READERS WHO WRITE: How we obtained into this mess

READERS WHO WRITE: How we obtained into this mess

Published 7:00 am Sunday, April 5, 2026

Several many years in the past, one thing referred to as “Writing Across the Curriculum” was all the craze on school campuses. The thought was to show writing within the context of the opposite programs college students had been taking.

As a younger English professor, I discovered myself educating a writing course by which my writing college students had been concurrently enrolled in an “Introduction to Politics” course. With my college students writing about what they had been studying in that class, I sat in on these lectures and skim the texts that college students had been studying and about which they had been writing. I spent my profession as a medieval literature professor, and thus I used to be studying “The Federalist Papers” and “The Antifederalist” letters for the primary time.

I discover myself occupied with these texts typically nowadays because it turns into increasingly more clear that as good because the Founding Fathers had been, their 18th century knowledge is trying slightly dysfunctional nowadays.

As certain as these gents had been that they didn’t wish to be dominated by a monarch, they had been equally afraid of out-and-out democracy. As typically as we see indicators declaring, “Save our Democracy” nowadays, the fact is we stay in a republic, and that’s by design. To these males, democracy was akin to “mob rule.” One want solely study what Madison and Hamilton needed to say about their imaginative and prescient for the Senate. The authors referred to as for the election of Senators by state legislatures as a way of forming “a convenient link between the two systems (state and federal).”

The “link” envisioned was little doubt an try to handle the Antifederalists who had been suspicious of a robust central authorities and had been agency about states’ rights. So the Federalists arrange a system for electing Senators by state legislators who would presumably be capable to acknowledge candidates evincing the form of “senatorial trust … requiring greater extent of information and stability of character” than is required by House members.

As one’s studying by the writings of each the Federalists and the Antifederalists makes clear, making a Constitution that each one can agree upon is a messy enterprise. It is almost certainly Madison, writing within the Federalist Papers, who acknowledged that granting every state the identical variety of senators “may in some instances be injurious as well as beneficial.” But whereas recognizing the benefit this set-up gave to the smaller states, he wrote, “the larger states will always be able to have their power over supplies to defeat unreasonable exertions of this prerogative of the lesser states.”

In the face of opposition from the Antifederalists and the worry of the small states that the massive ones would exert undue affect, compromises (at the moment, a unclean phrase in Washington) wanted to be made. Thus every state was accorded two Senators. And therein lies the present mess that the Founding Fathers by no means envisioned.

We have develop into a nation by which a number of states alongside our coast have giant populations with pursuits typically very completely different from these in the midst of the nation the place there are lots of fewer people.

These differing outlooks are most evident in our Senate, that premier deliberative physique meant to verify the passions of the House of Representatives elected by common vote in districts. These Founding Fathers imagined frequent turnover of members within the House and thus accorded longer phrases for the Senate in order that these males could be much less inclined to fads or the feelings of the second.

They by no means envisioned the lengthy phrases with out limits served by most in each homes of Congress. Nor did they envision the extraordinarily divergent views of these in bigger states versus these in much less populated ones.

Thus now we have the makings of right this moment’s mess. The fifteen least populated states — principally crimson states within the middle of the nation — have a complete inhabitants of fewer than 17 million folks. These residents are represented by 30 Senators. California, with a inhabitants of practically 39 million, is represented by two Senators, regardless of having greater than twice as many individuals as reside in these 15 effectively represented states. The states within the center are usually not about to surrender their place of energy, and thus frustration builds.

The Founding Fathers did their finest to compromise. The Antifederalists gave us the Bill of Rights, for instance, which weren’t part of the Constitution in help of which the Federalists had been writing. And even our most revered Founding Fathers had dangerous concepts that had been stored out of the Constitution. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, thought the Constitution ought to incorporate sumptuary legal guidelines. Sumptuary laws dictated that solely these of sure monetary means might put on clothes product of sure materials or put on sure jewels, and so forth. These sorts of legal guidelines have an extended historical past going again to the Middle Ages, and so they by no means work, however Franklin favored these as a way of encouraging frugality. Okay, nobody is ideal!

Harvard historian Jill Lepore has written eloquently about simply how troublesome it’s to amend the Constitution (one other drawback the Founding Fathers little doubt didn’t foresee). In the wake of the recurring “No King” protests, it’s cheap to ask, “Can our republic be saved?” Hmmm … keep tuned.

Victoria L. Weiss lives in Ashland.