"We the Fallen People" by Robert Tracey McKenzie

The calls for a new Constitution, changing the Supreme Court, cumulative voting, and doing away with the Electoral College seems to happen whenever a particular political viewpoint or candidate fails to prevail. We’re told none of this works any more, that the founders used flawed or biased reasoning, and that direct democracy is the preferred alternative. 

What most people don’t know, or have forgotten, says Robert Tracey McKenzie, is the founders considered direct democracy and saw what problems it could lead to. They understood the tyranny of the majority. They knew from history how easily democracy can fail. They were trying to deal with an immediate failure in democracy – the Articles of Confederation. And what they crafted with a republican form of government for the United States, with its three branches and its notable checks and balances.

 

McKenzie, the Arthur Holmes Chair of Faith and Learning and professor of history at Wheaton College in suburban Chicago, also argues something else, something fundamental to understanding why the founders did what they did (and how they’ve been proven right over and over again). He says that the founders knew that people were fallen, that people were not inherently good, that, if given the chance, would inevitably suborn the common good to their own self-interest. As Christians would say, man is a sinner.

 

The founders, he says, were not so much focused on creating a God-inspired document in the Constitution as they were a mankind-aware document. They knew what, if left to their own devices, what people could be capable of. 

 

Robert Tracey McKenzie

In We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy, McKenzie makes his well-researched case. He concisely recounts the history of how the Constitution was written, and why. He explains how the presidency of Andrew Jackson clearly demonstrates how majorities can become tyrannical – with the examples of the U.S. Bank and the removal of the Cherokees from their native lands in Georgia. He reviews what Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19^thcentury writer about and admirer of America, really had to say. And he offers ideas on how we Americans today can go about renewing our thinking about government, republicanism, democracy, and the Constitution. 

 

We the Fallen People makes a strong case. It might have been stronger if McKenzie had been less dismissive of some of his fellow historians, and if he’d examined more closely what happens when the problem is less tyrannical majorities and more political, social, and economic elites.

 

McKenzie has also published Lincolnites and Rebels, A Little Book for New Historians, and The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History.

 

McKenzie’s argument is a somewhat brave one to make. We have a long history of believing that Americans are special because Americans are good, and our presidents and others have spent an enormous amount of time telling us that. Not to mention that we like being told we’re basically good. The reality is that we’re not inherently good, and the Founders of our country knew that and planned a government accordingly.