(ambient music) - [Announcer] The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents the Civic Discourse Project, Sustaining American Political Order in History and Practice, this week-- - The mid-century political scientists said, well, wouldn't it be better if we had parties which didn't have these historical roots, but we had one clearly liberal party and one clearly conservative party?

That was their prayers.

Their prayers have been answered.

- [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

And now Michael D. Barone, the senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, talks about a Constitution for a diverse nation.

- Today, I wanna look back, farther back, 250 years at how a baker's dozen of British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard with three million people managed to become in this time a continental nation of 333 million people, with 5% of the world's population, a quarter of the world's economic product, and perhaps half the world's military capacity.

And that's happened, even though from its colonial beginnings, America has always been a land of diversity.

Now, conventional wisdom in much political commentary in recent years has been that the United States has only recently had diversity.

We used to just be a country where everybody was culturally the same and culturally uniform and so forth.

I think that's entirely wrong.

America has always been a land of diversity.

When you read about that colonial era and about the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, you realize that was always a diverse unit as the founders well knew.

It had religious diversity at a time when memories were still fresh of European and British Isles religious wars.

It had economic diversity, and a continent with many different climates, geographies, and natural resources.

It had cultural diversity reflecting the different folk ways that settlers brought to different parts of North America from different parts of the British Isles, from the Netherlands and France, and Antebellum America's two great ports, New York and New Orleans, and of course from those who were brought enslaved ships from Africa.

So what has kept this continental size diverse nation together?

Something that the original founders were not at all sure could be done.

Two things in my view, the first is the Constitution of the United States.

A structure of government that has fostered cohesion while providing room for diversity.

It's criticized today, you'll hear that sometimes on the campaign trail as it often has been in its history as an antique relic, unsuited to the industrial age, unsuited to the computer age and so forth.

My argument here is that the Constitution was fashioned for and suitable for an always diverse nation.

The other thing that I think has been important is the two party system.

The success of pairs of political parties, the most recent pair coexisting and competing over the past 170 years, the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world, which operating within the Constitutional framework have competed in offering visions and policies capable of winning majority support in an always diverse society.

Of course, people have often criticized the parties and complained that a two party system limits voters' choices.

But as I look back at four different periods in our history, each lasting about two or three generations, my conclusion is that our Constitution and our parties have mostly been well-suited to the democratic governance of a continental and culturally diverse republic.

Let me take a look at each of these four periods in turn.

The first of these periods, these eras, runs approximately from 1765 to 1815 from the Stamp Act protests in Colonial America to the Treaty of Ghent and the Battle of New Orleans that ended the war of 1812.

That first few people thought of the 13 seaboard colonies as a single unit.

Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s proposed an Albany Plan of Union in the colonies, that never went anywhere.

The idea was the colonies were all different in that they didn't really have much in common.

And in fact, it was only after the British sent large numbers of British troops to Massachusetts in 1774, that 12 colonies did send delegates to that first continental Congress in that year in Philadelphia.

As I learned in researching my book, "Mental Maps of the Founders," the assembled delegates understood how diverse their constituencies were.

They didn't need the brilliant historian, David Hackett Fischer's wonderful volume "Albion's Seed," which I recommend to everyone, to tell that settlers from four different parts of the British Isles brought different folk ways to different parts of colonial America.

They knew that, they knew that the New England colonies were founded by Calvinists, the Virginia and the Carolinas by Anglicans, Maryland by Catholics, Pennsylvania by Quakers, and New York by Dutch reformers.

Assembling in Philadelphia's Independence Hall, how many of you been to Independence Hall in the place in Philadelphia?

So 2,400 miles away, we're pretty well traveled here.

They knew in that Independence Hall they were aware of the quarter million unruly Scotts-Irish settlers who had been shipping across the sea in the dozen years before the American Revolution, who had landed in Quaker Philadelphia and were escorted out to the violent Appalachian frontier.

The Quakers were sort of pacifist, and the Scotts-Irish were fighters, a form of diversity, which echoes today.

And George Washington as the commander of the Continental Army quickly learned that leadership tactics accepted by his deferential Virginia militia didn't work very well with the prickly and stubborn New England Yankees.

