Cato V, Part XII: Popular and Bewitching Colours

Recall, in the passage from Cato V cited in the previous entry in this present series, the manner by which George Clinton sought to remind his countrymen how it was that a formerly virtuous people could easily cease to be virtuous through no more invasive means than the passage of time. “The progress of a commercial society begets luxury,” he advised, “The parent of inequality, the foe to virtue, and the enemy of restraint [.]” For a man in his position as of the late 1780s this is potentially a very revealing sentiment indeed. Clinton was the Governor of New York, after all, perhaps the most commercially developed of the former Thirteen Colonies and very soon to become the financial hub of the entire American economy. Furthermore, recall that though Clinton most certainly benefited from his state’s economic preeminence – inasmuch as a large quantity of the imported goods sold in neighboring states had to pass through New York City, allowing Clinton to raise high tariffs on imports and pass the cost along to people who lacked the power to remove him from office – he was not himself a man of business by either upbringing or experience. He had been a militia officer, a privateer, a magistrate, and a country lawyer, but never a merchant or a trader. Based on this fact, and judging from the association he was apparently given to draw between commercial success and rising iniquity, Clinton may actually have shared with certain of his patrician rivals in New York state politics a general disdain for the world of commerce.

  

Granted, the dislike of business harbored by families like the Schuylers and the Livingstons was almost certainly based on class – successful merchants, in their minds, being too uncultured to spend their money responsibly – while Clinton’s seemed to stem from a general suspicion that excessive material wealth tended to promote “softness” and indolence. Nevertheless, it did seem as though Clinton’s attitude towards the cornerstone of his home state’s burgeoning economy was ambivalent at best. As to why this might have been the case, one potential explanation does come to mind. As mentioned in a previous entry in this present series, Clinton’s chosen nom de plume, Cato, was almost certainly intended to function as a reference on his part to a series of polemic missives published under that name in the London Journal between 1720 and 1723 by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. Prompted by the aforementioned collapse of the South Sea Company in 1720, Trenchard and Gordon took to print in order to condemn the institutional corruption which this event had made manifest before then expanding their critique to include all aspects of contemporary British political life with which they found fault. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the time – given the fairly recent incorporation of the Bank of England in 1694 and the disdain for that institution harbored by “Commonwealth Party” devotees like Trenchard and Gordon – the increasing taste for luxury which contemporary British culture seemed to be acquiring quickly enough became a subject of particular commentary and concern therein.

  

In Letter 17, for example, published in 1721, the authors in question sought to explain to their readers how it was that a corrupt administration might very easily take hold of the organs of state and direct the powers thereof to their own ends without alarming – or even alerting – the general public. “It is the business and policy of traitors,” they accordingly explained,

So to disguise their treason with plausible names, and so to recommend it with popular and bewitching colours, that they themselves shall be adored, while their work is detested, and yet carried on by those that detest it.

As to the nature of these, “Popular and bewitching colours,” Trenchard and Gordon went on to claim that the aforementioned corrupt individuals would at length have cause to,

    

Promote luxury, idleness, and expence, and a general depravation of manners, by their own example, as well as by connivance and publick encouragement. This will not only divert men's thoughts from examining their behaviour and politicks, but likewise let them loose from all the restraints of private and publick virtue. From immorality and excesses they will fall into necessity; and from thence into a servile dependence upon power.

Excessive material comfort, it seemed, served the function of both lure and trap. Not only would it encourage people to overlook the abuses being committed against their liberties, but it would breed successive generations to think only of self-interest and to willingly sacrifice the justice that was their due to any authority that could promise them further comfort.

  

Letter 18 contained a similar admonition, this time in the form of a quotation from a recently-published history of Ancient Rome written by French clergyman and historian René-Aubert Vertot (1655-1735). “Pleasure succeeded in the room of temperance,” declared Vertot, referring to the waning years of the Roman Republic,

Idleness took place of the love of business, and private regards extinguished that love of liberty, that zeal and warmth, which their ancestors had shewn for the interest of the publick; luxury and pride became fashionable; all ranks and orders of men tried to outvie one another in expense and pomp; and when, by so doing, they had spent their private patrimonies, they endeavoured to make reprisals upon the publick; and, having before sold every thing else, at last sold their country.

Of particular note in this passage is Vertot’s emphasis – and, by extension, Trenchard and Gordon’s emphasis – on the degree to which “expense and pomp” encourage people to adopt and cultivate social distinctions. So enraptured by thoughts of splendor and self-love, individuals who might previously have given due consideration to the needs of the state or of their fellow citizens instead willingly sacrifice all competing concerns to the sole pursuit of luxury and fame.

  

This same basic theme appeared again in the text of Letter 24 during a discussion of what Trenchard and Gordon considered to be the talents required of a people if they were to successfully apply themselves to the task of self-government. “The administration has been always best executed,” they avowed,

And the publick liberty best preserved, near the origin and rise of states, when plain honesty and common sense alone governed the publick affairs, and the morals of men were not corrupted with riches and luxury, nor their understandings perverted by subtleties and distinctions.

As with the quotation cited in Letter 18, this passage of Letter 24 shows the particular concern which Trenchard and Gordon seemed to attach to the concept of social inequality. Not only did they seem to believe that an attachment to luxury make people dependent on those who could maintain them in a state of material comfort, but it also served to distract them – by way of cultivating an obsession with their status vis-à-vis their peers, neighbors, and rivals – from jealously guarding the rights whose expression was ultimately of much greater value. Equality accordingly seemed to serve a very practical social purpose to the authors of Cato’s Letters – and to the aforementioned Vertot. Inasmuch as people who were acutely conscious of the distinctions under which they labored within a given society would naturally seek to enhance their position – and its associated rewards – by whatever means at their disposal, people who were broadly equal with one another would be less likely to see the profit in attempting to raise themselves above their neighbors. Thus free from the distractions wrought by having constantly to measure and shore up their standing, they might more effectively guard those liberties which formed their fundamental birthright from subversion by some self-interested cabal looking to seize control of the organs of public administration.

  

Bearing this conviction in mind, George Clinton’s stated belief in the corrupting power of luxury appears somewhat nearer to being explicable. “The progress of a commercial society begets luxury,” he wrote, “The parent of inequality, the foe to virtue, and the enemy to restraint [.]” Note the connection which the author of Cato V appears to draw between luxury, inequality, and iniquity. One, he seemed to be saying, begets the other, begets the other. And while Clinton did not go on to explain why it was he believed that excessive opulence would ultimately lead a society to cease prizing virtue above all, the general framework he posited most definitely conforms to that which was earlier set out by Trenchard and Gordon in the text of Cato’s Letters. Given Clinton’s use of the same pseudonym as these venerable polemicists, it would seem exceptionally unlikely that the evident similarities between their commentaries on the nature of political corruption in 1720s Britain and his admonition on that same topic to his fellow Americans in the late 1780s was purely the product of coincidence. On the contrary, it would seem to have been more likely the case that Clinton – far from alone among this countrymen – had read and been influenced by Cato’s Letters at some earlier point in his life and career and thereafter internalized certain of the assertions contained therein as to the relationship between prosperity, liberty, and political society.

