Worse than Confucius, who froze the people's activity by rituals, was Han Fei Tzu, who said, "If words are divulged and affairs leak out, then no statecraft will function."
Ritualism and secrecy are enemies of the republic. The best republic is open to all eyes. The government is not a tomb or a guarded temple; it is simply, as John Dewey once said, men acting in the name of the public. If ever a land is so blessed as to use only this definition of government, then government will be seen in its place and stay in its place.
I will not dispute the long lines of critics, hot with a knowledge of historical disasters of historical man, ready with hundreds of quotations to the sole effect that pomp, force, and fraud are the inescapable effusions of the political process. So have they been. And therefore must there be eternal vigilance to keep the gates of government open. As Mao has said, "Don't people wash their face every day?" So if everyone can wash his face every day, everyone can do a bit every day to keep the gates open.
Should you visit America, you would see state tombs and state temples by the hundreds, Post Offices, where bundles of mail are tossed about and transferred, are often lofty marble palaces. Courthouses are the same. The houses of government that is supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people are built as if to worship ancestors. honor gods, and resound with the pronunciation of superhuman judgments. These buildigns should come down, their materials recycled, and a new human architecture provided.
Many thousands of towns and villages of America enjoy little squares of green and peace. But unfortunately most of them boast, as their main ornament, an old cannon or armored tank. Next in popularity come bronze or stone officers on horseback and soldiers in uniform. Yet there is scarcely a town in America that lacks a sculptor and there are many unemployed sculptors in the country who work as laborers or dentists or housewives. There are many new trees that have been grown by Americans, such as Burbank. Americans have designed many improved and useful machines, such as the sewing machine, the telegraph, and the plowshare. Obviously a nation that insists upon a public art of war and a government architecture of religion and empire, while it holds back a corps of creative peaceful artists, is a nation beset by a contradiction. Would it not be well to "beat swords into plowshares" and clothe "Johnny Comes Marching Home" in the form that he looked forward to assuming?
Men attach themselves like leeches to the sovereign state. One man, who made many millions of dollars and collected hundreds of fine paintings an sculptures, managed to place his collection in a new building in the center of Washington, D.C., through an arrangement with the bureaucracy. Why should this man be indulged in his pride? Why should the great museums be concentrate like industry and government. They do their part to assimilate to the idolatry of the gigantic institutions, thereby insulting the thousands of poor artists whose lifework is assembled against their will and neglecting the population that is left to its rusting cannon and artistically barren urban landscapes. This rich art collector has in effect been acting as a tax collector for the government.
But see another similarity and difference between China and America. There is skepticism in America about visiting China because it is believed that one can view only what the government wishes one to see; the great palaces of Peking, the model factory, the model nursery, the model commune. In America, the same process occurs automatically. The tourist sees the great palaces, the great museums, Disneyland, and the nation's capital. Thus, though one is free to move around the country, one is impelled by the same forces as are consciously employed in China, but in America unconsciously employed to the same end, to contemplate the magnified state and the enormous and bellicose monuments.
I took pains to tell you how devious and deceptive Americans could be in politics. I may take some pleasure in telling you how honest they are. As with honesty, so with the remaining seven goods. It is contradictory. So is life. It is nothing less than the yin and yang, the principle of contrariness, whether in politics or anywhere else.
No teachers in the world are as frank with their students as the American teachers. And no students as frank with their teachers. If in the past they have been less so, they have changed. A textbook all over the world is expected to be dogmatic and complacent, no matter what the field. The textbooks of America apologize when they are complacent and dogmatic. Often they are irritable, skeptical, and iconoclastic, whether they discuss race relations or plasma physics. Even I have written a textbook that specializes in the smashing of idols and the call for radical reforms of the system.
The search for political honesty begins, like the search for deceptiveness, in the education of the infant and child, Without question, America has been the worldwide center for the theory and practice of open and honest training and education of the young, owing to the anti-autoritarianism its people carried from Europe, its being born in revolution, its frontier tradition, and then its innumerable philosophers and practitioners of "progressive",and pragmatic education.
