Unwritten Constitutionalist

• Published in: American conservative (Arlington, Va.) Va.), 2016-03, Vol.15 (2), p.36
• Main Authors: Moffit, Robert Emmet, Reinsch, Richard M
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: American history; Brownson, Orestes Augustus (1803-76); Conservatism; Democracy; Freedoms; Politics
• ISSN: 1540-966X

Having been "mugged by reality," he revolted against the overblown promises of "popular democracy" and the notion that the voice of the "sovereign people" was the voice of God. The people had been easily duped, he thought, by the faux populism of the Whigs. Salvation, [Orestes Augustus Brownson] was coming to understand, would not be found in the leveling condition of democratic equality. Over the next four years, he argued himself into conservatism in politics and religion. In rejecting socialism, which he would come to label "social despotism," he developed a new appreciation for the idea of limited government. Writing in The American Republic (1865), his masterwork on political theory, Brownson was crystalline on the subject of federalism. Through the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, he said, the sovereign territorial people of the United States designed a unique division of governmental authority rooted in the distinctions between the American peoples general and particular interests and relations. In other words, in American federalism, there is no supremacy of the states over the general government. Nor is the general government supreme over the states. "In their respective spheres neither yields to the other," Brownson writes in The American Republic. "In relation to the matters within its jurisdiction, each government is independent and supreme regard to the other, and subject only to the convention"-the convention being the federal Constitution. Liberty is at the heart of what Orestes Brownson called "the American Idea." Brownson appreciated John Locke's natural-rights conclusions, but he broke with Locke on the key issue of the origin and ground of government and political authority. In rejecting the Lockean social contract, Brownson held instead, with the classical philosophers and medieval schoolmen, that society and government were equally natural. Society and government were, that is, equally governed by natural law-though the concrete social and political order of any given people was shaped by history and providence.