  

Part of what makes the connection between Clinton’s expressed principles and those of Trenchard and Gordon so interesting is what it arguably has to say about the convictions harbored by certain members of the Founding Generation. Though George Clinton had doubtless been influenced by a great many different strands of 18^th century European philosophy – a consequence, no doubt, of having access to his father’s personal library – it would appear that no small part of his essential convictions were specifically derived from the writings of two anti-establishment polemicists whose work was published in a country he had never visited – and would never visit – almost twenty years before he was born. The authors of Cato’s Letters, though they doubtless hoped that their insights would maintain some degree of significance even if removed from the context in which they were offered – i.e. 1720s Britain in the aftermath of the South Sea Company bubble – surely could not have guessed that this would be the case. Perceptive though these men most certainly were, surely nothing in their shared experiences could possibly have led them to imagine that the critiques which they offered of the conduct of successive British governments at the beginning of the 18^th century would at length serve to inspire the actions and convictions of one of a cohort of revolutionary nation-builders in the former Thirteen Colonies almost seventy years later. In spite of the improbability of such an outcome, however, that is exactly what transpired. Decades after the “Commonwealth Party” tradition to which Trenchard and Gordon belonged had faded into obscurity – having wrought little, if any, change to the character of contemporary British political culture – one of a band of provincial radicals in a far-flung colonial backwater sought to reassert the significance of many of the convictions espoused by this selfsame faction in the name of constructing a republic the likes of which generations of European philosophers and political theorists could only have imagined.

  

 What this would seem to mean, in essence, is that the antipathy which Clinton expressed in the cited text of Cato V towards the influence of commerce and luxury on the political character of the American people, while most certainly a reflection of then-current trends in the socio-economic development of the nascent American republic, also represented a kind of attempted resuscitation of a political dialogue that had its origins in early Georgian Britain. The author of Cato V was not alone in this, it bears noting. A significant number of his fellow Founders also appeared to adopt the language and convictions of earlier generations of British radicals in their attempts to first castigate what they viewed as the gross mistreatment of the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies by contemporary British authorities, and then to justify rebellion against the same. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) spoke glowingly of “revolution principles” – in reference to the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89 – in his satirical takedowns of British behavior vis-à-vis the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s. John Adams (1735-1826) directed his readers to the works of British republican statesmen and theorists like Algernon Sidney (1623-1683), Marchmont Nedham (1620-1678), Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), and Benjamin Hoadly (1676-1761) in his 1776 pamphlet, Thoughts on Government. And Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) paid homage across a number of his most influential published works to the version of the “social contract” advanced by John Locke (1632-1704) in his Two Treatises on Government (1689). The result of this ongoing dialogue between past and present would seem to have been essentially twofold.

  

On one hand, the members of the Founding Generation who took inspiration from the recent history of British radicalism effectively ended up actively working to validate a set of assertions and convictions whose soundness had long been almost completely discounted in their authors’ country of origin. In this sense, the American revolutionaries were affirming their collective status as the philosophical heirs of Locke, Burnet, and Sidney, as well as Trenchard and Gordon and their fellow Commonwealth Party devotees. Far from springing spontaneously out of a provincial backwater with no philosophical tradition of its own to speak of, the American Revolution could thus more accurately be characterized as the continuation – indeed, the realization – of a number of established radical political traditions rooted in 16^th and 17^th century Britain. And on the other hand, while in no way discounting the influence of contemporary events and contemporary attitudes, it would likewise seem reasonable to describe the various perspectives articulated by a number of the Founding Generation’s most prominent members as having their origins and foundations rooted firmly in a much earlier era in the Anglo-American past. Consider, by way of example, George Clinton’s aforementioned antipathy towards the increasing economic commercialization then taking place in certain regions of the contemporary United States.

  

New York City, as of the late 1780s, was perhaps the single-most important port-of-entry in the nascent American republic. As produce from New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York itself flowed out of its dockyards to be sold in Europe – and in the West Indies, albeit indirectly – manufactured goods flowed into the same facilities to be sold on to merchants in smaller population centers across the Atlantic coast. While less dominant than New York, Boston performed a similar function for the states in upper New England – with an added emphasis on shipbuilding – as Philadelphia did for the Mid-Atlantic and Baltimore for the Upper South. Notwithstanding the overwhelming percentage of the total American population who still made a living from principally agricultural pursuits, commerce accordingly accounted for an increasingly significant portion of the American economy. In spite of the benefits that this trend seemed to offer, however – i.e. access to export markets for American produce, the ability to purchase manufactured goods that were otherwise unavailable, the concomitant growth of firms offering purchases on credit, etc. – people like George Clinton and Thomas Jefferson maintained that the growing dependence of the American economy on commerce represented a potentially disastrous development.

  

Granted, people like Jefferson and his friend and political collaborator James Madison (1751-1836) harbored a number of personal reasons for their tendency to reject the increasing commercialization of the American economy. Being farmers by trade – inasmuch as someone who owns the people that do the actual tilling can really be considered a farmer – they had cause to resent both the loss of influence which the decreased importance of agriculture would have precipitated as well as the increasing presence of merchant firms whose offers of credit they required to make a living but whose ownership of their debts was a source of persistent frustration. But George Clinton wasn’t a farmer. Far from suffering a loss of influence or financial independence as a result of the growth of his home state’s commercial economy, his status as Governor of New York had if anything been strengthened by the revenues generated by the high import tariffs that New York City’s financial dominance had made possible. The likeliest explanation for his distrust of commerce – and the luxury and corruption which he felt it would inevitably breed – would therefore seem to lie in political philosophy rather than personal stakes. Having evidently absorbed the essential convictions of the Commonwealth Party through the writings of Trenchard and Gordon, Clinton accordingly seemed to view the events of the 1780s in the nascent United States through much the same lens as these selfsame radical polemicists had viewed the events of the 1720s in Great Britain. 