If Americans seem to have poorer memories than the Chinese, as I think they do, it may be because we have abandoned the heavy stress upon catechizing the young in schools. Most Americans cannot sing their national anthem, which is about as close to a catechism as they get. That, plus a few scraps of famous documents, like the Preamble to the Constitution and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Various of our religious groups improve upon this condition by causing their adherents to memorize prayers. As a matter of fact, even extemporaneous praying is regarded with some favor and a preacher who can devise a new prayer on the spur of the moment, as when a legislature convenes or an inauguration takes place, is applauded for his poetic ingenuity; yet, from a strictly liturgical point of view, an impromptu prayer is a contradiction in terms.
Confessions have an even more informal character in America. No people confesses its sins so often and readily. These are voluntary confessions, not to be compared with confessions obtained by torture or by brainwashing. Political torture or brainwashing is scarcely known to Americans.
Local police have often used torture to extract criminal confessions, a practice so generally reviled that evidence of a torture introduced into a trial will end the proceedings before the jury has time to take its seats.
Millions organize small consciousness-raising or sensitivity groups or transactional-therapy groups. They generally aim in these groups to tell each other what they feel about themselves and what they think of the others, going back and forth endlessly until they are quite exhausted with the private knowledge that they have made public. More millions practice confession before psychologists and psychiatrists. A large number will do so in bars with the bartender and other hapless customers as the recipients. Millions are urged to expose their frankest ambitions and habits when they apply for jobs or scholarships and to get others to write about them in the same vein.
The religious of the country are not all confessional, but the largest ones-the Catholics and the evangelical Baptists-are definitely so. The Baptists expect public confessions when the spirit moves one. Certain small sects such as the Quakers are alike in this regard. The Catholics require formal confession to a priest, in private, as a regular procedure.
What does this have to do with American politics? Political immorality is not exempt from confession, and since the democratic fervor prevails, voluntary confession to anyone of a political crime in a religious context, or indeed any context is believed to be purging and salutary. A story is told of a politician, named Mike, who made an unusual appearance for private confession before his priest. Following upon the preliminary prayerful injunctions, he asserted that he had illegally taken wood from the municipal lumberyard. "What did you do with it?" asked the priest. "I built a birdhouse in my garden." "Oh, well," said the priest, "is that all?" "Well, no," said Mike, "I had some left over and I made a fence around the garden." The priest was upset, but asked again, "And is that all?" "Well, there was some wood left," confessed Mike, "so I built a garage." The priest, now taken aback, asked sternly, "My son, have you ever made a novena?" Mike brightened up; "No, father, but if you tell me how, I've got the lumber." (I should add that the novena is a complex of prayers for serious repentance and penitence, among other things.)
When President Nixon went deeper and deeper into difficulties involving deceptions, it was quite common for him to "make a clean breast of everything to the people," to repent and confess, and presumably to be forgiven and to proceed with his job. Probably he was well advised to do so, but his stiff character would not let him and he chose to fight back on legalistic and institutional grounds.
Important shifts in American public opinion have occurred lately concerning open government and personal freedoms. I know of no better way of showing this than by quoting a speech of Louis Harris, whose company takes frequent careful polls of samples of Americans.
Back in 1970, the public condoned the shooting of students at Kent State University by National Guard troops. In August of 1973, we found that, by 55 to 31%, a majority now view that episode as "repressive and unjustified." By an even larger 69 to 10%, a solid majority think the attempt to raid the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist was "unjustified and repressive." By 68 to 17%, a lopsided majority feel the same way about the White House drawing up an "enemies" list of opponents of President Nixon. By an even higher 83 to 8%, the public condemns as repressive "the hiring of private detectives to spy on the sex life, drinking habits, and family problems of political opponents." Back in 1970, a majority of Americans favored giving local officials the authority to censor films, television, radio and theater for unpatriotic content. Today, a majority now oppose any such move. Three years ago, a majority favored outlawing newspapers which preach revolution. Now a majority oppose such a ban.
By the same token, a majority of 62% favor "a law which would make political spying in campaigns a serious offense"; 67% want "stiffer penalties for people who leak testimony before grand juries"; 73% favor "automatic disbarment of a lawyer who knows about a crime before it is committed and does not report it to the authorities"; 77% want to see "stringent laws passed which will make it a major offense for any person or organization to engage in illegal wiretapping"; 79% would support "a high-level board, named by the President, Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court, to make sure that government intelligence services, such as the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and other agencies, are not used for partisan political purposes."
