Stardate 20020201.1849

(On Screen): China had steel. China had metallurgy skills second to none. And China invented gunpowder. China made war rockets and used them in siege warfare. But China never invented the musket, even though it had all the components. It never performed that vital bit of integration, and thus when European nations finally showed up on its doorstep armed with infantry firearms, the ultimate result was conquest. Traveling in ships steered with a Chinese rudder, navigating with compasses which were invented in China, Europe used Chinese gunpowder to conquer large parts of China to run as colonies.

Iain Murray takes exception to my claim of American exceptionalism. He tries to claim that all the pieces which the Founding Fathers put together were borrowed, and there is a great deal of truth to his claim. The Founders were intelligent men, and were very well read. Tasked with creating a completely new government, and being bound by no tradition, they examined the virtues and vices of many governments and selected and integrated the things which worked, and by this process of selection and integration they created something completely new. Nearly every individual piece can be traced to something preexisting, but the mix was unique.

Some of them [people who left Europe for America] revolted against European domination and created a nation built on a different philosophy.

No they didn't! They created a nation based entirely on philosophies that had been conceived and nurtured in the UK.

Actually, it's nothing like that simple. For instance, in addition to studying European writings the Founders studied the governing principles of the Iroquois Confederacy (the "Six Nations") and other Indian nations, and it is generally acknowledged that they were very influential. James W. Loewen writes:

What did whites find so alluring [about Indian culture]? According to Benjamin Franklin, "All their government is by Counsel of the Sages. There is no Force; there are no Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment." Probably foremost, the lack of hierarchy in the Native societies in the eastern United States attracted the admiration of European observers. Frontiersmen were taken with the extent to which Native Americans enjoyed freedom as individuals. Women were also accorded more status and power in most Native societies than in white societies of the time, which white women noted with envy in captivity narratives. Although leadership was substantially hereditary in some nations, most Indian societies north of Mexico were much more democratic than Spain, France, or even England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ... Indeed, Native American ideas may be partly responsible for our democratic institutions. We have seen how Native ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality found their way to Europe to influence social philosophers such as Thomas More, Locke, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. These European thinkers then influence Americans such as Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison.

But there's something more deep than the specific things included in the Constitution: the fundamental concept behind the new government of the United States.

Where does a government get legitimacy to govern? Why should anyone grant it credence? There have historically been two answers to that: either a purported grant of power by God or some other deity (the "divine right of Kings") or a simple statement of raw power: we rule because we conquered. Often both were present, and in fact both are present in the foundation of power for the British government.

The Founders in the United States began with a different concept: the government of the United States would govern because it was granted that power by the people of the nation. That concept was not present in England at that time; it was a theoretical possibility, but never anything which had been tried out at such a scale before.

In the American system, all power flows from the voters. Every aspect of government is answerable directly or indirectly to the voters. Congress must face the voters in periodic elections, and Congress picks the Judiciary (and can remove it by impeachment if necessary). The voters pick the President, and Congress can also remove him if need be. (The Senate used to be selected by the state legislatures – who were picked by the voters – but a hundred years ago the Constitution was amended so that the Senate was elected by direct vote.)

That's the "different philosophy" to which I refer: the idea that the only legitimacy that the government has is granted to it by the people it governs, and that this is the only legitimacy that it needs. Our government was not foisted onto us by God, or imposed on us by might of arms; we created it ourselves and submitted to it voluntarily.

Iain lists a large number of rights which were already present in British common practice. Some are less true than he says. For instance, he claims religious tolerance, and ignores the Test Acts, which prevented Catholics (and Quakers, and Baptists, and Presbyterians) from holding office. The Test Acts were not abolished until 1828 (and Jews were excluded from Parliament until 1858). Dissenters and Jews weren't publicly burned, it is true, but they did not have the freedom granted to Quakers and the others in the US by the First Amendment, nor were they as free as members of the Church of England.

Because of the Test Acts, the Founders included the following in Article Six of the Constitution: "No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or Public Trust under the United States."

Many of the rights described in the Constitution do have precursors in the British system. The big difference, however, is that the US Constitution is a binding contract on its citizens and its government and the powers and limitations in it are absolute. The rights that the British hold have a long tradition, but any or all of them can legally be revoked by Parliament. Indeed, the Blair administration seriously considered abolishing most rights to trial by jury recently.

Our Founders had a fundamental belief that government cannot be trusted. Any excess power that a government has will eventually be abused. Therefore, the Founders wanted to create a contract which laid out, in very concrete terms, what the government was permitted to do and what it was forbidden to do. Part of why so much of the Constitution consists of prohibitions on government was in order to prevent abuses the Founders had observed in European government practice, including in the UK.

The Congress of the United States cannot touch our right of trial by jury because it is established by the Sixth Amendment.

These limits on government are set down in plain English where everyone can see them, and as we have found other powers of government that are subject to abuse, we have passed amendments to set them off limits to the government as well.

In my original article, I said this:

The people who came here brought with them what was good about the cultures they came from, but they also left a lot behind that which wasn't worth having. The pieces they kept then merged together into a rich and flavorful stew, a true melting pot.

Nowhere is that more true than in the government which was created here. The UK had political steel and political gunpowder, but it took Americans to create political muskets.