How did the founders envision politics working under the U.S. Constitution?

0:03The constitution has some distinct characteristic modes of solving problems. Before it even gets to defining institutions, and you can actually see these at work in the convention, as well as in the ultimate document that it produced. The constitution tends to approach divisive questions in three ways. I would describe them as competition, negotiation, and productive tension. Competition is straightforward.

0:30The constitution over and over sets up competing power centers that are trying to win more power for themselves, or trying to resolve problems in their own way, but none of them has enough power to do anything on its own. They constantly have to compete with each other. They constantly have to push and pull, and the constitution, I think, implicitly views our society as embedded in a competitive culture, a competitive economics, a competition of ideas, a lot of what the First Amendment protects is the ability to really be engaged in competition, to make your argument, to make your case, to have your community live in its way. Competition over and over is one way that the Constitution solves problems. Another is negotiation, which I think is really at the center of how the Framers thought about American political life.

1:21These competing power centers, because they can't make one another go away, have to deal with each other. Over and over, the constitution takes competing factions, takes sides of disagreements, and says, you have to deal with each other, literally make deals with each other. At the center of the system is the Congress, which is fundamentally an arena for negotiation, working out differences by bargaining. The third of these, which I call constructive productive tension is maybe the least familiar, but I think it's awfully important, and it's basically a way in which the constitution takes competing options, seemingly opposite alternatives and embraces both at the same time to resolve a problem. For example, should the design of

2:07the congress represent the small states or the large states? Should we have a congress that give states an equal vote or based on population? The answer of the convention was yes, both at the same time, even though these are actually competing ways of thinking about the character of the republic. Is the president of the United States basically a glorified clerk who just administers the government that congress creates, or is the president a head of state, an elevated person who represents the nation in the world? The answer is both. The president of the United States, a very unusual and really unique office in the world, is both a clerk and a statesman at the same time. Are we a confederation of states, or are we a national government? The answer is yes, we are a confederation of

2:50states and a national government at the same time. Over and over The constitution resolves differences by embracing seemingly opposite alternatives. I think this works in conjunction with competition and with negotiation to create a political order that is all about resolving differences. In a sense, what it means to say that we embrace opposites, that we aim for this kind of productive tension. Is to say that the constitution left some really big questions unresolved.

3:21Left them open for generations of Americans to keep arguing about forever. We're still arguing about whether the states or the federal government should have more power in various arenas. We're still arguing about the balance of power between the different branches. The fact that we argue about these is actually part of the secret, the magic of our politics. I think these three modes of solving problems to begin with are how the convention approached its challenges, and then these are really embodied in all of the institutions.