Back in 1969, majorities of the public thought student demonstrators who engage in protest activities, prostitutes, homosexuals, people who do no believe in God, and blacks who demonstrate for civil rights were all harmful to the country. Now only minorities believe that black and student demonstrators, prostitutes, homosexuals, and even atheists and agnostics are harmful or dangerous to the country.
By contrast, here is a current list of those whom a majority of the public think are harmful to the country: private investigators hired by politicians (52% believe they are harmful); 79% think vigilante groups such as white citizens groups and the KKK are harmful to the country (up from 59% in 1970); 78% think that military leaders who conduct secret bombing raids and then cover up such raids are harmful; a higher 81% think that businessmen who give illegal campaign contributions to candidates are harmful; and 88% feel that government officials who try to use official intelligence agencies of government for political advantage are harmful.
Believing in the values of honesty and frankness in public affairs has some important political effects, granted that America has a full range o secretive and devious characters. One can usually expect a Dean or an Ellsberg in any questionable secret operation, who will "spill the beans," as we say. It would never do to be cynical about this streak in the national character. It finds its way into the recruitment of honest and open characters in government.
The White House is not the best place to look because of its increasing tightness as a bureaucratic corps, heavily guarded in every sense of the word. But if you were to move from one congressman's office to another, you would be astounded at the frankness, openness, and helpfulness with which all public affairs are discussed. In each office you find a dozen or so assistants, access to whom is easy. And their access to the congressman, or even other congressmen, is continuous and easy on the whole.
Dozens of senators and many representatives are fully committed to making of the government "a family affair," whatever the number of doors that the agencies and great corporations and associations of the country would like to close. At every session of the last decade or more, there have been bills to open up the government, to penalize the withholding of information, to gather new and more meaningful statistics on what all parts of the economy, society, and political system are doing. Only the most urgent claims of confidentiality-in respect to ordinary people's wealth in regard to criminal investigations, in reference to military operations and new weapons designs details-are treated with deference by many congressmen.
I repeat-it is certain agencies such as the Departments of the Treasury, Defense, State, and Justice, it is the White House, and a number of associated agencies tagged on to the White House such as the Office of Management and Budget and the Central Intelligence Agency, that are overtly provocative; and then the overwhelming bureaucratic behavior of thousands of lesser offices has an impact upon open government that is appalling. Nor would it be correct to exempt scrutiny and enjoy a more disorderly management; there, excessive secrecy and the withholding and distortion of information are common. But, overall, the remaining free machinery of the country becomes almost irresistible once it fixes upon a target and begins moving against secrecy.
For the American system does not count alone upon the recruitment of honest character, important as that may be. It relies upon a skeptical, turbulent, free corps of press reporters, protected by law. It depends upon the separation of the organs of government, all of which could only be suppressed at the same time by a national military force or a conglomerate of local police force, who are, it must be observed, peculiarly dependent upon legislatures and representative councils.
If, for instance, you may have wondered why President Nixon did not simply employ military force to protect his official person when he could order a thousand planes and ten thousand troops illegally into Cambodia, the answer is partly that at least fifty congressmen have a stronger hold upon the minds, purses, and personal affections of the military chiefs than this President, or any President, does. Only if Congress were subjected to the single-party, majority-party discipline of the Executive Branch would this be conceivable. And so it is, too, with the local police forces. Whatever their problems, and corruption is one of them, they are in no way bound to heed the orders from a Secretary of the Interior or another official as in Europe, Russia, South America, or China acting under orders of a commander in chief.
In America, "commander in chief" is a title given the President as executive head of the armed forces, as he is executive head of the civil bureaucracy. It does not mean personal chiefdom, nor should it mean policy chief, though it threatens to become that. The powers of Congress, buttressed by the independence of the press and many groups of the country, are adequate to refuse a President support for any of his adventures abroad and to impeach him for going ahead without such support.
In society at large, there are two constellations of powers, aside from the press, that must be counted as reinforcements of open government. One can be called the intelligentsia, because-though it rings unfavorably to American ears-it is a term well known to you. The American intelligentsia is by far the largest and most pervasive of such social formations in the world. It has a largely classless character in the Marxian sense, because it is recruited from all strata and has, thus far at least, an independent social base in the thousands of universities and independent schools and school districts in the land. Not since the disappearance of the ancient market place and the effective domination of town squares by automobile parking lots and armored police has any institution like the campus of the American schools evolved. Here is a realm of so-called academic freedom where-though the institution are oligarchies controlled by wealth, politicians, and bureaucrats entitled "educators"--a practically unlimited amount of agitation can batter against the closed doors of all governments.