Cato V, Part XI: Americans Are Like Other Men

By way of offering a conclusion to the present series – which has, as ever, gone on slightly longer than intended – I would ask my readers to consider one final set of passages from George Clinton’s Cato V. So far, in examining said document, we have discussed the purpose and effects of different election intervals, the importance of education in a democratic society, the nature and deficiencies of the 18^th century British House of Commons, and the many and various means by which outside interests could, and did, and would, successfully gain control over bodies of elected representatives between the time of Clinton’s writing in 1788 and the present day of 2019. And while Clinton’s clarity of insight and expression have been featured prominently throughout, thus far his perspective on the subject at hand has tended towards keen observation rather than prophecy. That is to say, though the author of Cato V was demonstrably a very astute individual who readily grasped the nature of the relationship that exists in democratic jurisdictions between political power and political institutions – and furthermore harbored far from unreasonable ideas about how to improve democratic outcomes and stave off potential subversion – he was also very much a man of his time and place. He saw clearly and spoke shrewdly, no doubt, but within the intellectual and socio-cultural confines of his era. This would hardly seem cause to find fault with the man. No one should be thought less of for being unable to predict the extraordinary, the unimaginable, or the unlikely, any more than they should be castigated for failing to see around corners. What it does mean, however, is that whenever one attempts to interrogate the wisdom of the past, one must keep in mind what the subject in question did and didn’t know, could and couldn’t know. George Clinton was a very wise man, but he could not know everything, could not see everything, in his own time or in any other.

  

All that being said, people are still capable of the rare stroke of intuition. Indeed, it is because they are so rare that such insights are so impressive. It isn’t that they can literally see into the future, such a feat at this point being practically impossible. Rather, it’s that they are able to observe some aspect of their present situation which to them seems likely to develop into a major factor of historical change and that they proceed to call it out as such. There is luck in this, of course, but also a degree of astute perception. Certain trends which went on to reshape entire cultures over the course of decades or centuries were not necessarily obvious to most observers in their early, formative stages. No one, for example, seemed either willing or able to predict the downfall of the French monarchy at the beginning of 1789. The French economy was in dire straits, the people were hungry, and insurrectionary ideas about absolutism and republicanism were circulating freely. Something was in the offing, the more incisive onlookers would doubtless have agreed, but the fall of the monarchy? The end of a line of kings that stretched back through the houses of Bourbon, Valois, and Capet over a course of eight centuries? It was quite simply inconceivable. That is to say, no one seemed willing or able to conceive it. This is not always the case, of course. Sometimes, owing to some innate capacity or a stroke of blind luck, someone is able to see what is impending more clearly than all their contemporaries.

  

George Clinton, for all his aforementioned limitations, did seem to possess this capacity himself. Not in all things, mind, but in some things. For in the text of Cato V, armed with no more knowledge than the wisest of his countrymen, he predicted something that hardly any of his fellow Americans would then have had the stomach to admit. Namely, that there might conceivably come a time when the American people ceased to care any more about virtue, and liberty, and freedom, and justice, and that they would substitute in their place a love of luxury and a lust for power. Perhaps this seems too callous a description of what he American character has become. Clinton did not seem to think so. Nor did he believe that Americans were unique in their ability to shun virtue as their material circumstances gradually improved. His contention, far from attempting to paint his countrymen as unusual in their latent capacity for rapaciousness, was rather than Americans were not half as special as they believed themselves to be. An ardent love of virtue may have been the characteristic most widely embraced by the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies in response to the oppressions foisted on them by the events of the 1760s and 1770s, but at some point this would almost certainly cease to be the case. As the material, political, and social circumstances of the American people changed – as they had begun to already over the course of the 1780s – so too would their manners, interests, and general character change in turn. And while no one could say for certain whether this process would work out for better or for worse, Clinton was adamant that his countrymen would only be deceiving themselves if they held to the conviction that the latter outcome was impossible.

  

The context in which George Clinton offered this assertion naturally had everything to do with the proposed constitution then under scrutiny across the length of the United States. Certain supporters of this new compact, he alleged, were willing to overlook its obvious deficiencies – the inexactness of its language, the opportunities it afforded for the abuse of its various powers, etc. – because they believed that, “The opinions and manners of the people of America, are capable to resist and prevent an extension of prerogative or oppression [.]” It was not that the document in question was perfect, but that the American people were virtuous enough so that it didn’t have to be. This, Clinton unsurprisingly asserted in the third paragraph of Cato V, was a painfully shortsighted argument. “You must recollect,” he admonished his countrymen,

That opinion and manners are mutable, and may not always be a permanent obstruction against the encroachments of government; that the progress of a commercial society begets luxury, the parent of inequality, the foe to virtue, and the enemy to restraint; and that ambition and voluptuousness aided by flattery, will teach magistrates, where limits are not explicitly fixed, to have separate and distinct interests from the people [.]

Clinton went on to very succinctly sum up his impression of the probable consequences of this trend further on in the same section of Cato V. “Americans are like other men in similar situations,” he thus affirmed,

When the manners and opinions of the community are changed by the causes I mentioned before, and your political compact inexplicit, your posterity will find that great power connected with ambition, luxury, and flattery, will as readily produce a Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian in America, as the same causes did in the Roman empire.

Obviously, there is a great deal to unpack in these statements, not the least of which is what they seem to say about George Clinton’s perception of the fundamental character of the American people.

Far from trumpeting the manifest virtues of his countrymen as reason enough to reject the proposed constitution – as certain of his fellow Anti-Federalists most certainly did – Clinton seemed to believe that it was in fact the probable inability of the American people to maintain themselves in a perpetual state of virtue that made the political compact on offer such a dangerous idea. “Americans,” he declared accordingly, “Are like other men [;]” their manners and opinions could change in time, become softened by prosperity, warped by luxury, and at length no longer serve to prevent the reappearance of the worst abuses that the species had been made to suffer in the context of political society. Keen though this reasoning may have been, it was also an exceptionally sober evaluation of the moral disposition of the American people. Consider, by way of comparison, the manner in which Clinton’s aforementioned Anti-Federalist colleagues spoke or wrote of the American character at around the same time.

Patrick Henry (1736-1799), referring to that selfsame subject in his address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention a few months earlier in 1788, stated that, “The time has been when every pulse of my heart beat for American liberty, and which, I believe, had a counterpart in the breast of every true American [.]” Granting that the originator of the phrase “Give me liberty or give me death” here seemed to be referring to the “pulse of liberty” in the past tense – as if to say that he felt himself now alone in experiencing it – later passages in the same address do show him attempting to rouse this same sentiment in his listeners there and then. The American spirit, he stated accordingly, was, “That spirit which has enabled us to surmount the greatest difficulties; to that illustrious spirit I address my most fervent prayer to prevent our adopting a system destructive to liberty.” In essence, it seemed, Henry was trying to goad his countrymen into rejecting the proposed constitution by telling them, last he had checked, that Americans were too virtuous, too fond of liberty, and too jealous of their rights to allow them to be so easily subverted or forgotten. If he did not believe that they would respond accordingly – that they yet held fast to the spirit he was seeking to invoke – one imagines that he would not have bothered.

