Leaders at Work on Plan to Avert Mandatory Cuts

Congressional Performative Arts

Here is what is remarkable. These are the leaders we chose. They are playing, performing, for us. They are behaving as they believe we want them to behave.

There was a reason 229 years ago the framers of the nation’s constitution locked folks like Patrick Henry and Tom Paine out of the Constitutional Convention; why nearly all the states set high wealth and property barriers to voting; and why the Constitution itself guaranteed not democratic process, but republican values and institutions. And it is the same reason why vaudeville performers perform in vaudeville halls and not at the Met.

Of course, there was an alternative. The framers could have approached the question of enfranchisement, as Aristotle had, by asking what citizens need in order to responsibly exercise their rights and responsibilities. They need, the philosopher responded, health, education, and welfare. Or, as the framers themselves repeatedly asserted, citizens need sufficient education, wealth, and leisure to govern not in their own private self-interest, but in the interests of res publica, in the interests of the wealth we hold in common.

With this in mind, the framers could have set to work making sure that every citizen had sufficient wealth, education, and leisure to make responsible political choices. But, the costs for such a venture appeared so astronomically high that, instead, they chose to limit the vote to those persons alone who already possessed this endowment.

We have chosen the worst of both worlds. We have deprived the vast majority of voters sufficient health, education, and welfare; and then we have placed self-government in their hands.

Welcome to the vaudeville hall, the clown tent, the big show. The clowns will be performing for us, not for res publica, not for the republic, not for the commonwealth. And the show is doomed to go on until we decide to grant all citizens the health, education, and welfare they need in order to govern themselves responsibly.

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