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Mark Peterson, "The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History" (Princeton UP, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome everyone. My name is Dr. Zachary Williams and we want to welcome you to the New Books Network. And today we have a privilege of having Dr. Mark Peterson with us. Dr. Mark Peterson is the Edmund S. Morgan professor of History at Yale University, where he teaches Early American history, earned his Ph.D. in history at Harvard University and taught previously at the University of Iowa from 1998 to 2007 and at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2007 to 2018, where he was chair of of the history department from 2015 to 2018. And today we're here to talk about his most recent book, the Making and Breaking of the American A Thousand year history. And it is said of Dr. Peterson's book, Its provocative new history of America's Constitution and an urgent call to action for a nation and a country confronted by challenges and its founders could have never imagined. Welcome, Dr. Peterson. And to begin with, could you please just walk us through your book and explain its significance?
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Okay. Well, thank you, Zachary, for having me on your podcast. The book is a departure in studies of the American Constitution in that it takes an approach that's rather unusual. Its focus is not on lawyers and judges and constitutional interpretation so much as it is on the relationship between the American people and their Constitution. A major takeaway of the book that I hope readers will get from it is that in the long history of constitution making and adaptation, going all the way back to the origins of the North American colonies in Britain, constitutions are best understood as a relationship between the land and the people, their form of government and written instruments, documents that define and limit and shape those. In other words, I'm trying to get us away from thinking of the Constitution as nothing but a text and rather as an ongoing relationship between society, government and written texts that help shape them.
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B
It's interesting and want to kind of walk through different parts of your book. So if you can explain to our readers, I mean our listeners and our readers, how it is a comprehensive look at, as you said, the making and breaking of the American Constitution. And let's begin first asking your book situation the US Constitution within a thousand year constitutional tradition. How does this long deray perspective challenge conventional American constitutional historiography?
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C
Well, excellent question. So yes, the United States is, as some this year like to point out, only 250 years old. So how can this be a thousand year history? Well, the answer is also the answer to the making and breaking question. That is, if we think about constitutions as relationships, then we can see that this making and breaking is a constant ongoing process. So I begin the story almost a thousand years ago in medieval England, because that is when we have the first major written constitutional document, by which I mean the Doomsday book, this huge rate book, a kind of an economic census of the kingdom of England shortly after the Norman conquest by William the Conqueror. And what the king then William did, was that he wanted an assessment of what it was that he and his Norman knights had conquered. And so he sent out agents to every single plot of land, more than 15,000 of them in England at the time, in order to see who owned the land, how much land was there, who lived on it, how productive was it, how much Revenue could the king and his government expect from every plot of land every year. And this was a constitutional document in the sense that it recorded the basic structure of society and how that society, which was an agricultural society, of course, would produce the resources that the king could then use to keep the peace in his kingdom. It's not full of complex statements of constitutional principles and the like. Those, in a sense, already existed in the fact that there was a king and a nobility and the church, and all of those things had their governing structures in place already. But it was a constitutional document in the sense that it described how the resources of the land would be mobilized for the sake of its government. And in a sense, this is really what constitutions do. That is, they set out how a frame of government will work so that the resources will be made available for the government to do what it does. Now, the story of English constitutionalism, which also becomes the story of American constitutionalism, is then how those basic premises change over time, and how in those changes, we get sort of principles and structures and ideals of government that get built into the way the government works. So for the sake of Americans, one of the fundamental things to understand is that when England started to colonize North America, all of the forms of land ownership and political organization were derived from this older English structure. So in each of the colonies that became the states of the United States, the English king would grant a big tract of land to a small number of subjects and give a charter that is a written document that would lay out the terms under which these people and their descendants could rule this piece of land. So, in other words, the English ideals and practices for government and land holding were transferred to North America with these colonies. Now, there's a striking difference, and this has a huge impact on the subsequent history of America. And that is, you know, it was already the case in 1086 that pretty much every inch of usable farmland in England was already owned and occupied and surveyed, and they could predict what its annual revenue would be in America. None of the land was like that at the time of colonization. It was owned and occupied and settled and used by Indian peoples, But they didn't organize their governments or raise tax revenues in the ways that the English did off of their land. And so the entirety of American history since this colonization has been a project of colonists projecting these English ways of understanding land ownership and how you build government out of that onto the North American continent, which really wasn't like that until English colonists begin to. To acquire land from Indians, often through violent or unsavory means and then transform it into land that resembled the England of Doomsday.
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B
I mean, you resist the notion that the Constitution is a singular founding moment in 1787, which is an interesting perspective. And with that, it begs the question, how should we rethink founding as a process rather than an event? And what does that sort of shift in thinking reveal about power and contingency? And it also invokes ideas like with Eric Foner and talk about the second Founding.
