A Weak Central Government, Optional Participation, and the Group Project That Nearly Failed Before It Started
A Weak Central Government, Optional Participation, and the Group Project That Nearly Failed Before It Started
The Group Project With No Leader and Optional Participation
Every political science student eventually encounters the Articles of Confederation, the United States’ first attempt at national government, and experiences a reaction somewhere between sympathy and vertigo. The Articles of Confederation were, in the most charitable possible reading, a sincere effort by people who had just overthrown a tyrannical central government to design a government that could never become tyrannical. They succeeded. They also designed a government that could not pay its debts, enforce its laws, raise an army, or conduct basic diplomacy without everyone agreeing first, which they almost never did.
This is what political scientists call a “”structural problem.”” What the rest of us call it depends on our emotional state and whether we have recently tried to achieve anything requiring the cooperation of thirteen parties with incompatible interests.
The Philosophy: If Central Power Is Bad, Try Almost No Power
The logic of the Articles was coherent, even if the outcome was not. The colonists had just spent years under a crown that taxed without asking, quartered soldiers without warning, and dissolved their assemblies when they became inconvenient. Their solution was to create a national government that could do almost none of these things. The national government could not tax. It could not compel states to do anything. It could not regulate commerce. It could ask nicely, and then ask again, and then write a strongly worded letter, and then hope.
This is, in fairness, a very human response to abuse. When you have been controlled too much, you design a system with too little control. The problem is that the world does not stop requiring coordination just because you are philosophically opposed to the institution that coordinates it. Wars still need to be paid for. Trade disputes still need resolution. Foreign nations still send ambassadors who expect to negotiate with someone who has actual authority to agree to things.
The Practical Problems: A Comedy of Governmental Inadequacy
The Articles required nine of thirteen states to agree on major decisions. This sounds manageable until you try it. The Continental Congress – the legislative body under the Articles – frequently lacked a quorum simply because states did not bother to send delegates. The national government was trying to govern a country whose component parts considered attendance optional.
The financial situation was operatic in its dysfunction. The Congress had no power to tax. It could only requisition funds from states, which the states were free to provide or ignore at their discretion. Most states, exercising this discretion with considerable enthusiasm, chose to ignore the requisitions. The national government funded the Revolutionary War largely through loans from France, printed money that collapsed in value almost immediately, and IOUs to soldiers that the government then could not honor. The phrase “”not worth a Continental”” entered the American lexicon as a description of worthlessness. This was, to be clear, a description of the national currency. Things were going well.
Foreign policy presented its own absurdities. Britain, Spain, and various Native American nations had ongoing territorial disputes with the United States. Negotiating these disputes required a national government with the authority to make binding agreements. The Congress under the Articles could sign treaties, but it could not compel states to honor them. Britain, observing this, simply declined to remove its troops from American territory as promised, correctly reasoning that the national government lacked any mechanism to make this inconvenient for them. The United States had won its independence and then immediately built a government that its former colonial ruler did not need to take seriously. This was not ideal.
Shays’ Rebellion: The Bug That Became a Feature Request
In 1786, a group of Massachusetts farmers, burdened by debt and taxes and unable to get relief from a state government that was also largely helpless, took up arms and marched on courthouses. This was Shays’ Rebellion, named after Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolution who had fought for a country that then sent debt collectors after him.
The rebellion was eventually suppressed by a private army funded by wealthy Massachusetts merchants, because the national government had no standing army to deploy and no money to raise one if it had. This detail alarmed virtually every founder who heard it. If the national government could not suppress a domestic insurrection, what exactly was it for?
The answer, increasingly obvious by 1787, was: not much. The Articles of Confederation had produced exactly the system they promised – one in which the central government was too weak to threaten anyone’s liberty and also too weak to protect anyone’s liberty, defend anyone’s borders, honor anyone’s debts, or keep anyone’s currency worth the paper it was printed on. Independence had been achieved. Functionality remained pending.
The Absurdist Conclusion: A Government That Proudly Could Not Govern
There is something almost philosophically pure about the Articles of Confederation. It is the only government in history that was designed from the beginning to be powerless, and then achieved that goal with remarkable fidelity. Most governments, when given the opportunity to accumulate power, find ways to do so. The Articles built in structural antibodies against this tendency so effectively that the government couldn’t accumulate enough authority to cash a check.
The Articles lasted eight years, from 1781 to 1789, which is less time than most television series run before cancellation, and they were replaced for roughly similar reasons: the premise wasn’t working, the ratings were terrible, and everyone involved agreed it was time to try a different format. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was, in essence, a writers’ room for a show about a government that might actually function. The result – the Constitution of the United States – was a better document. Whether it produced better government is a question the United States has been debating ever since, generally at considerable volume and without reaching consensus.
The Articles of Confederation are today remembered as a cautionary tale about the dangers of designing government in reaction to your last government. The lesson was clear: some central authority is necessary. The optimal amount of central authority remains, as of this writing, a subject of vigorous and ongoing dispute. Progress, as we established in Chapter 1.1, is not linear. It is, in the American experience, more of a spiral – revisiting the same arguments from slightly different angles, generation after generation, with increasing production values and decreasing attention spans.
SOURCE: The London Prat