The moral carpet bombing of Edward Snowden has begun

David Brooks vents his prejudices and treats us to pop sociology in search of moral clarity this morning. Nice how some things don't change.

Brooks first reduces Edward Snowden to a social stereotype on flimsy evidence, then condemns him in high moral dudgeon, then undercuts the basis of his condemnation without noticing. For bonus points, he throws in a near-nonsense assertion about the founding fathers' original intent that, insofar as it has any meaning at all, is more false than true.

Brooks' lede intones, "From what we know so far, Edward Snowden appears to be the ultimate unmediated man." That's Brookspeak for 'not a good boy.'  He does not accept the authority and inherent benevolence of Institutions -- in Brooksworld, the repository of all moral value.

Condemning the world's anti-Boy Scouts does not exhaust Brooks' font of indignation. No, the charge must be generational and societal. We are All at Fault, for we are raising a generation of idiots (in the Greek sense of individuals isolated from society):

When the social contract was new

One perhaps obvious point about the United States' formative period is brought home vividly in Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788.  It's this: the framers, and many of those debating ratification, were quite consciously trying form a new social contract -- that is, implement some version of the social contract theory developed over the prior century-and-a-half. In fact, worries about the chaos that might ensue if the inert federal government was not replaced with a functioning one made some fear the return of a state of nature, which must have added to the sense of being in at the birth.  The sense of consciously forming something new, yet doing it deliberately and in accordance with the norms of representative government already developed, is really quite astonishing. It was an almost scientific experiment and a lived creation myth rolled into one.  Here is James Wilson making the opening bid for ratification in the Pennsylvania ratification convention (as paraphrase/quoted by Maier):

"Government...taken as a science may yet be considered in its infancy," Wilson said, and it had in the past been the product of "force, fraud, or accident." America, he said, offered the first instance "since the Creation of the world...of a people assembled to weigh deliberately and calmly, and to decide leisurely and peaceably, upon the form of government by which they will bind themselves and their posterity."

That's true, isn't it? Remarkable...

Polarized politics, 1787

In the United States, the bitter charge that a majority that wants to bring an ambitious project to a vote is trying to ram it down our throats has a long pedigree.  In Pennsylvania, the first state to ratify the Constitution, such was the lament of the minority who were either opposed to ratification, undecided, or in favor of making ratification conditional on the opportunity to amend.

Moreover, the minority was right, according to the narrative stitched together by Pauline Maier in  Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788.  Pennsylvania proponents of the Constitution wanted to be the first to ratify. They convened the ratifying convention in November, just two months after the framers completed their work, and before copies of the Constitution had had time to fully penetrate the enormous rural expanse of the state. In fact they scheduled the ratifying convention before Congress had decided the manner in which it would present it to the states.  That led a conditional supporter of the proposed new scheme of government, Robert Whitehill, to complain, "I don't know any reason there can be for driving [the Constitution] down our throats, without an hour's preparation"...unless it was "a plan not fit for discussion" (p. 61). 

History of the United States: Counterfactuals in the Prequel

I am about 1/4 through a remarkable book, historian Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (2010).  What's remarkable about it is that, so far at least, Maier has delivered precisely on the narrative premise she posed in the introduction:

A writer can build suspense in telling a story, [Barbara Tuchman] said, even if the reader knows how the story turned out, so long as the writer never mentions the outcome until it happens at the proper place in the story. This book is, among other things, an effort to test that theory.
     For the experiment to succeed, however, requires readers who are willing to play a game. They need to forget for the moment much of what they know about the American past, and return in imagination to another time when there was no Constitution, when the federal Convention had not even met, and watch events occur, step by step, unaware of how they would turn out (p. xvi).

This is precisely what's so fascinating about the book. Maier's narrative sympathies, if not her settled judgment, are with those who objected to the Constitution in the form in which it was presented for ratification.  State by state, she relates the objections and anxieties of those who rejected or had serious reservations about the Constitution or about the ratifying process (people complained, with some justice, that the Constitution was being "rammed down our throats"!). These included the little matter of the absence of a bill of rights, the nonrepresentative nature of the Senate, the new Congress's powers of taxation, the lifetime tenure of judges, and the lack of provision for trial by jury in civil cases.