The Great Debate: liberty or death?

I have been listening to a course from The Teaching Company on the debate over the proposed Constitution between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. Professsor Thomas L. Pangle (University of Texas at Austin) teaches the course, The Great Debate: Advocates and Opponents of the American Constitution , which does an outstanding job of framing the debate between the two sides in its historical context and presenting the give-and-take discussion. The Federalist Papers are often presented as a self-contained treatise on the Constitution, but they were, in reality, part of a broader conversation, reacting to accusations and questions from the Anti-Federalists and lodging accusations and questions on behalf of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay (their authors).

The Anti-Federalists also presented some salient concerns in their opposition to the proposed Constitution. Among them:

• the proposed Constitution would lead to the establishment of a military industrial complex (not their words, of course), which would lead to America drawing unto itself the trappings of empire and shedding her commitment to republican virtue;


• juries would lose their right to interpret the law under the proposed Constitution and the federal judiciary would become an unaccountable aristocracy; and


• the states would eventually become mere administrative subdivisions of the federal government because states do not have an effective constitutional check against the federal government (Madison pointed to the fact that the states appointed senators under the design of the proposed Constitution, but this effective check was removed with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment).

The Federalists consistently seek to recast Anti-Federalist concerns by focusing on the need for a strong central government to protect the national security of the United States. Whereas the Anti-Federalists were concerned to protect the classical republican freedom of the United States, which called for small communities governed by like-minded, virtuous citizens, the Federalists called for society to include a broader, more diverse territory whose sheer size would draw in competing interests (factions, to use Madison's term) to protect republican freedom at home and from attack from abroad.

I will spend a few upcoming blog posts looking at these debates in more detail, but what intrigues me from a birds'-eye view is the same basic question that we still deal with today, most recently in the days since 9/11. The Bush Administration thought it was necessary to engage in torture to protect America from further terrorist attacks after 9/11. While there is some circumstantial evidence that this policy protected the U.S. from further attacks, the brutality and dehumanizing consequences of these "enhanced interrogation techniques" are highlighted by Mark Danner in his piece US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites. Now the Obama Administration has prohibited these techniques from being used by U.S. governmental agencies because, as the new president has said, they violate America's core principles of liberty and commitment to human rights. But the President has said he'll do what is necessary to protect the United States, so one wonders what that would mean if another terrorist attack should befall the U.S.

So the question becomes - can a love and commitment of freedom and liberty coexist with institutions required to defend and make war? In the spirit of the Governance Imperative, these are two competing principles that must be balanced, but can the balance truly be maintained without detriment to either principle? Peace and security can be easily maintained through the use of excessive force, but freedom and liberty will suffer and be snuffed out. Witness Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Iran and North Korea. Liberty and openness can flourish, but society is then left vulnerable to attack and domination from the outside. Witness the classical Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, and the medieval Italian cities. In the latter cases, the republics were only able to save themselves by giving up liberty for ever more powerful militaries and dictators. Patrick Henry insisted on being given liberty or death, but most people will take security and peace over anything.

Whatever the prescient warnings of the Anti-Federalists, the Constitution has enabled the United States to strike an uneasy, if ever-correcting, balance between liberty and security. The ability of Americans to maintain this balance will be directly dependent on our continued fidelity to republican principles and the constitutional order.