The Remarkable Nature of Now | Dr. Nicholas Cole | BRI’s Constitutional Conversations

0:00 well it is a great project and we’re very happy that it’s out there for students and teachers and and one final question you know what lessons could be fruitful today you know we live in a world that seems very divided politically and ideologically not just here in America but around the world around the Western

0:21 world with it but the entire world at an age of social media and what are seemingly you know a lot of division how can how can that idea of negotiation that you’ve studied at the Constitutional Convention elsewhere how can that maybe lend a little sanity and compromise and moderation to today’s

0:43 politics well I think first and foremost I think we need to better understand the processes that gave us the institutions that we’ve been busy for the past thirty years taking for granted and not really thinking about I mean I think many people of my generation didn’t study

1:05 this kind of history in in school or in university because you know surely we’d learnt all the lessons we knew how democracies worked you know we’d been given the institutions and and and we took them really for granted and I think we’ve we’ve forgotten just how remarkable the emergence of the the

1:28 liberal democratic capitalist order really was historically and and what a what a brief moment it has been in world history where we’ve really enjoyed the liberties that we’ve enjoyed and the the ability for citizens to shape the direction of government that we that we currently have so I hope we’ll sort of

1:48 stop taking it for granted and that’s one of the reasons why when we were when we were designing the look of the quill project one of the if you like rhetorical choices we made for the interface was to make it look very modern we didn’t want a lot of pictures of people in powdered wigs to sort of

2:10 alienate students from the material and that’s incredibly deliberate we wanted them to focus on the substance and not the alien and 18th century nature of these debates partly with a hope that they would see you know that the modern relevance of of the material um but I think the the

2:34 other thing that is really remarkable about 1787 is that leave aside the question of slavery where I think this point is not applying quite this way but for the most part the American Constitution is so short because it’s a document about process it’s a it’s a

2:57 document that sets up how political debate should happen and although at the convention there were attempts to limit what Congress might or might not do concerning particular taxes or other questions of that nature for the most part the document that emerges is

3:17 broadly neutral on what the policies of the new government will be and that’s something that in modern Constitution writing is incredibly difficult to achieve because whether you look at the state-level constitutions that were written in the 19th and 20th century or whether you look internationally more

3:39 and more later writers of constitutions have tried to write policy outcomes into their constitutional texts and I think one of the really remarkable things about 1787 was the restraint that the convention showed in not doing that and and and really setting up a text that

4:01 set the boundaries for discussion now they weren’t perfect and some people did try and and and set in constitutional terms what federal policy might be on particular issues but largely they didn’t succeed and the document that emerges is one that is provides a a a broadly neutral forum for debate

4:24 and and then you know the subsequent congresses have been left to to work through those issues and you know if I had a hope for the future and Constitution writing it would be that we had the courage to do that more rather than less and to trust the people more rather than less and I think again for

4:46 all that the convention is sometimes criticized as not being democratic enough they really did leave future congresses enormous latitudes on policy questions that would be almost unimaginable today and that if America were to have a constitutional convention

5:06 today I suspect there would be very definite attempts to try and write policy preferences into the base constitutional text necklace call the crow project at Pembroke we thank you very much for your time and thank you for celebrating Constitution Day with us

5:26 here in the United States it’s an enormous pleasure thank you