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C
Yes.
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B
And so how do we think about founding as ongoing and contingency?
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C
Excellent. Well, so this isn't the place to explain the entirety of the American Revolution, but needless to say, by the 1770s, 13 of these British colonies in America had come to the conclusion that the British Constitution that they had been living under, of which their colonial charters were part. Right. That this Constitution was no longer working for them. Right. Because the British government was acting in ways that, to them, violated their rights as Englishmen. And one of the things I stress in the book and I think is really important to understand is that in the colonial period and right up to independence, British colonists in America loved the British Constitution. They would talk about it as the finest constitution the world has ever seen, the best protector of liberty and rights and prosperity. The kind of things that Americans say about the U.S. constitution nowadays. Right. But they were eventually felt as if they were forced to break from it because the understanding of that Constitution by the Crown and by Parliament was different from their own and was, in their view, being punitive towards them in ways that they could no longer tolerate. So when the states declare their independence, the very first thing that they do is to write new constitutions for themselves. So this is one of the reasons why I don't want to equate 1787 in Philadelphia with the Founding, because it's actually a much longer process. So first, the states take their old charters and start revising and rewriting them so that they will have a fundamental foundation for themselves as states. And then secondly, the states come together and frame their first constitution, which we call the Articles of Confederation, as a way for them to work together to win the war against Britain. So one of the reasons why Philadelphia in 1787 isn't the founding, is that there already was one before that. Right. There was a working framework of government with the states and the nation already in place. And the big key, the reason why the first Constitution, the Articles, doesn't sustain itself, is that when the war ended, the Treaty of Paris that ended the war granted to the United States, this enormous territory west of the Appalachian Mountains all the way to the Mississippi River. Well, in some ways, from the US Point of view, that was great. It was going to be a much bigger nation than they anticipated. But on the other hand, it was a huge problem because the citizen population of the United States pretty much all lived east of the Appalachians, and the part west of it was Indian country, still owned, occupied, dominated by a large number of Indian nations. And so under the Articles of Confederation, the national government had almost no powers that would be useful to transform this huge access of new land into the sort of settled, developed land that the 13 colonies east of the Appalachians were. And so one of the major arguments of the book is that the Philadelphia Constitution, which was deliberately set out to be a revision of the Articles of Confederation, actually breaks out of that old framework in large part in order to empower a much stronger national government that will be able to do the job of transforming the West. And that includes the taxation power, it gains, the executive branch and the president's powers, the ability to raise a military, which will become vital to the conquest of the West. And so, rather than calling 1787 the Founding, I prefer in the book to think of it as a kind of realignment, you know, that they're taking the institutions and practices that they've inherited and revising them in order to meet the challenges of the moment. Right. That was the key to it, that the shift from the Articles to the Constitution happens because people feel like the current framework still isn't going to work for them, and so they need to realign things to make it work.
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B
That's good. And with that, how do you balance ideas of intellectual history, including thought ideas, legality, legal notions, with material factors? War, economy, expansion.
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C
Yes.
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B
And how does that sort of play a role in this sort of evolving framework of constitutional development? A living, breathing document that's in right.
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C
No. And that's. You put your finger on one of these old, venerable controversies in the historical profession, people trying to pit ideas and intellectual traditions against the material. And I don't buy it. I don't think that that distinction really holds up in the long run. I was a student of Bernard Bailyn as a graduate student at Harvard, and he, too, was someone who pushed very hard against it. That is, as I read the documents and the process of Constitution making, I see both of these working together. Right. So as I said, colonial Americans loved, revered the British Constitution, and yet eventually they are willing to abandon it because their experiences are such that that they can tell it is not working for them. And one of the key factors in that was the fact of the explosive population growth of British North America across the 18th century. So the last time the constitution had been the British Constitution had been revised in a major way was 1689. And at that point there were fewer than 200,000 colonists living in all of British North America. By the time of the Revolution, it's more than 2 million. And by the first U.S. census in 1790, it was 4 million. So in that 75 year period, that which becomes the United States goes from being a tiny speck in the greater British realm to being like 40% of the size of everything that Britain governed. And so those material circumstances, changing population, changing land, changing economy, had everything to do with why Americans are now discontent with the British Constitution. And therefore it leads them to think, okay, how can we take those parts of the British Constitution which we have loved, use them in ways that suit us, and get rid of the parts that don't work for us? Right. So in other words, the material and the intellectual are always going together. Right? Yes, they read John Locke and they read Montesquieu and these various European philosophers, but they read them so that they could think about how to adapt constitutional principles to their own world. Right. And so what I'm trying to do in this book is make sure that we pay attention to the actual world of the United States when we think about the Constitution as a set of principles and ideas.
