The constitutional case for equality.

• Author: Carty, Kevin
• Position: The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic - Book review

The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens

Our Republic

by Ganesh Sitaraman

Knopf, 432 pp.

The founders assumed that America would always be a middle-class nation. That makes it particularly important to check the power of plutocrats today.

Political thinkers since antiquity have argued that successful republics must be structured to accommodate the inevitability of class conflict. So, for example, the Romans thought it best to create a senate reserved for patricians and a separate Tribune of the Plebs to represent the interests of the lower classes. British democracy evolved with a House of Lords, to which commoners could not belong, and a House of Commons, from which lords were excluded.

But as Ganesh Sitaraman, a law professor and former adviser to Senator Elizabeth Warren, points out in his new book, America's founders rejected the "class warfare constitutions" of the Romans and the British and, instead, created a "middle-class constitution." This new order was premised on the idea that America would always be a place where most people were neither rich nor poor, and there would be no need for ruling bodies reserved for one class or another. Sitaraman convincingly argues that the assumption of broad-scale equality built into our very structure of government is what makes the shrinking of today's middle class and the rising power of plutocrats so politically dangerous.

America's founders created a middle-class constitution, Sitaraman writes, because they lived in a society that--for white people--was unique at the time in its degree of economic equality. Fully two-thirds of white Americans owned property at the time, while only one-fifth of British citizens were property owners. "Every man has the opportunity of becoming rich," wrote Noah Webster in 1787. David Ramsay, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, said that the U.S. was made up of "free men all of one rank, where property is equally diffused."

"Throughout the founding period," writes Sitaraman, "Americans recognized that they were uniquely suited to republican government precisely because the people were relatively equal and the middle class was strong." So they incorporated this equality into their government. Neither the Senate nor the House, Sitaraman reminds us, included property requirements for membership or stipulated that members come from specific classes. While states had the power to impose their own property requirements for voting, this was not enshrined in the Constitution, and several states relaxed or eliminated these requirements after the Revolution.

The framers also established salaries for members of Congress so the non-wealthy could afford to serve. It was still left to state legislators to elect U.S. senators, but in the context of the times this was a means of empowering the broad mass of Americans, since state legislatures were themselves dominated by ordinary middle-class citizens.

Because the founders were drafting a constitution that assumed broad economic equality, they especially wanted equality to remain a dominant characteristic of American life. Thus they limited the inheritance of wealth by abolishing primogeniture and entail, and they spread property widely by selling cheap, government-owned land via laws like the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

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