Tied to the campus are thousands of wealthy institutions of "the independent sector," foundations, associations, societies, research institutes, and creative and performing artists of all types. From these stem organizations of all the scientists and scholars of the nations and many publishers of books, journals, and special newspapers.
Nothing like this intelligentsia has ever existed in history. It expends and controls the spending of perhaps one tenth of the Gross National Product. It encompasses in a network of communications some 15 million professors, students, and activist friends. It has connections all over the world that are far more numerous than the government's.
Some will assert that this aggregate has never existed as a unit, and must therefore be discounted. That is like saying that there is no labor movement since there has never been a successful general strike. Or that the Democratic Party does not exist since it has so many independent factions. The intelligentsia of America is the center of the national endemic helicrynea: opening everything to the sun. It is fundamentally more important and more effective than the press in keeping governments and politics open and preventing the ever threatening epidemics of pseudosis. Hundreds of committees place unending pressure upon the government for new kinds of information, for increasing opportunities for all types of people, for using peaceful rather than violent instruments of policy.
The fact that for a dozen years even general statistics on the Chinese economy have not been published seems bizarre to Americans, and could not be endured. Every day, in an ordinary American newsstand, you can discover more facts about the economy and government than in a year of research in China. Yet everyone knows of the Chinese genius for calculation and exactness.
As I have mentioned earlier, this magnificent helicrynean set of institutions is threatened, as you might expect, from the twin devils of American politics-bureaucratization from within and the government from outside. The vast outpouring of funds for education in America over the past generation has tended to reduce the independence of professors and students, who are the nuclear element, by diverting them into or forcing them into a variety of services irrelevant to the future of the nation and the world. To detail the effects would require an inordinate demand upon your attention. Nor should I imply for a moment that the intelligentsia of America has come to resemble in any way its stultified counterparts in communist and authoritarian countries.
I would only offer this allegation: if the great scientific and developmental research efforts directed by the governments and many university administrations into military-relevant projects and social projects conducted under tedious, administrative restraints and confined to trivial subjects had been given over to the intelligentsia for projects abounding in potentiality and importance to the world, the U.S.A.--and the world both directly and indirectly--would be at least partly turned around and on its way to the only kind of future that can bring survival, that is, true progress.
Perhaps formal institutions of the American intelligentsia will need the drastic Chinese cure for their taxesis before long --shut them down for four years. I hope not. The cure is almost as bad as the disease. A better remedy, I think, would be to break up the large institutions into independent smaller ones. Then take a fraction of what is presently spent per student out of the many governmental treasuries, say $2,000, and give it in the form of education chits to whoever feels the need for education, to spend where one pleases, on whatever education one deems necessary. I believe that the present system would shake tremendously but settle down quickly into a vigorous and far more open, realistic, and even intellectual system.
Actually, this system could fit neatly into the Personal Social Contract and Life Account System that is to be described in Chapter 5 below and that provides a drawing account. A system of separate financing might not be needed at all. For the country has learned (though partially forgotten) how to provide the highest, most deservedly expensive kinds of education, but has gone wild in using public funds to imitate badly this high education, which it confuses with the basic inexpensive educational processes that Americans might and should pursue throughout life.
A second area that protects the open society beyond the guarantees of honest character and governmental checks and balances is that nemesis of communism, the free enterprise system, whose inadequate name is capitalism. So many are the misconceptions of this system among friend and foe alike that I must begin at the beginning.
Property serves a person like a capsule of free inner space with a protective covering against external aggression. I wish to distinguish two types of property, to which I give the unimaginative terms of micro-property and macro-property.
Micro-property is the little property of clothing , food, housing space, personal vehicles, games and books, modest cash and savings, a parcel of land, a small business. It is part of the personality, said St. Thomas Aquinas; the Ta-hsueh says; "For the human-hearted man wealth is the means by which the individual self is expanded." Men and women feel naked without some small property. It lends reality to their existence, and a respectable distance from all others, an ego shield, a psychologist might say. Its accretion and disposition are acts of will that exercise the mind, the imagination, and the creative impulses. It distinguishes the person. It frees him. Ideally it may be enough to reject the aggressions of the world for a considerable period of time and even to intervene in the world, as one is pledged to do by the theory of the democratic citizen.
