After the Founders unveiled the Constitution in 1787, a ratification debate followed that pitted those who supported the new plan — the Federalists — against those who opposed it — the Antifederalists. Most of us today know very little about that debate, and what little we know comes from the musical Hamilton. Some know enough to rightly credit the Antifederalists with the Bill of Rights, an addendum to the original that ultimately guaranteed the ratification of the Constitution. Perhaps ironically, when I ask my students what they know of the Constitution, they nearly always mention the Amendments — the part of the Constitution we enjoy thanks to those who opposed it, and the part that outlines our rights as citizens of the country.
Studies suggest that my students are typical — that most Americans, when asked about it, understand the Constitution as a guarantor of rights. This view is not wrong, but it is incomplete.
The Constitution, and even the Amendments to it, should be seen as enabling self-determination as much as protecting rights. That, at least, was the view of the men who created it.
The monumental challenge the Constitution’s creators faced lay in combining the two central pillars of republican thought that informed the drafting of the Constitution and the ratification debate that followed. All sides agreed that government’s power came from and should remain with the people and that the people (or at least a majority thereof) should have the ultimate say in the fate of the nation. Yet they also knew that majorities, once empowered, tend to rob minorities of their rights. The challenge, therefore, came in empowering and disempowering majorities at the same time, in providing a system of government favorable to self-determination while also protecting the rights of minorities.
On the surface, we might conclude that the Antifederalists feared the danger of powerful majorities and this led them to demand a Constitution with a Bill of Rights. This is not wrong, but again, it is incomplete. In fact, the Antifederalists worried just as much about attenuation.
Attenuation expresses a simple arithmetic in this way: in a nation of 10 voters, each vote counts for one tenth of the total; in a nation of 100 voters, each counts for one one-hundredth. And so on. With each additional voter, the impact of each vote decreases — it becomes attenuated.
The Anti-Federalists worried that a growing nation would result in ever smaller opportunities for individuals to take part in self-governing. This could lead to apathy because more and more voters would come to believe that their vote no longer mattered. Worst of all, after years of feeling this way, an apathetic citizenry would become ripe for a despot because too many people would have already grown comfortable letting others decide their fate for them.
The Founders responded to this concern by ensuring that government in the country consisted of multiple levels. Today, we have (of course) 50 state governments, each with a constitutional jurisdiction over their citizens. But we also have more than 90,000 local government units (including townships, school districts, county governments and more).
More to the point, most governing happens at this level. The logic behind this proliferation of local governments follows the compromise worked out by the Founders. Those local governments typically affect our day-to-day lives the most. Our police and fire departments along with our libraries and schools usually reside within the jurisdiction of local government. Local government is also where our vote counts the most, or (put another way) where our vote is least attenuated. Conversely, the federal government typically interacts with us much less but is also where our vote is most attenuated.
Ironically, as the nation has grown in size our focus (some would say our obsessions) has turned increasingly to the federal government (and specifically the president). Sadly, this obsession tends to blind a president’s supporters to the concerns of their locality while leaving the president’s detractors feeling unnecessarily powerless. More to the point, it misses the genius of our constitutional arrangement by giving voters an excuse to shirk their duty as citizens in between presidential elections.
The best way to respect the government that the Founders gave us is to vote this coming Nov. 4, and to do so as informed and responsible citizens. In doing so, we counter the claim by the Antifederalists that the growth of the nation necessarily leads to apathy and, ultimately, to despotism.