Constitution Day on September 17th is a uniquely American holiday, far more unique than the Fourth of July. Many countries celebrate an independence day. But only the United States has a 228-year-old written Constitution that authoritatively shapes its national life. We don’t often appreciate what an astonishing treasure that fact is, and how much we have to be grateful for in that regard. For it is not only an old Constitution, it is a wise Constitution; and it has become old precisely because it is wise, and has survived and outgrown all the unwise expedients offered to replace it.
Other countries, such as France, have lived under many different regimes, so that for them the nation is something distinct from its form of government. Not so for Americans, who have lived since the 1780s under the same regime, a remarkable fact the significance of which seems to escape us. We swim in its waters, unaware of the element that contains and sustains us. We revere our Constitution blandly, without troubling ourselves to know very much about it, and without reflecting much about what it says about our national identity.
Ties of race, religion and ethnicity have never been what binds us as Americans. We think of the management of our diversity as a recent issue, but the conduct of American life has always involved the negotiation of profound differences—difference of states and regions, of demographics, of economies and social arrangements. Our Constitution took it as a given that there would be such differences and that they, and our human imperfections, would generate endless conflicts. Ambitious individuals and power-hungry interests would always be among us, and their dangerous energies had to be properly channeled—not eliminated, not subdued, but guided in directions that would conduce to the greater good.
Our Constitution is, accordingly, short on soaring rhetoric, and long on procedure, laying out the complex rules of political engagement. Behind the familiar formulae of checks and balances, and the separation of powers, is a powerful idea: rather than trying to prevent conflict, this Constitution would presume conflict and even institutionalize it, thereby directing its effects to the general good. Like an internal combustion engine, the Constitution uses the explosions within its chambers to drive the effort of American governance. But for that very reason it is not conducive to smooth or unanimous action flowing from centralized power. Indeed, the craving for centralized unanimity is precisely what it most distrusts. And so should we.
This aspect of the American system is ill-understood at home and abroad. When I gave a lecture in Ankara at the height of the Iraq War, a Turkish questioner wondered whether the intense conflict then going on in Washington meant that the American system was falling apart. When I responded, “But this is how the system is supposed to work,” and that Congressional resistance to the President can be entirely proper and legitimate, the audience was incredulous. I would tell that audience precisely the same thing today, about Republican Congressional resistance to President Obama on various policy fronts. Such conflict can be a sign of health rather than weakness. It would be good if more Americans understood the ways in which the corrective energies of their system actually operate, instead of seeing endemic conflict in Washington in despairing terms. It would be good if our political leaders, including the President himself, and his Congressional opposition, respected this fact more than they do.
Conflict is an inescapable part of political life. We all have legitimate but divergent interests, and we always will. It is the creative insight of our Constitution that such conflict need not be invariably destructive, and can be channeled toward the common good and toward the flourishing of the individual person, both at the same time.
For conflict to be constructive, though, there has to be one point of agreement: prior acceptance by all parties of the Constitution’s overarching authority. It provides the rules of the game. There can be no successful game without durable administered rules, administered with as much impartiality as human nature will allow. Sometimes it may seem disappointing that our Constitution contains so few high-flown words, being quite unlike the Declaration of Independence in that regard. But it has spoken best through the structures it has established. When push has come to shove, it has functioned remarkably well as the umpire of last appeal in our most contentious public debates. Even the coming of a horrific Civil War did not cause us to lose its beneficial effects for good. Its authority remains indispensable. It deserves to be veneratedand to be better understood.
Don Kagan, a long time professor of Classics at Yale University and at one time Chairman of the Faculty at Yale, spoke last year at Hotchkiss School and discussed the need for citizens to receive what he calls a “patriotic education” a notion promoted by Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was convinced that there needed to be an education for all citizens if they and their new kind of popular government were to flourish. He understood that schools must provide “to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; to enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts, and accounts, in writing.”
For Jefferson, though, the most important goals of education were civic and moral. In his “Preamble to the 1779 Virginia Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” he addresses the need for all students to have a political education through the study of the “forms of government,” political history and foreign affairs. This was not meant to be a “value free” exercise; on the contrary, its purpose was to communicate the special virtues of republican representative democracy, the dangers that threatened it, and the responsibility of its citizens to esteem and protect it. This education was to be a common experience for all citizens, rich and poor, for every one of them had natural rights and powers, and every one had to understand and esteem the institutions, laws and traditions of his country if it was to succeed.3
Professor Kagan was correct. We need to understand these principles.
I am thrilled that at the University of Oklahoma (OU) where I teach, the U.S. Constitution is held in high regard. Under the inspired leadership of President David Boren and Provost Kyle Harper, OU formed the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage (IACH). The motto of OU is civi et reipublicae: for the citizen and for the country, a constant reminder that citizenship training is an integral part of higher education’s mission and its justification. The IACH at OU follows through on that responsibility, offering a unique undergraduate curriculum called “Constitutional Studies,” which can be pursued as a free-standing minor or a concentration within the Letters major.
The IACH sponsors a broad range of programming free and open to the public, like our annual Teach-In, in which some of the nation’s finest historians address overflow audiences with compelling accounts of key moments in the American past. In addition, the outreach mission of the IACH brings the talents and resources of its faculty to the broader community, and in turn the community enriches the conversations hosted by the IACH. Freedom.ou.edu is such a program, dedicated to promoting civic education through short, topical, online talks related to citizenship, freedom, and the Constitution. The site also acts as a hub for lifelong learning on the web. Numerous programs are hosted, including Freedom 101: an ongoing series of short, 15-minute lectures on American constitutional law and constitutional history.
In addition, IACH sponsors an annual summer institute for teachers, in collaboration with the Center for the History of Liberty, which provides teachers with a week-long full-immersion course in constitutional law and history, designed to refresh and improve their own teaching.
In all these ways, we at OU are trying to carry on the mission that Thomas Jefferson assigned us at our beginnings as a free nation. We welcome others who wish to join us in that noble work.
• Wilfred McClay holds the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and is one of the founding board members of the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History.
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