Eric Alterman: FISA and the Founders
[Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow of the Center for American Progress, a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and Professor of Journalism at the new CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His weblog, “Altercation," appears at www.mediamatters.org/altercation, His seventh book, Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, will appear early next year.]
Congress’ rush to its August recess was not a pretty spectacle by any standard. Its passage of a new FISA law once again raises the rarely asked question of whether democracies can “do” foreign policy patiently and competently.
The circumstances may be new, but the problem is not. “For my part,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “I have no hesitation in saying that in the control of society’s foreign affairs that democratic governments do appear decidedly inferior to others.” De Tocqueville credited democratic societies with a sort of “practical everyday wisdom and understanding of the petty business of life which we call common sense.” But he found that while “democratic liberty applied to internal affairs brings blessings greater than the ills resulting from a democratic government’s mistakes,” this was not the case in relations between nations.
Foreign policy, the Frenchman lamented, required none of the good qualities peculiar to democracy, but it did demand the cultivation of those sorely lacking. Democracies, he noted, found it “difficult to coordinate the details of a great undertaking and to fix on some plan and carry it through with determination.” Moreover, they had “little capacity for combining measures in secret and waiting patiently for the result.” De Tocqueville criticized the tendency of a democracy to “obey its feelings to satisfy a momentary passion.”[i]
Walter LaFeber, perhaps America’s pre-eminent diplomatic historian, calls this phenomenon “the Tocqueville problem in American history.” How, LaFeber wonders, can a “democratic republic, whose vitality rests on the pursuit of individual interests with a minimum of central governmental direction, create the necessary national consensus for the conduct of an effective, and necessarily long-term, foreign policy?”[ii] This problem, LaFeber notes, has not received much attention from historians and has barely registered in the concerns of those who define the terms of U.S. foreign policy, nor those in whose name it is made.
The federal government has eluded its FISA issues just as it did during the Cold War—by further tipping the balance of power away from Congress and toward the executive branch. And while this may be the easiest way to avoid the problem, both from a practical and a political standpoint, it is also explicitly contrary to the spirit of what our founders intended.
President George Washington, in his Farewell Address—the Magna Carta of early American foreign policy—counseled his countrymen to keep their society pure by remaining above the petty animosities of European politics and to value peace above almost any other goal. While he recommended “harmony” and “liberal intercourse” with all nations, Americans were never to “seek nor grant exclusive favors or preferences.” “There can be no greater error,” Washington insisted, “than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation.”[iii]
Washington’s almost visceral loathing of war was born of the experience of command. His hope that the United States “never unsheathe the sword except in self-defense” and his “devout” prayer “that we remain at peace to the end of time” were not mere pabulum, but the central theme of the Farewell Address.[iv]
The Founders enshrined their abhorrence of war in the Constitution by explicitly vesting Congress, rather than the president, with war-making powers. The reasons are obvious. As James Madison wrote Thomas Jefferson, “The Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.”[v]...
Read entire article at Center for American Progress
Congress’ rush to its August recess was not a pretty spectacle by any standard. Its passage of a new FISA law once again raises the rarely asked question of whether democracies can “do” foreign policy patiently and competently.
The circumstances may be new, but the problem is not. “For my part,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “I have no hesitation in saying that in the control of society’s foreign affairs that democratic governments do appear decidedly inferior to others.” De Tocqueville credited democratic societies with a sort of “practical everyday wisdom and understanding of the petty business of life which we call common sense.” But he found that while “democratic liberty applied to internal affairs brings blessings greater than the ills resulting from a democratic government’s mistakes,” this was not the case in relations between nations.
Foreign policy, the Frenchman lamented, required none of the good qualities peculiar to democracy, but it did demand the cultivation of those sorely lacking. Democracies, he noted, found it “difficult to coordinate the details of a great undertaking and to fix on some plan and carry it through with determination.” Moreover, they had “little capacity for combining measures in secret and waiting patiently for the result.” De Tocqueville criticized the tendency of a democracy to “obey its feelings to satisfy a momentary passion.”[i]
Walter LaFeber, perhaps America’s pre-eminent diplomatic historian, calls this phenomenon “the Tocqueville problem in American history.” How, LaFeber wonders, can a “democratic republic, whose vitality rests on the pursuit of individual interests with a minimum of central governmental direction, create the necessary national consensus for the conduct of an effective, and necessarily long-term, foreign policy?”[ii] This problem, LaFeber notes, has not received much attention from historians and has barely registered in the concerns of those who define the terms of U.S. foreign policy, nor those in whose name it is made.
The federal government has eluded its FISA issues just as it did during the Cold War—by further tipping the balance of power away from Congress and toward the executive branch. And while this may be the easiest way to avoid the problem, both from a practical and a political standpoint, it is also explicitly contrary to the spirit of what our founders intended.
President George Washington, in his Farewell Address—the Magna Carta of early American foreign policy—counseled his countrymen to keep their society pure by remaining above the petty animosities of European politics and to value peace above almost any other goal. While he recommended “harmony” and “liberal intercourse” with all nations, Americans were never to “seek nor grant exclusive favors or preferences.” “There can be no greater error,” Washington insisted, “than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation.”[iii]
Washington’s almost visceral loathing of war was born of the experience of command. His hope that the United States “never unsheathe the sword except in self-defense” and his “devout” prayer “that we remain at peace to the end of time” were not mere pabulum, but the central theme of the Farewell Address.[iv]
The Founders enshrined their abhorrence of war in the Constitution by explicitly vesting Congress, rather than the president, with war-making powers. The reasons are obvious. As James Madison wrote Thomas Jefferson, “The Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.”[v]...