Are 'We the People' our own worst enemy?

As we approach another national election, Professor Louis René Beres notes that each aspirant wants to be the "people's president." To say otherwise would be foolish if not blasphemous. So it is ironic, he writes, that the Framers of the Constitution did not believe in democracy. The fact that the famous Philadelphia convention was held in secret speaks volumes. Beres observes: "Today, we try to forget that the Founding Fathers displayed a very deep distrust of ordinary folk, and, as corollary, an abundant fear of democratic governance. With no more than a half-dozen exceptions, the men of the Philadelphia Convention were scions of wealth and privilege, utterly disdaining the people as a vile and contemptible 'mob.' Any serious thought by the general population was something that always had to be vigorously discouraged. ... Even Benjamin Franklin, whose faith in the people was discernibly stronger than that of his colleagues, remarked candidly that any capacity for purposeful citizenship remained undemonstrated."

Would democratic governance give rise to the barbaric Hobbesian mob as the Founders feared? In America, it did not. Instead, a more benign but equally dangerous mob arose, one Beres characterized as bearing the "far-reaching absence of any individuality, courage, or serious thought." We have become a people who have made a virtue of "fitting in" and not rocking the proverbial boat. Gone are the rugged individualists "motivated by industry, meaning and self-reliance," as Ralph Waldo Emerson once described the nation. Instead, Beres writes, America today is what Emerson dreaded most: a people marked by conformance, mimicry, and "trembling.” Beres laments that demos is no longer "a preferred path to virtue, but an endlessly deep valley of imitation, mediocrity and eventual despair." In this sense, the fears of the Founding Fathers have indeed manifested themselves. Can we matriculate beyond the crowd? Perhaps. America's best days may still lie ahead.

But as Beres rightly notes, "Before this intolerable condition can change, and before the assorted [presidential] aspirants can ever make good on their ritualistic adorations [about 'We the People'], it will first be necessary for us to take our Selves seriously. Soon, unless we finally start to honor the American people as individuals, the coming presidential election will miss the point."