The worst thing that ever happened to the idea of property was to hand it over to the economists, by which I mean first the capitalist Smithians and Ricardians, and then the communist and socialist Marxists, Promptly, something that lifted man from the beasts and made the dream of democracy possible became the football of learned idiots and the reductio ad absurdum of demagogues.
Every person in the world should have his property and it should be as substantial as possible, not for the luxury it affords him, the profit in dollars that it may bring him, but for important psychological and political reasons. The ideal of a person's property is what can edify, ornament, and sustain him for his normal needs and in opposition to the government. If a person lives outside of the state, whether as a nomad or as a hippie, then he may need less. If he resides in the middle of a state then he needs more.
The earliest democracies were of free farmers, artisans, and tradesmen. Nothing but collective violence could conquer their integrity and, as often as not, their own collective self-defense was adequate as protection. Not so today. The disease of exartysia or dependency, compounded by the high-flown theories of taxesis or officialdom, subjects the human personality to a regimen that prevents personal fulfillment. Legions of scholars have rationalized this "modern society," but in the end the result it modern despotism instead of archaic despotism.
The point of greatest aggression, where the culture of force penetrates the shield of independence, forms around the concept of exploitation of property. Those who seek overarching control exercise their dominion over those who have no property to clothe their personality to destroy the cumulative efforts of civilization over thousands of years. Whereupon, in defense, the idea of macro-property must be insisted upon.
It is well that one posses a bundle of rights that is capable of some expansion. It is essential, at the same time, that a line be drawn beyond which a fulfilled personality becomes an arbitrary, domineering boss, a capitalist in he communist image. Large property must consist of great engines of production, extensive landholdings, transportation networks, mines and mineral resources, the large ships for exploiting the seas, large power plants, and big buildings housing or servicing hundreds and thousands of people.
Psychologically, macro-property does not touch the vital sensitivity for property, or, if it does, presents a disease, as do the gross exaggeration of all values. Politically, macro-property has direct public policy effects, and becomes the subject of public standards and public policy. All macro-property, then, is public, although the wisest public policy may provide many different forms of organizing it, including vesting its income in some hands, its management in others, and its criticism and reform in still others.
When viewed in this way, the micro-propertied present themselves as both consumer and producer. It is idle, fanciful, and unjust to regard a person's property as a squirrel's nest, stuffed with the effects of his scratching and scampering. Property has a productive and consumer side. A deck of cards can provide pleasure, tie together a group, and stimulate productive "research" into forms, logics, or machines. To let a henroost feed a family but not a village is extravagant dogmatism.
Indeed, the production of items that we in America call "do it yourself" gadgets contributes heavily to the production of your country. It is sad to view the masses of Russia so poor in these devices, for here again "a petty capitalism" can help solve a multitude of elementary and fulfilling problems--whether you wish to call them consumption or production problems. The heavily rural character of China, and its village centered psychology, luckily defends itself naturally against party dogmatists who would never tolerate the small-scale consumption-production, "do it yourself" capitalism, nor allow it to acquire tools an material were it to occur in the cities or were it to postulated as a social invention.
Free enterprise, then, exhibits itself most famously when it exists at a level of self-reliance of small groups. Then, whether farmers or part-time farmers, workers or part-time capitalists, or small capitalists, the political system earns a great many "honest citizens," that is, persons who need not fear to express an opinion, can afford to litigate in court, can be deprived by political animosity but not so badly deprived as to collapse immediately. The distinction of political independence is fine, true, but it is like a fence of steel.
Free enterprise, when it moves to the use of macro-property, that is, when it is affected with a public interest, contributes to the honest and helicrynean society only when it satisfies conditions some of which are often absent in America. It must be autonomously directed, that is, by a free market, a public policy, and a self-interested and hopefully enlightened "ownership." It must not be a monopoly, or, if a monopoly, requires an organization that provides "an opposition party" along the whole continuum of its policies, not alone on the question of wages, for example. And it requires a powerful overseeing body tied directly to the top executive and legislative bodies.