  

Robert Yates (1738-1801) – writing as Brutus – similarly affirmed in one of his own anti-constitutional missives that,

I need say no more, I presume, to an American, than that this principle is a fundamental one, in all the Constitutions of our own States; there is not one of them but what is either founded on a declaration or bill of rights, or has certain express reservation of rights interwoven in the body of them. From this it appears, that at a time when the pulse of liberty beat high, and when an appeal was made to the people to form Constitutions for the government of themselves, it was their universal sense, that such declarations should make a part of their frames of government.

Again, the impression which Yates seemed eager to convey was that his countrymen were, at base, too attached to the liberties for which they recently fought to give them up so casually to the kind of powerful central government described in the text of the proposed constitution. Doubtless he would not have attempted to rouse what he did not believe was there, or indeed would continue to be there for the foreseeable future.

  

Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), in her Observations on the New Constitution, meanwhile seemed to be of much the same opinion as Henry and Yates. Namely, she affirmed that the supporters of the proposed constitution represented an ambitious and self-interested cabal whose character and interests set them almost completely apart from the bulk of the American people. “On these shores freedom has planted her standard,” she thus affirmed,

Dipped in the purple tide that flowed from the veins of her martyred heroes; and here every uncorrupted American yet hopes to see it supported by the vigour, the justice, the wisdom and unanimity of the people, in spite of the deep-laid plots the secret intrigues, or the bold effrontery of those interested and avricious adventurers for place, who intoxicated with the ideas of distinction and preferment have prostrated every worthy principle beneath the shrine of ambition.

Granting that the language which she sought to deploy was a fair bit more visceral than was favored among her fellow Anti-Federalists, the sentiment Warren was attempting to communicate was entirely typical of that selfsame cohort. Americans, she asserted, were better than this. They had sacrificed too much, loved justice too dearly to turn over their rights to the custodianship of a small group of powerful magistrates, elected or otherwise. Their liberties were better left in their own hand; the same hands that had wrested them from the covetous grasp of tyranny.

  

Clearly, though he was in agreement with his fellow Anti-Federalists that the proposed constitution represented a mortal danger to the American people – and should accordingly have been rejected – Clinton did not endorse this course of action because he believed that the mass of his fellow countrymen were more virtuous as a whole than their prospective governors were likely to be. On the contrary, he opposed the ratification of the proposed constitution because he believed that its deficiencies, while perhaps rendered moot in the interim by the virtuousness of the contemporary American character, would at length fall prey to the changing attitudes of a people no more capable of indefinitely shrugging off the temptation of self-interest and the softening influence of luxury than were any other. Far from attempting to rouse his countrymen to action, then, by reminding them that they were too attached to liberty as a fundamental aspect of their character to submit themselves to as powerful a government as described by the proposed constitution, Clinton rather seemed intent on disabusing his fellow Americans of any notion they may have formed as to their collective ability to rise above the kinds of petty impulses that had heralded the destruction of other peoples at other times. Americans, he thus affirmed, were not better than their counterparts in contemporary Europe or Ancient Rome. They were not more virtuous, more selfless, less given to corruption or egotism. Rather, as with any people, they were the product of their environment, their resources, and their experiences. Privation and oppression – in the form of Britain’s heavy-handed treatment of the Thirteen Colonies in the 1760s and 1770s – had taught them to prize liberty and justice, but prosperity and luxury might yet teach them to prize other things entirely.

  

While the 1780s had certainly not been all that kind to the fledgling United States of America – between a nationwide credit crisis, concomitant economic instability, and periodic civil disturbances – this kind of dour attitude towards the prospects facing the American people most definitely set George Clinton apart from the majority of his countrymen. The Revolutionary War had ended scarcely five years prior with Britain’s defeat and recognition of the sovereignty of the American republic. Having thus defeated one of the most powerful empires the world had ever known with a hastily-assembled army and a collection of local militias – and, yes, French, Spanish, and Dutch assistance – the inhabitants of the United States yet had every reason to continue basking in the exaltation of what they had accomplished and to continue justifying their success as stemming chiefly from their superior virtue vis-à-vis their British counterparts. America’s future, in the eyes of those who held to these sentiments despite the difficulties that the United States was presently experiencing – and the need which some of them felt to draft an entirely new national charter – was accordingly very bright. As their collective behavior over the previous decade-and-a-half had shown, Americans met the most trying challenges imaginable with righteousness, dignity, and perseverance. Whatever the future might cast into their path – including economic crises, civil conflicts, and even an attempt by some self-interested cabal to bamboozle the people into giving up their rights – the American character would surmount every obstacle so long as it stayed true to its nature.  That Clinton disagreed with this assessment should by now be quite clear. What remains to explore, then, is precisely why. Fortunately, the cited text of Cato V would seem to contain the beginnings of an answer. 

Cato V, Part X: Four Hundred and Thirty-Five Ways to Get What You Want, contd.

Oil companies, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, investment firms, banking firms, and social welfare organizations – to name but a few – respectively spend tens of millions of dollars every year in the United States for the purpose of gaining some measure of influence over that country’s elected officials. Sometimes they donate money directly to the relevant re-election campaigns, sometimes to the associated political actions committees, and sometimes to whichever tax-exempt organization whose objectives they believe align with their own. That there are four hundred and thirty-five Representatives and one hundred Senators – along with a much larger total number of state legislators – does not seem to deter this activity in the slightest. That is to say, the interests in question don’t seem to be much put off by the fact that they have to purchase the cooperation of a seemingly large number of people in order for their policy goals to gain significant traction. In part, this may be the result of much the same set of circumstances that made it so easy of the likes of Petrobras and Odebrecht to effectively take control of the contract approval process in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. Given control of established oversight mechanisms and sufficient ideological cover, it may be the case that any legislature, no matter the size, can be brought under the control of a single exterior interest provided it deploys its resources with care.

That being said, it is likely nearer to the truth to suggest that the ability of an entity like the National Rifle Association to exert as much influence as it does over the national legislative process of the United States of America is due chiefly to its ability to raise and spend vast sums of money with relative ease. In 1788, it may be taken as a given, the idea that a single individual or organization could or would accrue and spend the sum total of the contemporary United States domestic debt on a single political race would surely have been thought of as downright ludicrous. Not only were non-governmental entities generally incapable of generating that kind of discretionary cash, but they would have surely balked at the thought of spending it all in one place. Such is no longer the case in 2019. Organizations like the NRA can and do spend thirty million dollars over the course of a single election cycle – over three times the total foreign debt owed by the United States in 1791 – because they know from experience that they’ll be able to make as much back and then some by the time the next campaign season rolls around. Faced with potentially hundreds of officeholders whose cooperation needs to be purchased, corporations, social welfare groups, and lobbying firms accordingly have little cause to abandon hope at the outwardly daunting prospect that looms before them. Instead, with the aid of the best expertise that money can buy, they spend, and spend, and spend, and spend. And while no single business, interest group, or private advocacy organization currently operating in the United States of America tends to allocate sufficient funds to secure the cooperation of an absolute majority at every level of government, the simple reason for this is that they really don’t have to go that far in order to get what it is that they want.