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B
It's interesting with that, the broader sort of, you know, sort of implications of it, the broader sort of reach of it gets into world making. And I've taught, you know, in some of my classes, Adam Getachu's book World making after empire and colonial, you know, you know, sort of post colonial Africa and even how, you know, America is a part of a global, you know, sort of, you know, sort of evolution entity. It is a. An entity that is oftentimes distancing itself or not trying to associate with empire, you know, its ideals and its sort of framework and things of that nature. But how does the idea of empire and even notions of imperial expansion also part and parcel of America's founding and evolution and even in its sort of constitutive sort of pieces? And how do we see that in relationship to other sort of colonial, imperial, settler, colonialist entities, France, Great Britain and the like, who have a constitutive role within the making of America, both you know, as sort of, you know, settler founding sort of entities, but also sort of, you know, cultural and linguistic and other sort of, you know, pieces as well. So how does that also play a role in this whole, you know, understanding of America's notions of freedom and equality, justice, or even some of the other sort of ideas that are seen as sort of major sort of, you know, thought pieces that are in line with and associated with American Constitution?
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C
Yeah, those are big questions. I'll do my best. So, you know, lots of people involved in the making of new American constitutions or the realignment of the 1770s and 80s were very upfront about the notion that essentially what they were doing was, yes, rejecting British rule, British authority over them, but at the same time sort of picking up the ball of Britain's colonial project and taking it over themselves. Right. They were going to run with it now. And Jefferson early on refers to the United States as an empire of liberty. And in the chapter of my book on the convention, the writing of the Constitution and then the ratification of it, I talk about how fiercely various Americans argued about the Constitution. And some of the people who we think of as founders really hated it. Patrick Henry, leading spokesman of the revolutionary movement, then governor of Virginia, he hated this new constitution, whereas others, like James Wilson, for instance, of Pennsylvania, loved it, thought it was great. And both of them. And in the speeches they give in each of their ratifying constitutions, Wilson in Pennsylvania, Patrick Henry, explain their opinion on this, but essentially both of them agree that what's going to happen with this Constitution, I'll quote you, Patrick Henry right here, he says the American spirit, assisted by the ropes and chains of consolidation. That's what he means by the Constitution, he says, is about to convert this country into a powerful and mighty empire. Now, he thinks this is terrible because he was a true anti imperialist, whereas James Wilson says the same thing. But he thinks it's great. He says to accomplish this great end ought to be the leading view of all our patriots and statesmen. Right. So no matter where people stood on the Constitution, they could see that by putting this powerful new government in place, that's what was going to happen. The expansion was going to happen. The conversion of territory, the gaining of Indian lands and this growing population was just, you know, they were setting up a system that would make this happen. So what I call that system in the book is the Doomsday machine, right. And not in the Dr. Strangelove sense of the, you know, of the bomb that ends the world, but rather that what the United States government becomes is this powerful engine that uses the tax resources and the military power and, and the expansion of the population of the country to rapidly transform, to gain Indian land, sell it to settlers and make it into more and more new states in the government. And so it's an implicitly imperial process. And what it's kind of doing is it's changing some of the definition of empire. That is the British, the French, the Spanish, going back in history to earlier imperial powers, tended to see their colonies as sort of permanent subsidiary powers that would not have the full rights, would not be fully part of the kingdom, the empire, etc. Subordinates. And what the promise of the US Constitution, at least for a while, was that as it expands into colonies, territories, it will eventually turn them into parts of the home country. Right. It won't keep them in a colonial status forever. And so in some ways it's just as imperial, it's just defining the future of what that empire will look like differently. And in doing so, it's doing something that no other empire had done, that is it is implicitly promising to its citizens, which by then in those early days were essentially free white people, that it would use the power of the nation, its taxation wealth, its military power, et cetera, as a kind of welfare system for them. It would make more and more land cheaply available to them so that they could replicate the colonizing process, become landowners, build new states out of it. Right. And this is something that the older empires hadn't really done, but the United States is going to do for those people who are privileged to be its citizens, right? Indians, not taxed, they're excluded from the get go. Right. Enslaved people, they don't count as citizens either. Right. But for those who are inside the citizenship circle, then the American government is going to, you Know, make this promise of expansion to develop their future. Right. It's quite a striking thing.