It often appears to me that the poorer people of the world view the behavior of free enterprise as an old-fashioned market place where one may sometimes be cheated. But, of course, these same people would never give up the joys of this market place even though the stories of shrewd and crooked bargaining there are true. View the free enterprise system, if you will, as such a market place, but view it as such for both good and evil, not just evil. It is as great an invention as the wheel, and although we may be riding on air-jet cushions instead of wheels someday, the market has served humanity well and long.
The problem is to create an artificial market place by a combination of the social ingredients that formed the old natural market place, and in this greenhouse market place, more can be done than could ever be achieved by the old. It is a task for ingenious representative and managerial devices, of which I shall say more later (Chapter 3).
Modern Western economists, in their horror of communism and their fear of government, not to mention their invariable inward turning as a specialized discipline divorced from reality, have passed up a great opportunity to explain why it is that the theory of the U.S. Constitution regarding the protection of contracts and property is vital to the free culture. Political scientists, on their side, have for several generations regarded these clauses as nefarious and obstructive of government by the people and for the people.
Here I would like to stress what free enterprise contributes to an open society, yes even an honest society, because you can call a competitor a crook but you cannot do that to a bureaucrat representing the sovereign state in a monopolistic capacity. Free enterprise is based upon an enormous, widespread public trust in dealings among private individuals. At the end of his distinguished economics career, Frank Knight changed his total approach to the free enterprise system and insisted that we begin to call it "the cooperative system" instead of the competitive system. For there is more of cooperation than of competition in it.
He might well have called it also the creative system, the innovative system, the system of myriad autonomies, the system of direct accountability, the system which educates quickly and hard, the flexible system. That it is, again, a system to reduce coercion is also true, for, generally and ordinarily, there is a mile of distance between the order of an officer and the refusal to bargain, buy, or sell.
The free enterprise system, beyond all these things, stretches a fence of propertied independence, like the fences of a free farmer, or cooperative group of farmers, between those who would coerce and those who would resist coercion. It reduces the scope of coercion. It elevates the dignity of those who enjoy it and work in it, even to the worker whose confidence in it consists for the moment, as we would say, in "a lick and a promise."
It goes beyond these functions into the kind of flexibility modern industrial technology and production require. For it permits rapid shifts of plants, and reorganization. The attempts of the U.S. government to control prices in the inflation of 1972-74 are estimated to have cost government and business $2 billion. This large sum had little effect. Only a major war or natural disaster would have justified it; all excuses of saving the poor, the underprivileged, and the consumer were mere camouflage of complete bureaucratic failure; these groups would have been better off without the semi-coercive intervention. It was a plague of taxesis. The genuine fuel shortages produced another flare of taxesis. Thus people with little knowledge or faith, but with much indignation, cannot sometimes be restrained. The open system is always in danger of having its doors slammed in upon it.
Finally, in my all too brief eulogy of free enterprise, I would point out to you that the system assumes an added and thankless political burden. It absorbs continuously, and as a matter of course, the blame for innumerable economic frustrations--call them losses, defects, bad bargains, shoddy merchandise, or other names--that in a socialist economy are foisted directly and immediately upon the government. Without the free enterprise system, every deficiency, every annoyance, every abuse of daily life is an excuse for "calling out the troops." An example will help.
When I was delivering my "Lectures to the Indians" in March 1973, the Indian government seized the businesses of the grain dealers. A famine was already beginning and the socialist-trained officials and intelligentsia were placing the blame on the traders. My heart sank. I knew what would happen. It did happen. The famine got worse. Thousands of independent employers and workers were ruined. The bureaucrats stepped in. Prices soared. Shortages worsened. An illegal market developed. The famine grew. Popular resentment turned upon the government. On March 29, 1974, the New York Times reported, "The Indian government, frightened about a lag in food production and tensions in the nation, decided tonight to scrap its controversial year-old takeover of wheat distribution."
Do you understand what I am saying? If you don't, you are a typical product of the brainwashing centralist, statist ideologies of this century and you will find a great many Americans in your ranks. But in America, and especially in California and Hawaii, the Chinese are famed for their free enterprise. I should not be surprised if you do understand me. And therefore you may understand why I insist upon the maintenance and elevation of free enterprise in the American constitutional system. As the authors of the American Constitution appreciated, along with Marx, it is part of the substructure of the ruling group. And that is what it should remain.