Now, in fairness to George Clinton, none of this is to say that the point which he was attempting to make in the cited text of Cato V was wholly and completely without merit. He was, as it turns out, incorrect in his evident affirmation that a sufficiently large legislature could successfully resist being influenced by entities or interests separate and outside of itself. As the intervening centuries have shown quite clearly, there are many more factors contributing to the likelihood of a given legislature coming under the sustained influence of an exterior entity or interest than merely the number of representatives seated therein. These factors include, but are not limited to, the existence of large corporations, the existence of political parties, the style and extent of political campaigning, the state of campaign finance laws, the existence of government-owned utilities, and the state of communications infrastructure and consumer media. The more money there is in the system, and the more opportunities there are for that money to be spent, the easier it becomes for individuals or organizations to exert their will within and upon the relevant institutions of political representation.

Granted, there may well be a number – a ratio of political representation to actual population – that might reliably serve to prevent a given legislature from coming under the sustained influence of a single exterior interest. Given a rate of one representative for every one hundred thousand people – a number which falls far below the current average of one member for every seven hundred and fifty thousand – perhaps the United States House of Representatives could conceivably lessen the influence of high-value campaign donors – namely major corporations and social welfare groups – though the consequent emergence of a number of smaller parties speaking to very specific regional or socio-cultural policy issues. Then again, it seems equally likely that the resulting three thousand-member legislative assembly would cease to function as intended for a whole other set of reasons having to do with its ungainly size. The fact that much larger countries than the United States of America – India, to recall but the most prominent – have elected to maintain relatively small national legislatures would seem to validate this course of reasoning. While a given legislature might have to be exceptionally large in order to counter the ability of wealthy individuals or private interests to purchase the cooperation of a sufficient number of delegates therein to claim functional control of the relevant agenda, it would also seem to be true that a given legislature become unacceptably dysfunctional as the number of constituents per individual representative decreases.

Clearly, George Clinton could not have known these things at the time he penned Cato V in 1788. His error, then, is properly attributed to ignorance rather than any fault on the part of his reasoning. Though he was, in the main, incorrect in his specific assessment of the relationship between the size of a legislature and the ability of its members to collectively resist the influence of exterior entities or interests, he was not wrong to call attention to the structure and composition of the version of Congress which he and his countrymen were being asked to consider. While the powers possessed by a given legislature might seem, to the casual observer, to be far more important than the number of seats allocated therein, the latter can in fact have a tremendous impact on which subjects ultimately rise to the level of debate and which constituent communities are most likely to be heard. Consider, by way of example, the United States of America as it exists in 2019. Most Americans living today probably know that there are four hundred and thirty-five seats in the House of Representatives. And most of them probably also understand – to some extent – that these seats are continually re-apportioned according to the results of a census that is conducted by the federal government every ten years. But there likely aren’t very many Americans in 2019 who give much thought as to how it is there came to be four hundred and thirty-five seats to begin with, or, if seats are indeed apportioned according to population, why that number hasn’t changed during their lifetime.

Information which might shed some light on these subjects is readily available, of course. People are free to read about the method of apportionment currently utilized by Congress, to peruse the data collected during the most recent census and compare it against state-by-state seat tallies, or to familiarize themselves with the text of the Reapportionment Act of 1929, by whose terms the current seat cap was set. Most of them won’t bother, however. The number of seats in the lower house of Congress is simply a fact which they feel free to take for granted on their way to worrying about much more urgent matters. Now, to be entirely fair to the current inhabitants of the American republic, there do seem to be any number of more urgent matters to attend to. And yet, notwithstanding the fact that matters of intense personal, economic, ideological, and constitutional significance can and do arise from among the day-to-day business of the United States Congress, the fact that the number of seats in the House of Representatives has been frozen at four hundred and thirty-five since before the Great Depression explains a great deal about which communities in the United States can and cannot claim access to the levers of institutional power. Decennial census data, rather than result in the addition of wholly new seats, instead initiates a process whereby seats are “shuffled” according more to disparities in representation than real population growth. In practice this means that while some states do currently enjoy relatively generous representation when compared to others – Wyoming’s single Representative, for instance, is elected by about five hundred and sixty thousand people; California’s fifty-three are each elected by approximately seven hundred and forty thousand – the average number of constituents per seat is only ever going to increase. Between 1793 and 1803, for example it stood at a mere thirty-four thousand. A century later it had risen to one hundred seventy-thousand. Today it sits at over seven hundred thousand. And as this number goes up, choices have been and will continue to be made about where seats are allocated and by what means they are drawn.

If New York, say, were to double its population between one census and the next, that state would not necessarily be entitled during the consequent re-apportionment process to twice as many seats in Congress. In accordance with the aforementioned Reapportionment Act, wholly new seats cannot simply be created in order to account for increases in population. The total must remain locked at four hundred and thirty-five. What must occur, then, is a shifting of seats away from other states until New York enjoys a representation in Congress that is roughly proportional to its newly-enlarged population. Maybe Ohio loses one or two seats, maybe Massachusetts three or four, and maybe Virginia as many as five. New York’s increase, then, is someone else’s loss; communities in other states that once possessed a clearer voice in Congress are now grouped together into larger constituencies where their interests will be forced to compete for attention or else be drowned out entirely. Not only that, but the redrawing of district boundaries even in newly-empowered New York – because, once again, the number of seats being added must fall somewhat short of the actual increase in population – are bound to result in larger constituencies and a general watering down of the representation in Congress enjoyed by the effected communities. Within this scenario, then, not only have people living in states outside of New York suffered for the population growth experienced by certain of their fellow Americans, but the people of New York have suffered as well. And as to which communities are most likely to have the negative effects or reapportionment foisted upon them, well, the most likely answer would seem also to be the most obvious: those whose interests are not valued, whose ability to reward prospective patrons is limited, or whose emerging power represent a threat to the status quo. 