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B
It's interesting when we think about, you know, a Constitution is constitutive of different pieces of different elements, voices, perspectives, values, cultures. And, you know, I'm based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So we automatically think of one of these sort of centerpieces, not only of the United States, what becomes the United States, but also colonial expansion, the Louisiana churches, and even ways in which there's a relationship, as you're saying, between the Constitution and expansion, slavery. These questions, regional expansion, expansion, advance of slavery, moral ambivalence, moral contradictions, moral ambiguity as it relates to what does that mean as those pieces are become constitutive of America not just now, but future interpretively, but also in its own time. And even now, when you talk about how do we interpret legal precedent against the backdrop of history and, you know, and social and cultural sort of analysis of it, how do we come to understand how it applies to groups to where it may not have applied to which. Which, you know, in a lot of ways applies to, you know, most every group that has come to inherit the promise of America and so embedded structure within its constitutive design. How does that speak to sort of a broad application of its principles and ideas from those particular earlier times to ours now? How do we wrestle and grapple with that in a sort of ongoing, sort of evolving way?
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C
Right. Well, let me start with Louisiana. Cause that's a great place to begin. So, as I'm sure you and your listeners know, the colonies that became states and founded the United States more or less all began as British colonies. The major exception to that is New York, which was originally Dutch New Netherland. But the English had already taken it over by the 1660s. So it had more than a century as a British colony as well. And so they collectively, as they declare their independence, are overthrowing the same ruler, the British king, and setting a new course. And they all did this essentially voluntarily, Right. Each of these colonies says, yes, we're joining this rebellion. We're joining this new confederacy. And so when they made the Philadelphia Constitution, it was as these 13 states who had all voluntarily joined together, and now they were going to, as you say, constitute a new nation that would, according to the treaty, extend out to the Mississippi River. But Louisiana was beyond that. Right. Louisiana had been Spanish. The French acquire it in this sort of secret treaty in 1800. And then Napoleon decides he's done with it and is willing to sell it. And the United States makes this Purchase. Okay, well, Louisiana had this long colonial history of, yes, its own indigenous population and then Spanish and then French colonists and Spanish again. And of course, these were people who had lived under monarchies, right, as the Spanish and the French governments were. There are by the time of 1803, lots of enslaved people there, lots of refugees from the Haitian revolution had come to Louisiana. So, yes, the US Government purchases it. Now, Jefferson himself knew, and he uses this word, that the purchase was extra constitutional. That is, there's no language in the Constitution authorizing the president or Congress to buy a huge chunk from a foreign country, but he does it anyway. Secondly, he also knows and writes about the fact that nobody has asked the people of Louisiana if they want to join the United States, whereas everyone who had been part of the founding of the United States had done so voluntarily. But no one's going to ask the Louisianans then this question. Nor does Louisiana have a tradition of small r republican self government, right? They've been a monarchy, right. And so immediately the question comes up of, well, if we buy this territory from a foreign country, can we make a state out of it? And that's an even more difficult constitutional question because the Constitution doesn't say anything about that either, right? About making states out of foreign countries. And Jefferson is very puzzled about this at the beginning. He says, well, if we can make a state out of Louisiana, why couldn't we make a state out of Ireland or the Netherlands or something like that? And that doesn't make any sense to him. So his idea was that there ought to be a constitutional amendment that makes this possible. And his logic was this, that, okay, when the states got together and made the Constitution, it was for a fixed territory, the territory out to the Mississippi. And everybody knew that, right? And so when they were making all the compromises and the adjustments and this much representation and all, all of the states had this clear idea of what they were talking about. But, you know, Louisiana was as big as the whole United States already. And you could have imagined, I don't know, 20, 50 more states out of that. And the thought was, well, wait a minute, if we can just let them in, they'll overwhelm us. They'll be. And so he was sure that you needed all of the states to buy into this by virtue of an amendment, you know, that kind of unanimity. But his fellow members of his party who had a majority in Congress, said, no, no, no, no, no. We can just treat this like Ohio, right? Or Kentucky or whatever places that were already part of the United states and just admit them by a majority vote, and that's what they go ahead and do. But the thing is, there was big opposition to this from the Northern states, New England, New York and the like, because they knew that if you start admitting, you know, new Southern states, new Western states, and especially if they become slave states, like the south was increasingly becoming already, well, then you'll get this growing majority of, you know, these sort of Southern planter oligarchs running things to our detriment. And guess what? They were right. You know, that's literally how the Civil War comes about. Right. The war was fought over slavery, but the triggers that drive it into war are every one of these controversies where expansion leads to fights between the states as to whether they'll be slave states or free states or whatever. Right. So by Congress sort of usurping this power to admit states out of foreign territories, it sets in motion this sort of horrible logic of not just expansion, but expansion with the slavery question at its center. That is the thing that drives the US into civil war. So I'm following from your initial question. Yes. That the constituting practices of a nation can have these drastic consequences. Right. And the weird thing about Jefferson is that he kind of half knew it. You know, like he could see that this was going to be a problem, but he doesn't stop it. You know, he doesn't come forward and say, no, we can't do this until there's an amendment. Right. He just lets it roll along, and then it leads the United States into this disaster that we're kind of still suffering from. Right.