They had different attitudes, diverse attitudes.

The revolution defined these 13 colonies as an independent nation with boundaries in the 1783 Treaty as large as Western Europe, from Scotland to Sicily, a huge expansive territory, but without a functioning government, the capable of levying taxes or fielding an army.

The Constitution signed by 55 delegates on September 17th, 1787.

The Constitution created a super structure, a federal government with exclusive power over foreign policy.

It created a free economic market far larger than any in Europe without trade barriers over a nation then of four million people.

It provided protections for property rights and commerce, banned impairment contracts, authorized bankruptcy patent, and copyright laws.

As an author, I've always liked the copyright laws, yet acknowledged the existence of slavery but it was careful as the historian Sean Wilentz has painstakingly demonstrated in a recent book to leave slavery only as a state institution, not a federal institution, not given affirmative sanction in the Constitution.

And that was happening in a decade when the New England states and Pennsylvania were passing laws to abolish slavery gradually.

Not immediately as we would all want it to be done today, but the idea of abolishing slavery was in the air in a way that it had not been 20 years before the American Revolution.

Compromises in the convention therefore resulted in a framework that left room for New Nations diversity.

Each state had two senators, Article Five makes that provision unappealable, elected at different times with House members elected every two years by very wide franchises.

Many more voters were allowed than in any comparable European institution.

In districts proportionate to population, the Constitution established the first regularly scheduled national census in history and stated that representation would be dependent on population.

That was an innovation.

The Constitution of the Bill of Rights proposed by the first Congress quickly ratified, made room for religious diversity in a way that did not exist in Europe.

With no religious test for offices, they had in Britain, no restriction on the free exercise of religion, of any religion which was different from anything in Europe, no federal established church, and also nor federal ban on state established churches, which continued in a couple cases till the 19th century.

The founders hated the idea of political parties, but they formed them nevertheless.

The parties became recognized by...

Recognized that the parties were gonna present national tickets for president and vice president.

The electoral college was not gonna work as initially was determined, and by 1804, they passed the 12th Amendment that basically gives the people a choice between two political parties with the president and vice president on each side.

And the election, the Constitution's election for a single president, single senators, representatives chosen mostly in single member districts.

That structure, most of it in the Constitution, some in the legislation, gives political parties incentives to build inevitably diverse coalitions to try to get 50% of the votes of the electoral votes, or to vote members of Congress as Jefferson's party did more successfully than anyone has ever since.

The second period, the War of 1812, was followed by what I call the headlong republic from 1815 to 1865, years in which the New Nation's population grew more than 30% each decade.

I mean that's an enormous rate of growth.

What have we been growing recently, 6% per decade or something like that?

The nation was expanded geographically by Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams' negotiations with Britain, Spain, and Russia taking America's boundaries all the way to the Pacific Ocean, or at least theoretically.

Adams' sometimes bitter rival Andrew Jackson expelled almost all of the Indians west of the Mississippi River and Americans surged beyond the nation's borders even, settling in West Florida, Texas, Oregon, country Utah, California even before those areas become part of the United States.

There was headlong process in transportation and communication with steamships, railroads, telegraph, headlong economic growth and wealth manufacturing in the northeast, corn and pork in the Midwest, cotton in the deep south.

No one quite knew where America was headed or whether it would careen out of control.

The headlong Republic saw the founding of the Democratic Party, oldest political party in the world, created by Martin Van Buren, as a diverse alliance between the booming South, rural Southwest and booming New York.

A body in which party loyalty would trump regional interests and especially the widening cultural diversity between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North and the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River.

Van Buren's immediate purpose in 1832 and remember, the first Democratic National Convention was 192 years ago when we had another one in that chain of quadrennial conventions going on this summer.

New England Yankees cooped up in the northeast corner of the country for two centuries surge westward with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825.

Upstate New York, Northern Ohio, Indiana, Southern Michigan, Chicago.

They brought with them religious enthusiasm, innovation, and reformist causes like temperance, women's rights, abolition of slavery.

They opposed Texas' annexation the war with Mexico and they were pleased when California with the Gold Rush migrants petitioned to be admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850.