Changing the method by which seats are apportioned in Congress might not stop these kinds of things from happening, of course. Nor would it necessarily do anything to affect the ability of Congress as a whole to stave off the influence of exterior interests – be they nefarious or otherwise – notwithstanding what George Clinton sought to affirm in the cited text of Cato V. But it would almost certainly have an outsized effect of some kind on the character and quality of representative government in the United States of America. The seats possessed by a given state in the House of Representatives are one of the principle means by which communities in that state make their desires, interests, and objectives known within the context of the federal government. Adding to a state’s delegation accordingly increases the ability of these communities to garner the attention of their assigned representative. Just so, taking seats away from a state’s delegation in Congress forces the communities therein to compete for the attention of their representative from within a larger overall body of constituents. If Congress were to change the method by which these selfsame seats are apportioned, they would therefore also be changing the dynamics that currently govern which voices are most likely to be heard within a given congressional district. Consequent to such an alteration, concerns which would otherwise have been drowned out are permitted to rise to the attention of this or that Representative. Data is collected, legislation is drafted, and laws are made, all pursuant to the interests of communities which would not have been able to exert themselves near so effectively if a different set of procedures governed the process of apportionment.

The results of a given presidential election are also closely tied to the rules by which states are granted seats in the House of Representatives. While each state, under the regulations currently governing the Electoral College, are guaranteed at least three votes for President and Vice-President – one for each of their two Senators and one for their minimum number of Representatives – the bulk of the vote tally allotted to each state tends to run much higher. California, for example, currently possesses fifty-five electoral votes; three of them are a function of this guaranteed baseline, fifty-two of them are owed to the seats allotted in the House of Representatives to the Golden State’s thirty-nine million residents. If California were to gain significant population over the course of the ten year period between one census and the next, their seat tally and their vote tally would naturally go up. Depending on how many residents California actually gained, however, the concomitant increases in Congress and the Electoral College may or may not be proportionate to how much California’s population really grew. If the population of the Golden State somehow doubled during the aforementioned ten year period, for example, the relevant congressional delegation and electoral vote would almost certainly not increase from fifty-three and fifty-five, respectively, to one hundred and six and one hundred and eight. Since there are only four hundred and thirty-five total seats to go around – pursuant to the aforementioned Reapportionment Act of 1929 – such a drastic swing in California’s favor would represent too large a loss for the other states to be accurately represented within the relevant institutions. California would ultimately gain, of course, and other states would lose, but not to the extent that California’s actual population growth would otherwise indicate.

The result of this confluence of emerging circumstances and established regulations would seem to be that the Golden State’s congressional delegation and its Electoral College vote would underrepresent its population relative to smaller states. Votes cast by California for President and Vice-President, while indeed reflecting the will of the majority of the voting residents thereof, would accordingly misrepresent the actual number of people – as a percentage of every vote cast – who chose this or that candidate. This is happening already, of course, albeit not as drastically as it might. California currently accounts for just short of twelve percent of the total population of the United States of America while controlling only ten percent of the five hundred and thirty-five votes in the Electoral College. Almost nine percent of the US population resides in Texas; its electoral votes account for only seven percent of the total. And Wyoming, at the other end of the spectrum, contains just short of two-tenths of a percent of the American republic’s three hundred and thirty million people while claiming almost sixth-tenths of a percent of every vote in the Electoral College. Changing the rules that govern the apportionment process would naturally alter all of these figures, as well as the advantages and disadvantages they confer on the effected states, and conceivably even the outcome of a given presidential election. Shift seats here, shift seats there; add to the total, take away from the total. Minute and technical though such matters may seem in the abstract, the effects which they can and do exert upon the character and quality of representative government in the United States of America are and can be exceptionally severe.

This, more than anything else, should be the message that the modern reader derives from the cited passage of George Clinton’s Cato V. Notwithstanding the literal meaning of what he was trying to say – an assertion whose validity has at this point hopefully been disproven – the relevant implication of his claim that the House of Representatives described by the proposed constitution contained too few members was that such structural details are as important to how the resulting government functions as any of the powers or responsibilities to which it might lay claim. What the lower house of Congress could and couldn’t do under the auspices of the proposed constitution was most definitely of tremendous significance as well, and a perfectly apt subject for scrutiny and critique. But so was the number of seats in that body which each state was set to possess, and the manner by which that number was arrived at, and the effects which that number was likely to exert upon Congress as a whole and each of the states in isolation. These might seem at times like somewhat arcane details; the products of obscure equations and complex calculations. And that they may be. But they also collectively determine who among the American people can speak and be heard and who must struggle to have their concerns and priorities addressed. Notwithstanding the fact that many of us presently don’t seem to pay much heed to this fact – and decline, therefore, to question the logic underpinning it – George Clinton rightly affirmed as long ago as 1788 that it was as important to interrogate such matters of apparent minutiae as to pay heed to what seemed to be the most important questions of state. 

Cato V, Part IX: Four Hundred and Thirty-Five Ways to Get What You Want

Private individuals and enterprises do most assuredly traffic in the kind of influence peddling to which Clinton sought to call attention in the text of Cato V, of course. He was far from mistaken in believing that the fundamentally public nature of the American model of representative government entailed a degree of vulnerability to outside interference. But whereas he and his fellow Founders tended to pinpoint the source of this intrusion as being either foreign in nature – with Great Britain in particular seen as a likely potential source of infiltration and sabotage – or else originating in the minds of bankers and speculators whom they believed would gladly ruin a country in order to line their own pockets, the real threat would ultimately present itself in a very transparent and law-abiding fashion. Consider, by way of explanation, the way modern political campaigns tend to be conducted. Since campaigning as we know it here at the beginning of the 21^st century really came into being – roughly sometime in the middle of the 19^th century – it has tended to be a very expensive endeavor. Transportation costs money, rallies cost money, leaflets cost money, buttons cost money, and the expensive but far-reaching electronic media of the modern era – radio ads, television ads, streaming ads, and social media ads – cost even more. Fundraising is thus perhaps the most important single responsibility that any potential candidate for elected office must attend to from the moment they even begin to imagine their swearing in to the last possible second before the polls officially open. To be a political aspirant, therefore, is to pretty much always be on the lookout for new and larger sources of cash.

There are rules, of course, as to where this cash can come from. In the United States of America, campaign finance laws ensure that most political donations are recorded and readily accessible to the public, that individuals cannot donate more than a set amount, that ostensibly non-partisan organizations like labor unions and social welfare groups do not make direct donations to political candidates, and that political parties do not accept more than a given amount of money per election or per year. Because of the high stakes of national and even state elections – the prize being the power to influence and/or alter the laws and policy priorities of the jurisdiction in question – the ability to work effectively within and around these regulations has naturally become a skill of tremendous value to the public and private organizations whose material well-being or ideological objectives stand to be directly affected by the identity of the individual or the party in power. Enter the modern lobbyist. The job of a lobbyist, and the purpose of the firms that employ them, is essentially to turn private money into public influence. In its simplest form, this might entail little more than a campaign of persuasion whereby a candidate for office – many of whom, it bears noting, are already office-holders themselves – is convinced by way of personal favors – the gifting of luxury goods, the organizing of fundraisers, or the securing of individual donors, for example – to support such policies once elected as the employer of the lobbyist in question prefers. So long as such favors are reported, and do not exceed a set maximum in terms of their monetary value, no harm is reported as having been done.