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B
Yeah. So it speaks to your metaphor, your analogy of making and breaking of the association, which is an interesting way to look at that as it relates to all these questions, even as it relates to legal questions of legality and citizenship, whether it's birthright citizenship, whether it's right to vote and the Voting Rights act, everything that comes from it, or even how people come to identify themselves in relationship to national identity? And how do people come to see themselves and how. What's sort of the grounds upon which they're able to stand and lay claim to American inheritance based on this sort of ongoing yet imperfect document, but a document that is sort of a. Grounded in sort of a basis of sort of, again, a national identity that is sort of broadening and stretching and becoming much as people are becoming, as they're coming to contribute to what America is becoming, as it's becoming a global entity. As you're talking about that whole idea, what are some of the key. Talk more about some of the key pivotal periods and moments where this reshaping evidences or shows this constitutional making and breaking that reflects continuity and change. And how does that help to shape American consciousness and even of America as it's sort of a contiguous right.
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C
That's right on point. So I would definitely point to the Jefferson, Louisiana moment as an early moment of breaking right where a first conception of how the Constitution is going to function as a sort of compact among states breaks down when essentially Congress blows right through a kind of constitutional barrier and, and changes this state making process. So there are many more of these. Right. What you mentioned, Eric Foner's book earlier, obviously the fact that the, the Civil War amendments banning slavery, defining citizenship for the first time, including birth citizenship, these are only possible because essentially the Confederate states have removed themselves from active participation in the Union. And so as a condition of their readmission, their agreement to these amendments is required. Right. But without the catastrophe of the Civil War, that couldn't have happened under ordinary circumstances. Another example really is that the social order that the 1787 Constitution imagines is an agricultural society. And because of the expanse of land in the United States, the US does remain an agricultural country for a long time. But it's still the case that across the 19th century, and especially in the second half, urbanization and industrialization are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger things. And it is leading plenty of Americans to think that this century old Constitution isn't going to work that well when more and more of our people are not farmers, are not landholders, you don't have the single family farm as the most common unit of production and life and that sort of thing. And so this is what is leading, say the progressive movement to think, well, we need to make adjustments to this. Right. And so the idea of an income tax emerges at the end of the 19th century. Part of what drives it is when the national government in the 1890s passes these very large, various generous pensions for Civil War veterans, right. Trying to reward the, the soldiers who had fought for the Union, which is going to cost a lot of money, bigger amounts than the US had been accustomed to raising through sort of customs taxes, things like that. And so they propose an income tax on a permanent basis for the first time. And the Supreme Court strikes it down. And they strike it down because according to the original Constitution, if you were going to tax the people directly, you had to raise those taxes in proportion to the population of each state. Right. So New York and Illinois would pay a lot and Vermont and North Dakota would pay hardly any because of the different sizes of the populations. But an income tax doesn't work that way, right? You take the X amount, percentage, whatever, from people, wherever they are. And so the court struck that down, and so they needed an amendment. And finally they get one in 1913 which says, yes, an income tax is legitimate in the United States. And it expressly says that older way of apportioning direct taxation by population, that's gone. We're not going to do that anymore. And on one level, it works, right? I mean, the income tax is the thing that has made the United States government become this huge, powerful entity, right? Without that, you couldn't have had the military, the social policies, all the kinds of things the United States has done. But what it meant then to no longer apportion taxes by state is that people in Congress from poor states, even if they had lots of population now knew that they could vote for policies that would help their states that their own people wouldn't have to pay for. Now, you could argue that this has been a good thing because it has allowed, over the course of the 20th century, the US government to use the massive revenue it collects to shift the wealth of the nation around. So one of the things that this does is it helps take the south out of poverty. From the Civil War onward, the south was this horribly impoverished region, and no one suffered this more than the disenfranchised black people of the south, right? So with, you know, the coming of the New Deal and entities like that, the United States government starts spending money in these places trying to fight poverty, bring in industry and that sort of thing. So that on one level has been a huge success, but on another level, it's been a cause that has created this new sense of the kind of inequalities across the nation and among the states, right? So that there continue to be states, and you can name them easily, California, New York, whatever, that contribute way more than their share to the national income, and other states, poorer states that contribute way less and get much more from it. And so, in other words, what the income tax amendment did was some very useful social things, but undermined an older understanding of how the contributions from the different states should add up to support the nation. Right? And I think one of the many controversies that our country now faces is the horrible maldistribution of representation. We're seeing it fought out in the House now. It's a longstanding problem in the Senate, right. That a state like Vermont or Wyoming gets the same two senators that California or New York does, right? In democratic terms, it's just insane. But we're stuck with it. So part of what I'm trying to do in the later part of the book is to show how these very old ideas about the way things ought to work, which were crafted in an agricultural society, are still lingering in our Constitution in ways that sort of limit and hamper us from having the kind of country we would like. Right. Nowadays, Americans live in metropolitan districts. The U.S. census keeps track of, I don't know, 82 different metropolitan districts that pay no attention to state lines. Here I am in southern Connecticut and we're part of the same metro district that includes New York and New Jersey. And it's a real thing, this whole sort of greater New York area. It's a real thing in ways that like the boundary line between Connecticut and New York when you cross it when you're taking the train or driving i95 and it's like meaningless. It's all the same sort of place, right? And yet these old carryovers from these 18th century constructions still have so much power in how our politics are shaped. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium
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B
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C
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- [44:10]
B
interesting when you talk about representation. You know, the taxation without representation, you know, the, the re. You know, people being accounted 3/5 of the person for representation purposes. How it creates sectional crises, how it creates regional apologists, you know, you know, and this whole idea of being a nation that has to be reconstructed and reinvented over and over and over again, that's a part of making and breaking sort of, you know, you know, metaphor, but also real constitutive piece of, you know, it's a bad play on Humpty Dumpty, you know, being put back together over and over and over again or relationships patches on that day, having to be. It's interesting, but that's who we are. You know, we're. We know we have, we need counseling on a regular basis through an entity like The Supreme Court, it's opposed to sort of, you know, find a way to, you know, to sort of negotiate, navigate these vast differences that initially weren't planned on into perpetuity, to be understood at an earlier time, but to be resolved and wrestled over and thought about and sort of adjudicated, but also to try to be sort of leveraged. But it also has a way of also speaking to who we see ourselves as a whole, but also as pieces of a whole. And this interplay between what can be called resuscitated and reinvented reconstructions. I think we're on our fourth or fifth one now. How does it talk about, speak to interpretively, both the static and dynamic interpretive meanings of Constitution and these wars over what the Constitution, what thus America, American values mean or can be?
- [45:58]
C
Well, yes, so a lot in that question, too. Although I wrote this book over the past four or five years, it's a subject I've been thinking about for a long time, since the 1990s, really. And my own sense is that over the last several decades, people in the United States are somewhat adrift in constitutional terms. That is, I don't think you'll find much agreement across the country in the question of what the purpose is of the United States. What is the United States for? And you may think, well, that's a weird question. What should a country, a nation, be for? Right? But I think it's really important in the United States precisely because of the way in which the United States is this sort of crafted and developing country, right? It's not like it always existed. And I think it's particularly important to think about it as a nation that grew out of a colonial society, right? Because colonies are always for something, right? When a nation, an empire, whatever sends off colonies. And this was true of the ancient Greeks or this was true of the children of Israel colonizing the land of Canaan or Britain in America or whatever, right? They do it because they think, well, we have a better idea. We're going to use this place, this land, because our God is better, our government is better, our economy, something. We're the ones who know, right? And in early America was like, well, indigenous people, Indians, they don't know how to use this land properly, right? We're going to show them, right? So, so there's this sort of purpose behind colonial projects, and the United States almost necessarily picked up on that, right? They, oh, we're creating a new country, and it has all these purposes. And the purposes include, you know, liberty and democracy, but also prosperity and land and growth. And for a while, people are like, okay, that's, that's good. That's where we're going. But by the end of the 20th, early 20th century, as we're facing ecological crises, crises of global inequality, global migration, all kinds of things, I think if you got 10 or 100Americans together in the room and asked them, what's the United States for? The question is like, you'll get 10 different answers. Right? And so to me, that speaks to a kind of deep constitutional crisis, Right. That we don't have a clear set of ideas about what our United States now and going forward should be, should do. Right. And to me then, that feels a lot like the British empire in the 1770s. Right. That on the one hand, all these colonists are like, oh, yes, of course, it's the best constitution ever, but it sure doesn't work for us. It is not solving our problems here. And that's kind of how I think about where we are now. That, yes, there's all kinds of ways in which people love, cherish, revere the U.S. constitution. Yes. Equality before the law, free speech, civil rights, freedom of worship. Sure, right. Terrific. But that doesn't mean it has all of the answers for the kind of country we need to become so that people really can be equal, can look to a prosperous future, but also one where there's clean water and livable environment and housing and all of those. Right. None of those things are in our Constitution. And my point in tracing this whole long story is to say that earlier I gave you a quotation between two founders who had totally different ideas about whether this Constitution was good or bad. Right. But what they all agreed was we do have it in our power as free people to make a constitution that is good for us now. Right? Not the old one, not the British one that's 800 years old. It has good parts to it, but it's not for us going forward. And I really feel like the United States today is walking backwards into a similar kind of situation where all of the old cherished ideals, as wonderful as many of those are, are not enough and that we need to generate new conversations about the kind of constitution that will take us into the future in a way that will defend and protect and support so many things that I actually think huge numbers of Americans actually agree on that we should have have a healthy environment and a safe climate and, you know, health care for everybody and fair housing for everybody. You know what I mean? I don't know why the richest country in the world has to have millions of people living out of doors.
