The Level of Political Discourse: a visit to the Federalist Papers

Recently I re-read parts of the Federalist Papers, the articles written by Hamilton, Jay and Madison in support of the approval of our constitution in 1787 and 1788. The strongest reaction to my brief re-visit is that the level of public discourse a little over 200 years ago was enormously higher than today. These articles, frankly written to influence the general public and published in the newspapers of the day, clearly take their audience seriously. There is no talking down, dumbing down, to use a more current phrase. Let me illustrate this with a quotation from one of the papers:

The Federalist No. 47
The Particular Structure of the New Government and the Distribution of Power Among Its Different Parts

New York Packet
Wednesday, January 30, 1788
[James Madison]


To the People of the State of New York:


HAVING reviewed the general form of the proposed government and the general mass of power allotted to it, I proceed to examine the particular structure of this government, and the distribution of this mass of power among its constituent parts.


One of the principal objections inculcated by the more respectable adversaries to the Constitution, is its supposed violation of the political maxim, that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments ought to be separate and distinct. In the structure of the federal government, no regard, it is said, seems to have been paid to this essential precaution in favor of liberty. The several departments of power are distributed and blended in such a manner as at once to destroy all symmetry and beauty of form, and to expose some of the essential parts of the edifice to the danger of being crushed by the disproportionate weight of other parts.


No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system. I persuade myself, however, that it will be made apparent to every one, that the charge cannot be supported, and that the maxim on which it relies has been totally misconceived and misapplied. In order to form correct ideas on this important subject, it will be proper to investigate the sense in which the preservation of liberty requires that the three great departments of power should be separate and distinct.


The oracle who is always consulted and cited on this subject is the celebrated Montesquieu. If he be not the author of this invaluable precept in the science of politics, he has the merit at least of displaying and recommending it most effectually to the attention of mankind. Let us endeavor, in the first place, to ascertain his meaning on this point.


The British Constitution was to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the didactic writers on epic poetry. As the latter have considered the work of the immortal bard as the perfect model from which the principles and rules of the epic art were to be drawn, and by which all similar works were to be judged, so this great political critic appears to have viewed the Constitution of England as the standard, or to use his own expression, as the mirror of political liberty; and to have delivered, in the form of elementary truths, the several characteristic principles of that particular system. That we may be sure, then, not to mistake his meaning in this case, let us recur to the source from which the maxim was drawn.

(You can read the rest of this online at http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa47.htm)

Clearly the rhetoric here is elevated, even ornate, by today's standards, nevertheless, still eminently readable and accessible. Madison expected the average reader to integrate knowledge of the British Constitution, Montesquieu, and Homer (to pick just the references in the passage quoted above. What can we say of today's political discussion?