Costlier forms of lobbying tend also to be less direct in consequence of the aforementioned campaign finance regulations restricting large money donations directly to individual campaigns. So-called “Political Action Committees” or “PACs” are an increasingly popular means of exerting this kind of indirect influence in American elections, owing largely to their ability to accept and spend tremendous amounts of money during the course of a political campaign almost entirely outside of the rule regime that currently governs political funding in the United States. This evident circumvention of campaign finance regulations is made possible by the existence of a particular subset of PAC, labeled as an “independent-expenditure committees,” whose operations are legally and functionally separate from those of a candidate or party-run political organization. So long as this species of PAC is operated independently of any political campaigns – and so long as its funding is disclosed in accordance with Federal Elections Commission regulations – it may accept virtually unlimited donations and spend virtually unlimited sums of money on political advertising, voter registration efforts, or any number of additional expenditures intended to aid a particular party or individual. The intention, of course, on the part of those people or organizations who donate to a PAC is that their support will both accomplish the election of their preferred candidate and ensure – pursuant to the aforementioned disclosure regulations – that the newly-minted public servant in question does not soon forget who it was that helped make their election possible.

And then there are what the United States Internal Revenue code refers to as 501(c) organizations, a category which includes (but is not limited to) labor unions, social welfare groups, and chambers of commerce. Provided that the primary stated purpose of a 501(c) is not partisan political advocacy, campaign finance regulations currently active in the United States of America allow for substantial participation, directly or indirectly, in electioneering activities without the need to publically report their donors. 501(c)(4) entities in particular – the aforementioned social welfare organizations – have in consequence become particularly active in state and federal political campaigns over the course of the decade preceding the 2020 elections, with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Planned Parenthood, and the National Rifle Association (NRA) being among the most prominent. Of these named organizations, the NRA has developed a particularly impressive and sophisticated regime of political fundraising and donations. Since shifting towards political activism starting in the mid-1970s, the NRA has combined a complex donor network with exceptionally effective lobbying tactics, not the least of which is the publication of an annual “report card” by the associated “National Victory Fund” rating office-holders and candidates from “A+” to “F” based on their public statements for or against gun control legislation and the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. According to this NVF scoring scheme, the NRA has distributed millions of dollars to any number of candidates over the course of the last forty years. In 2008 alone their donations totaled some forty millions dollars. In 2016 they pledged fully thirty millions dollars to the ultimately victorious Republican Party candidate for President.

As to where this money comes from, the answer is fairly straightforward. A little less than half of the NRA’s annual revenue – in 2010 amounting to just over two hundred and twenty-seven million dollars – comes from membership dues, near to half again – one hundred and fifteen million – is generated by fundraising, sales, and advertising, and the rest is made up of grants and/or contributions from individuals and corporate donors. Unsurprisingly, the corporations evidently most eager to fund the activities of the NRA include outdoor supply manufacturers, sporting goods retailers, and the developers of firearms. The extent to which this rough ratio of funding translates directly into the degree of influence each interest group may wield within the NRA is, and has been, a subject of debate. Without endeavoring to wade into the same wholly absent any stake in the outcome, it will here suffice to affirm that the NRA at least to some extent represents the interests of both its dues-paying members – presumably all of whom are reasonably avid customers of the world’s various firearms manufacturers – and of the developers and retailers of guns, ammunition, and weapons accessories who continue to do business in the United States of America. What this would seem to mean in the larger political sense, of course, is that one of the largest and most effective lobbying efforts undertaken from one election cycle to another across the length and breadth of the American republic is funded by – and presumably also serves the interest of – the collective gun-owning, dues-paying membership of a single organization and the manufacturers of the weapons which said members take it to be their unalienable right to own.

Where this all gets back to George Clinton, Cato V, and legislative influence – corruption being in this case perhaps too pointed a descriptor – is in the extent to which support by and funding from the NRA has become a necessary ingredient to the election of whole swaths of public officials serving at the state and federal level in various regions of the United States of America. Consider, to that end, the following construction. In certain jurisdictions of the American republic – barring an unlikely and very specific set of circumstances – it is practically impossible to secure election to either state or federal office without being a member of the Republican Party. This is far from unusual among modern democratic nations, of course. Political parties in counties across the world cultivate regional bases of power where experience has shown them that their resources will do the most good. It is also true, however, that in order to secure the Republican nomination in one of these jurisdictions – and in order to ensure that Republican voters don’t simply stay home come Election Day – the candidate in question must also secure the endorsement of the NRA. The Republican Party having established itself as the party of the Second Amendment since at least the 1994 mid-term elections which returned them to power in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1954 – a feat funded in no small part by NRA spending – the political interests of the National Rifle Association have enjoyed near-universal support among the membership and leadership of the GOP.

What this means in practice is that the supporters of the Republican Party – eager as anyone to see their interests hold sway over those of their political opponents – have to a large extent delegated the selection of candidates for public office to the NRA. By ranking nominees via the aforementioned system of report cards, said organization succeeds in communicating both whom its supporters should vote for – a group which at this stage includes most of the devotees of the Republican Party – and which of the nominees in question will have access to the funding necessary to successfully market their candidacy to the voters in the relevant constituencies. But while the membership and support bases of the NRA and the Republican Party at this point in time do substantially overlap – thus ostensibly indicating that the two organizations will tend to come to the same conclusions in terms of candidate selection – certain interests which could only ever form a minority in the latter enjoyed a much larger degree of influence over the former. Candidate selection within the Republican Party generally represents some manner of synthesis of local and national organizational priorities, with party elites offering – or perhaps attempting to enforce – their direction and the rank-and-file making their collective intentions known through the medium of primary and caucus votes. Candidate approval within the NRA, however, must respond to a certain degree of institutional pressure as well as to the interests of individuals and elites.