- [51:14]
B
Right.
- [51:16]
C
So, I mean, yes, these are some of my political opinions, but I do think they can be constitutional ones too, in ways that we have kind of lost the ability to imagine. And I'm trying to bring back into focus.
- [51:30]
B
I appreciate what you're saying. And then I think that's at the heart of what the Constitution is and represents. It is. We are. It's a political document. It is a document that speaks to people's social, cultural, economic hopes and aspirations, is aspirational, but also speaks to sort of what can be transformative, you know, what can be. And so. And what does political represent? It represents what people in their everyday experiences are experiencing and aspiring to and wanting to see. And even we entrust into group of political actors, justices and judges, you know, the federal appellate court level and Supreme Court level, you know, a responsibility to be able to, you know, to make sense of what this means. And if you go back to town, times like Brown vs Board of Education and. And that Supreme Court ruling and the petitioning on behalf of those who felt a need and wanted to get legal redress. But how Justices in their particular time, Earl Warren and that court and others sought to address it, but in two halves, the 54 decision and the 55, with all deliberate speed. And what it bequeaths to future generations, this ongoing crises and interpretive struggle and battle that is more than just about a legal document, but also about sort of the cultural questions of cultural continuity and coherence and even cleavage of a country and even memories of it from the Civil War, of a lost cause being resuscitated as people begin to reflect upon, re envisioning and reimagining and reinventing what was and how they come to understand it. And it's this ongoing question that is not about checking boxes or of winning and losing at one particular time. It is continuous and it is a living, breathing as people are, Americans are, from generation to generation. And in this sense, how do you see these constitutional crisis? Are they sort of. Are they aberrations or sort of they routinized and reoccurring facets and features of what America and even the Constitution, is as a political right?
- [53:41]
C
Well, you can read the constitutional carefully, and nowhere in it will you find it says that the Supreme Court is the final and ultimate arbiter of what is and is not constitutional. Now, in modern US Politics, it has evolved in that direction, right? It has become that sort of thing. But that could change within the Constitution, especially if Congress were to assert its authority, which the Constitution does grant it, to make decisions about what questions and issues the Court can address. But I think the larger issue that you raise is the question of whether, under the current structure of the Constitution, the kinds of fundamental changes that seem to be happening with things like Brown or some of the other things that you mentioned are still possible. And again, my own sense is that structurally, the amendment process in Article 5 of the Constitution is so difficult and so limited that it's hard to imagine it ever working again. It's interesting. I just had a student in my class here. We were talking about her paper. She was writing about how some of the state constitutions early on created these institutions called a Council of Censors, in which there would be, in some cases, an elected group of people whose job it would be every seven years to review the Constitution to see whether it was still suitable for the state's needs and also look over laws the state legislature had passed and to see if any of them were unconstitutional. Right. There are other ways to think about how to do that job besides a Supreme Court. And it's possible to imagine a Constitution that actually builds in a process of renovation, which ours unfortunately doesn't have. But my own feeling is that because the written Constitution that we have is so difficult to amend, so restrictive in that regard, two thirds of both houses of Congress and 3/4 of all of the states have to support something, and that has not happened in a very long time. My sense is that major constitutional change going forward is going to have to be unconstitutional. It's going to have to go outside of the written rules of the document we have. And you know what? That's actually the way it happens most frequently, like with the Civil War amendments. Right. It took having to say, yeah, those 11 states don't count for now, in order to get that through. And I don't think very many people realize it, but the US Constitution itself is kind of unconstitutional. That is, they broke the convention, broke the rules that were set for them by the Articles of Confederation. They were told to revise the Articles. Instead, they threw them out and started anew. And the Articles rule was that all of the states had to agree in order to change the Articles. The convention said, yeah, no, no, no, we only need nine of the 13. Right. So in creating the Constitution, they broke the rules they were operating under of their existing Constitution. Right. And I could give you examples of that back and back and back in American and English history, where major changes happen when people kind of jump the shark, you know, when and it makes sense, right? Because if the constitutional order isn't working for you anymore, right. If your society, if your economy or government have changed so much that the old rules don't work, then it may well be the case that you can't follow those old rules to fix it. So my great hope is that people will start thinking about ways forward in this regard in order to do it as peacefully, as creatively, as constructively as possible. It is the case that some of these major changes happen in wars and in, you know, horrific events of one kind or another, but not always, right? Sometimes people work this out in ways that don't require guns and violence and divided societies and all. So I wrote this book in part to encourage readers anywhere at any part of society to start thinking, thinking, what would you want out of a new constitution? What would be good ways to get us there? And what do you want to keep from the ones you have? That's the thing. The US Constitution brought in all kinds of things from the British Constitution and reinstigated them, like freedom of the press and trial by jury and all of these things. Americans didn't invent them, they hung onto them from their traditional. So I think we're at a place where we really need folks in all walks of life thinking hard about this question, what would a good constitution be for me, for us, for the place I live, for the world I see going forward? Because if people don't start thinking about it, it won't happen, right?