The next three generations, 1865 to 1940, was what I call the two separate nation's period of American history.

In my 2013 book, "Shaping the Nation", I described how in these 75 years, only about one million southern blacks, one million southern whites moved from the South to the North, even though wages in the North were double what they were in the South.

They had an economic incentive, but it was as if there was a wall along the Potomac River and the Ohio River, two separate nations, even while some 30 million immigrants were coming from Europe to North America, almost entirely to the Northern states.

You have vast industrial development, you have farm to factory migration, you have huge technological progress.

You have the building of what became the arsenal of democracy in World War II.

This surge of immigrants, mainly from Western Europe up through the 1890s, then largely people who were second caste people in multi-ethnic empires, the Russian Empire in particular, the Austria-Hungary, the German Empire.

So you had Pols and Slovaks and Serbs, Jews in large numbers who were all kind of secondary people in the society.

They were attracted, I think, by the idea of civic equality pertaining in the United States.

They were eager to have their children educated in schools that taught American history, perfected the English language and provided for upward mobility and civic equality.

The South during those years was really another country.

Similarly, a dozen years later when the Depression, very small, cut production in half and raised unemployment to 25%.

Voters in 1932 turned to the Democratic Party by a 57 to 40% margin, a big landslide.

Yet neither the Democrat's electoral disaster in 1920, nor the Republican's electoral disaster in 1932 proved fatal the parties.

And my 2017 book on how America's political parties changed, I argued that both of these parties had built up an enduring character that was useful in a way of organizing opinion in a culturally diverse country.

The Republicans party was always centered on people who were thought to be typical Americans, but who were not a majority.

They had to win over others in order to win elections.

The Democratic Party was always a collection of outgroups of people who were not thought of as typical Americans, but who when they held together could and didn't win majorities of the vote.

And it's a system that prevented the kind of class warfare and violence that we saw in various parts of Europe, presented the emergence of socialist parties, as in Britain and Germany, presented the emergence of fascist movements, which we saw in Italy and Germany, of course, the American political parties operating under the Constitution, sent history in a different and better direction.

Come to the last of my four periods, World War II, it was an age of conformity, a period of early marriages and few divorces of record numbers of birth, the baby boom.

It was a period of strong associational activity and involvement, a time of record church membership, much higher than in the colonial period or the earlier republic.

All time high participation in civic organization.

A time when millions of people were as employees of giant corporations and members of giant labor unions, proudly productive as small cogs in very large machines.

Today, many Americans look back on the mid-century moment with affection.

Conservatives look at it, say it's high rates of family formation and religious participation.

Gee, I wish we could go back there.

Liberals look at the high rate of Union membership and the continuing wartime, 91% tax rates on up high earners and say, gee, I wish we could go back there.

But it was just a moment, it didn't last.

As the baby boomers grew eagerly into adolescence and hesitatingly into adulthood, they refuse to imitate their elders, creating markets for their own rebellious music, protesting America, military service, avoiding early marriage and declining to create a baby boom of their own.

During the mid-century movement, that period of Americans who had stayed put in the depression early 1930s were moved around in voluntarily in the wartime 1940s, suddenly were free to move wherever they wanted.

The farm to factory migrations of 1890-1930 resumed and continued to the point where a country, which most people lived on farms in the late 1890s, becomes a country where only about 3% of people live on farms.

Wartime military service opened up the possibility of living year round in sunny California.

Midwesterners especially going there, increasing the state's population from seven million in 1940 to 20 million in 1970, just 30 years tripling.

Arizona, Maricopa County here had 331,000 people in the 1950 census, it's over four million today.

So people moved around the country.

Essentially what happened, Americans pulled down that wall that seemed to exist between north and south, along the Potomac River, the Ohio River that seemed to keep Americans from mixing with each other for 75 years after the Civil War.

That wall has been gone for a while and the war pulled that war down.

Even as one third of American black people moved from the rural south to the urban north in just a single generation from 1940 to 1965, just 25 years, a huge movement of people suddenly free to move where they wanted to go.

So the Civil Rights Act passed, the Voting Rights Act passed.

The Reconstruction Amendments finally became successful.

The Constitution was effectively endorsed in the way that people lived.

