The Hillsdale College Constitution Class

         Hillsdasle College (http://www.hillsdale.edu) is offering a free online course in the constitution.  It’s excellent.  The brilliance of the founders rests on their profound understanding of human nature. They, on one hand, would agree with Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties… how like an angel.”

              But they also understand how stupid, selfish, and irrational we can be, and not just the rich or the poor, the unchurched or unschooled, but all of us.  Alexander Hamilton’s view was especially harsh.  “Men are ambitious, vindictive and rapacious.” Given the opportunity we all would trample another’s rights.

           The founders strived to create a government that would deal with those realities, draw on our remarkable potential and recognize our inescapable failings.  They were not Libertarians.  They understood that governments are necessary, and not a necessary evil, but a necessary good.  They had to find a way that we could govern ourselves without oppressing one another.

                 All tyrannies are the result of the failure of a utopian dream relying on the notion that man is perfectible. Progressives believe that over time, by tinkering with the educational system or the laws or the economic structure, they could create a more perfect society.  It always leads to totalitarianism. The founders were adamant:  “It’s time that we awoke from the deceitful dream of a golden age of perfect wisdom and happy virtue.”   

               But democracies can be tyrannies as well. A hundred despots can be as dangerous as one. We will violate the rights of others for personal gain.  Hoping to protect us from that reality, the founders gave us a strictly limited federal government, balanced carefully among three branches, each of which would govern the impulses of the other, and all dependent on an informed and vigilant populace, lest  “once fashionable follies begin to plague the country.”

             It is our responsibility to make sure they do not pass laws “so voluminous that they can’t be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood [under which] only the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few can function.”  We have done our job very well. 

I highly recommend the Hillsdale class.