HLS Library Book Talk | Michael Klarman: "The Framer's Coup" 

only 3 comments? Wow - the Framer's Coup really was successful!

Too bad the audio tech was asleep on the job. Very weak and at times almost inaudible. Needed more gain to capture the talk completely.

"It would be as unnatural to refer the choice of President to the people as it would to refer a trial of colors to a blind man," declared Virginia delegate George Mason at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 (avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_717.asp). The Constitution as an elitist counterrevolution to the burgeoning democratic zeitgeist of the 1780s is not a new thesis: Charles Beard, Gordon Wood, and Woody Holton each put their own spin on it. Michael Klarman, however, exemplifies the difference between 'vulgar Marxism' - in this case, reducing the Founders to greedy pocket-liners - and mature historical accounts which evaluate the granularity of underlying economic interests with due care and seriousness. The thicket of romanticism Klarman must machete through is so dense that he almost sounds like a radical. But how could any American not feel some sympathy for a bunch of broke farmers who, just having fought in a war for independence, demanded legislative debt relief during a period of severe crisis and hardship? From that perspective, the Constitution was the original revenge of the top 1%. Delegates at the Convention specifically designed it to keep ordinary citizens from playing a direct role in governing themselves, to suppress populist policies seeking wealth redistribution, to cut "an excess of democracy" off at the pass. Now that we've got a little distance on the last bovine nationalist swindle, we should permanently discard the hokey romanticism bandied about, by both the major party presidential candidates especially, regarding the founding of this country. Not because the existence of chattel slavery or the exclusion of women and property-lacking men or the dispossession of the nations already living here. Even fully acknowledging those crimes and others, the newly emancipated colonies enjoyed the most participatory democracy in the world - until, that is, Madison, Hamilton, and Washington staged their coup.