This mid-century moment sadly expired.

It means violence and disorder and disillusion.

But through this, the United States was able to struggle to maintain superiority or parody with the Soviet Union, the Cold War that had begun within months of World War, end of World War II.

Electorates with living memories of what everyone called the Depression and the war reelected presidents of both parties with landslide majorities, 1956, '64, '72, '84, because they seemed to produce peace and prosperity because people knew, voters knew what the opposite of those things were like, and they were ready to reward people that seemed to produce that.

That goes on, the last time that happens is in 1984.

The beneficiary is Ronald Reagan, who interestingly had made his career in the universal media of the middle third of the 20th century successively in radio, in movies and television, that universal culture.

But we go on to create, as Reagan talked about, his farewell address.

We no longer have that universal popular culture.

We have niche cultures in which people live in diverse cultures with diverse attitudes, with one hopes the Constitution to enable us to cohere when necessary with the political parties struggling to create majorities and so forth.

Many voters have memories of the 30s or the 1940s.

We do have a situation where the mid-century political scientists said, well, wouldn't it be better if we had parties which didn't have these historical roots, but we had one clearly liberal party and one clearly conservative party.

That was their prayers.

Their prayers have been answered.

We have that now and of course everybody complains about it, not least the political scientists.

And so we have a sort of polarized parody between the parties.

They're about equal strength.

They have less incentive to compromise than they did in the 1940-1990 period because they have some reason to hope that the next presidential election, they're gonna win the White House, the Senate and the House, they'll have a trifecta.

And in fact, in six of the last eight presidential election years, that's happened three times for the Democrats, three times for the Republicans.

To those who like me are depressed somewhat by current developments, don't despair about the future.

This always diverse nation with its antique Constitution, its obstreperous political parties has faced and overcome greater challenges before.

Americans in the headlong republic of the 19th century in the two nations during three generations after the Civil War, but the Constitution continues to provide a framework in which a diverse nation can achieve cohesion and still space for diverse people to live comfortably together.

And the political parties, even if you agree with me that they have been performing suboptimally lately, still have incentives to amass majorities in a diverse nation, 50% plus in which current deadlocks and debates will inevitably yield.

Those of us who are on the younger side of half of this audience can have reasonable hopes that this system which has been going on and being developed for more than 237 years can endure, can persist, and can prosper, thanks very much.

(applause) - What will you make of things like the influence throughout history of minor parties, sort of having influences here or there, or even today when you look at voter registration, the majority of people are actually registered as neither of the two major parties.

So basically my question is what do you make of the other guys?

- Well, as someone who was once active in the Democratic Party and who has been more recently more likely to support the Republican Party, I've been parts of both and have friends and people I admire in both.

I think the two party system is very useful because it gives an incentive for parties to be 50% parties.

And that means you gotta, in a diverse country, you gotta attract a lot of people with different priorities, different views, and an ability to get across those.

It's useful to have parties have that incentive.

Other systems can work in different ways and maybe tolerable in their results.

And sometimes, third parties will come along and they'll say that they add ideas to the dialogue and so forth.

You got people now who are pushing rank choice voting.

I don't think it's an improvement.

You tend to get small minorities.

My prejudice is the competition of the two parties.

However, suboptimally, that competition may be carried on at some points like today is preferable and tends to give you better results.

A lot of people with goodwill and a lot of knowledge disagree, but that's my view.

- I'm an international student from Mexico and there we have a multi-party political system, although recently it has, with coalitions, become almost just through-- - Maybe it's a one party system after the last election.

- Oh yeah, a lot of controversy over that.

But what I wanted to ask was, how has the US two party system been so successful in making people feel like they are sufficiently represented by one party or the other to where they identify, they register as and they vote for that party without ever feeling the need for a third party or a fourth party?

- One of my lessons in life that I've sort of developed is that in public affairs, success breeds failure.

We are a prosperous, mostly successful, mostly tolerant, mostly sort of wonderful country.

And we build up institutions and things that don't work very well and they keep on going because they have vested interests, because laws perpetuate them because this reason and that reason.

- Well Michael, thank you again for a fine talk for our Constitution Day.

- [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

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