequently stated in class-conscious terms. Westerners were substantially more likely to oppose ratification than were easterners, and northerners supported the Constitution more than southerners. Small states, as we shall see in chapter 6, produced very few Antifederalists relative to large states.”  Those who favored principle over local interest, those who wanted a sound capitalist economy, and those who favored what we now call globalization supported it.   A similar argument about the recent past, present and future is going on today.

Ever since the late sixties our political thought--especially in academia--has become more and more utopian.  Academics criticize every era, including our own, for falling so far short of the perfection that they can imagine.  The framers succeeded partly because they had no such illusions.  They had one overarching goal and knew they had to compromise to reach it.   They would not be surprised that it haws remained difficult to make it work.  

This is, once again, a great work of history--which, sadly, could no longer be written by a professional historian working in a history department.  I have explained here many times that political history of all kinds has fallen out of favor, and celebratory political history about the United States is almost universally condemned among professionals.  Klarman got an advanced history degree at Oxford, but then turned to law.  He has been a member of the Harvard Law School faculty for many years, and his research assistants were law students.  I thank him to trying, like myself, to keep a great tradition alive.  I was also shocked to find that The Framer's Coup did not rate a review in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Review of Books.  The brief review in the American Historical Review confined itself to Klarman's observations on the undemocratic beliefs of the founders.  He deserved better.

As long as governments are run by human beings, no document will ever guarantee us against the abuse of power.  Often the opponents of the Constitution identified dangers that have become all too real.  They successfully called for a Bill of Rights after ratification, and Madison, who had initially opposed one, agreed to it.  Even the Bill of Rights, however, has not, as Jefferson predicted, stopped the government from violating the peoples' rights in contentious times.  A few people noted that the Supreme Court's power to hear cases under the Constitution might make it the most powerful institution of all, and at one time or another Americans on all sides of the political spectrum have deeply resented that power--not least in 2024.  They feared that the president's powers over foreign affairs and the military might make him a dictator.  The framers, I believe, accepted these risks because they thought that the nation had to have a strong central government.  I believe they were correct.  As my last book tries to make clear, their new government accomplished extraordinary things over the next 225 years, and nothing they did prevents us from continuing down that path if we find the will to do so.