George Washington on Constitutionalism

Posted by Eric F. Langborgh on 07 Feb 2005 at 08:22 pm

George Washington’s Farewell Address is perhaps most remembered in history for its warnings against “entangling alliances.” Let me suggest that his last will and testament for the United States of America, as it were, is relevant to today’s America and our current circumstances for a whole host of reasons. In fact, you can just about pick a current civic malady and then go through Washington’s Address to find his prescription:

• In light of our war on Iraq, the passages dealing with foreign policy.
• In light of our ever more intrusive national government, the admonition to cherish the Constitution.
• In light of our civic ignorance, the need for diffusion of knowledge among the people.

Etcetera.

However, I want to advance a theory that each aspect of the Farewell Address should not be taken in isolation of the rest, but be seen in the light of an underlying, integrating principle which Washington lays out throughout his narrative.

To explain, the main target of Washington’s warnings in his Farewell Address are “factions.” He warns against two types of factions — internally-produced (and even geographic) factions created by special interests and externally-produced factions caused by entangling alliances.

Factions, Washington warns, will jeopardize everybody’s peace, freedom, and well-being in the long-run. Washington’s prescription in guarding against this bad outcome is national unity. The glue of that national unity is the Constitution and the principles therein. But the Constitution loses its power as the glue of national unity and well-being if it is overrun by the “spirit of innovation” and “alterations” brought on by momentary passions that circumvent the Constitution’s “provision for its own amendment.”

So, Washington clearly considers the present Constitution as the ultimate authority over all citizens of our great union, including government officials. But he does not make the Constitution out to be an infallible idol. Changes may become evidently necessary over time. But they must be implemented only through the Constitution’s “provision for its own amendment,” and not through the “cunning” and “ambitious” factions that would “subvert the power of the people and usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Therefore, the integrating principle of Washington’s Farewell Address, as I alluded to before, is a robust constitutionalism, defined and implemented as laid out above.

Taken as such, the Farewell Address should take its place alongside James Madison’s Notes on Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 and the Federalist Papers as the triumvirate interpretive key to the Constitution — at least as near to one as there can be, without circumventing another key aspect of constitutionalism. That is, the final authority in constitutional disputes must always remain the text of the Constitution itself, not interpretations about what the Founders intended or would have intended. But these documents, including the Farewell Address, are very useful tools for understanding the Constitution and what it actually says. They get at the Constitution’s purpose.

Too many in America these days are all too willing to drive trucks through the Constitution in order to advance their statist agendas (no matter how well-intentioned), because they are completely unaware of or ambivalent to the Constitution’s underlying principles and purpose. Here again, Washington’s Farewell Address provides the remedy.

© 2004-2008 Eric F. Langborgh