- [58:58]
B
It's a great way to peer into the future, even at least from our particular perch, to see what? Where do we go from here, essentially, and with your sort of the cycles of making and breaking, how to perceive our present moment and its trajectory and where it may go from here, given everything that's happening in our country now? And kind of with that, if the Constitution, One of the last questions, if the Constitution has always been shaped by conflict and reinvention, kind of like it's a Janus face mirror speaking to what John Franklin in Mirror to America Autobiography wrote about sort of a metaphor for what America represents, but also Franklin and Gina Ray McNeil in work African Americans in the living Constitution. What would a more democratic or just constitutional order require? And. And what does it take to not only shift conversation, but to actually bring this groundswell, a groundwork of support, generate meal, let's say, with respect to Charles Houston forward, to be able to make significant change? And should we look to the Constitution as the end all document or end all pillar of American life and practice to orient our sort of North Star, our trajectory? And again, how do we understand the Constitution now in relationship to all those other evolving pieces, the social, the cultural, the economic and the like? As our world changes, America still has a significant place on a global stage and a global order, but it is shifting and changing those internal crises. And. And questions are both pursuing and eating at America's ability to be able to project abroad. So how does that sort of making and breaking that push, pull, influence what may come next? Or how do we use your work and even understanding of the Constitution as it has evolved in America's 250th birthday, coming forward to move?
- [61:27]
C
Well, that's such a huge question that I'll offer just one little piece of what I think is important. If we continue to believe in representative democracy, which I do. My own experience is that in our world today, it works best at the local level, in cities. And I think that's in part because at bigger levels and especially the national level, it's kind of broken down. I mean, in the Constitutional Convention, they argued over whether one representative for 30,000 people or one representative for 40,000 people was like the right numbered to start with. We are at one representative for 780,000 people in America today, which is a sort of unthinkably large number. Right. It's like 10 full football stadiums at a Michigan, Ohio State game or an LSU. Who's LSU's big rival? I don't know, Mississippi, Alabama, Ole Miss now.
- [62:36]
B
Ole Miss now.
- [62:36]
C
Yeah. Because really one person is going to represent all that. Right. The United States Congress froze its number at 435 in 1913. Right. We have more than twice as many people in this country now as we did then. And the whole idea of the census was supposed to be that as the country grows, we figure out how to give more representation everywhere to all the people. But it stopped dead. And now we're in this world of fighting over gerrymandering of districts to see whether, you know, this one person will represent these 780,000 or those 780,000. And it can be so manipulated that it really doesn't represent the American people. Right. So just, just beginning to fix that, to address how badly broken the connection is between you and me and our neighbors or whatever. And the people in the national government who are supposed to be speaking for us is just, you know, one of many ways that we really need to think about how we can do this going forward. Right. So I'll leave you with that, and your next guest can tell you the 99 other things that need to happen to look ahead.
- [63:55]
B
But yeah, yeah, that's it's been great talk with you. It's thank you for really expanding our thought process and consciousness and really wrestling and grappling with and thinking about what the Constitution represents and means and can mean moving forward. And we will continue to ask questions. One of my mentors in undergrad who taught us the best answer for another question is another question. So there are a lot of questions.
- [64:26]
C
Well, my last words are this. The last words of the book are it's good to have a plan. Right. Every time there's been one of these major constitutional disruptions, the people who go into it with the plan tend to do well. So all you listeners out there, start thinking of plans. All right.
- [64:45]
B
That sounds good. Sounds good. Well, Dr. Peterson, what are you working on next?
- [64:48]
C
A new book on the American Revolution and the role of land, population, production and consumption in revolutionary America.
- [64:57]
B
Well, we wish you the very best on that and thank you for giving of your time and expertise and brilliance to this important work. And look forward to reading your work and hearing more about your work as you get that work.
- [65:10]
C
All right. Thank you, Zachary. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or
- [65:29]
B
crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money
- [65:32]
C
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