It is true, of course, that individual members of the Republican Party who hold, seek to hold, or seek to continue holding public office are to some extent also beholden to the interests and the entities that fund their campaigns – i.e. oil companies, insurance companies, aerospace companies, and the like. But these same institutional interests tend to exert less influence on candidate selection than might the equivalent corporate partners of the National Rifle Association. The NRA’s status as a 501(c)(4), after all, entitles its directors to absorb virtually unlimited quantities of money without the need to publically report every donor. In consequence, whereas it cannot but be quite clear where exactly a given Republican official is receiving their campaign funds – and thus, to some degree, to whom they are beholden – the anonymity that the NRA enjoys in terms of where its money comes from serves to effectively throw a curtain over the rationale underpinning its actions. It thus cannot seem to be anything but unclear from the outside precisely how the NVF determines which public officials receive what score and to whom said ratings – which carry with them the promise of financial support or financial destitution – are well and truly owed. Are the NRA’s corporate partners the principle drivers of candidate certification? The NRA directors? The rank-and-file membership? In all likelihood, only the leadership of the National Rifle Association can say for certain. What is clear, however, is that the NRA – among other social welfare organizations possessed of 501(c)(4) status – can and does directly influence the character and outcome of state and federal elections in the United States of America. As with the existence of state-controlled corporations like Brazil’s Petrobras – and the political consequences thereof – this is not a reality someone like George Clinton was at all prepared to imagine.

This isn’t to say that the way certain elements within Petrobras attempted to enrich themselves via the paid cooperation of public and party officials in Brazil is functionally or even morally the equivalent of the lobbying efforts yearly undertaken by the National Rifle Association or any of its non-profit counterparts. What the relevant officers of Petrobras, and Odebrecht, the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, and the Worker’s Party did in Brazil was grossly improper and very much illegal. Public money – being the profits derived from the sale of Brazil’s petroleum resources by a company owned by the government thereof – was traded for favors, favors paved the way for kickbacks, and kickbacks made possible the purchasing of more favors. Wealthy individuals became wealthier while the Brazilian people were neither compensated nor consulted. What the NRA, its members, its corporate partners, and its allies in Congress and the states have done – and continue to do – is conversely both legal and entirely in compliance with campaign finance regulations. Like any 501(c)(4), the NRA can accept donations from whomever it wishes, make contributions to whomever it wishes, and establish the criteria by which its favor is measured and disbursed however it wishes. No one is forced to pay heed to the pronouncements of the NRA, no public money is made to change hands, and no one who accepts the private donations of the NRA – within certain established limits – is guilty of anything more than being a politician in the 21^st century. On this subject there would seem to be little room for argument.

What the behavior of Petrobras and organizations like the NRA have in common, however, is that they both sought – or seek – to gain influence over public officials serving within a given jurisdiction through the medium of financial incentives and for the purpose of securing a favorable environment for their non-partisan activities. The guilty officers of Petrobras – and of the relevant Brazilian construction firms – sought to purchase the cooperation of public and party officials for the purpose of further enriching themselves by way of a fraudulent bidding process for public energy infrastructure contracts. The directors and corporate partners of the NRA likewise endeavor to gain the cooperation of state and federal officials in staving off potential restrictions on the sale and ownership of firearms for the purpose of permitting manufacturers, retailers, and individual citizens the continued opportunity to make, sell, and buy the weapons and accessories that are their common interest. To be sure, one of these constitutes an illegal use of public money, the other a perfectly legal use of private money. But both inarguably entail a moneyed interest successfully buying political support for itself and for its partners. And both represent a form of financial influence which the late 18^th century American mind almost certainly could not have comprehended.

Recall, to that end, the fact that formal political parties did not exist in the United States of America at the time that George Clinton penned Cato V in November, 1788, and that campaigning for elected office was equally unheard of. Absent either of these contributing factors – both of which, in the context of the late 18^th century, were seen as distasteful – much of what Petrobras has done and the NRA continues to do would serve little to no purpose. Partisanship breeds competition, competition produces a desire for advantage, and advantage can often be bought. Competition can exist without partisanship, of course. People can compete very actively for a given elected office even if they don’t each of them belong to a party organization. But the addition of organization – i.e. the emergence of institutional parties with shared resources and common goals among their members – serves to elevate any given election from a matter of primarily local importance to one of potentially national value. Resources begin to flow in from outside the constituency in question, direction is handed down from national leaders and elites, and the outcome of the race in question becomes important, not just to the local interests involved but to the national organizations to which the competing candidates belong. Within this kind of elevated context, securing any kind of advantage becomes that much more important than in an exclusively non-partisan setting. George Clinton might have harbored some vague understanding that this was the case – the disdain his generation tended to feel towards the concept of partisanship generally centered on the notion that factionalism was inherently selfish and functioned mainly to distract public servants from actually serving the public. But it is highly doubtful that either he or his colleagues among the Founders could have imagined the degree to which party politics could – and soon enough would – facilitate the entry of collective fundraising and collective spending into the American political process.

It is the very idea of campaigning, of course, which makes the raising and disbursing of all this money necessary. And campaigning for public office was likewise something that people of George Clinton’s generation tended to think of as self-serving and uncouth. Taking their cues from what they thought of as the customs and mores of Roman antiquity – though in actual fact the ancient Romans were never as virtuous as those who have later sought to emulate them seem to believe – the Founders understood public office to be a kind of sacred trust bestowed upon those who showed the least interest in having access to power and who demonstrated the utmost sense of forbearance and personal integrity. Seeking after office was thus a natural disqualification from ever being able to hold it. Once simply lived a virtuous life without expectation of reward and were eventually – hopefully – elevated accordingly. They could not be said to gain reward for their behavior, of course, because public office wasn’t supposed to be rewarding. On the contrary, taking on a course of public service was supposed to entail sacrifice; a person was expected to come out of it poorer than when they went in, and gladly so. Within this conception of public office as a form of self-abnegation, the notion of campaigning was naturally thought of as anathema. To seek office was to seek power; to seek power was to be untrustworthy. Granting that people in any era, under any manner of social obligation, will still be people, outward adherence to this construction of public service did not mean that every man who ultimately possessed an office of public trust in the United States of American in the late 1780s never harbored personal ambitions or sought after more power than they had already. Regardless of how they actually felt about their public standing, however, or how earnestly they wished to improve it by ascending to some high office of state, men in the late-18^th century American republic still tended to adhere quite doggedly to a collectively-defined notion of gentlemanly conduct. And gentlemen, among other things, simply didn’t go around asking their neighbors to elect them to public office. To put it bluntly, it just wasn’t done.  

Contrary to this outwardly intractable sense of disdain on the part of the United States of America’s Founding Generation, however, campaigning has become one of the primary activities undertaken by any species of public servant in the present-day American republic. Forced to appeal to larger and larger constituencies as the state and federal electoral franchises slowly but surely expanded over the course of the 19^th century, aspirants to public office arguably had no choice but to broaden their appeal to the voting masses by way of aggressive self-promotion and the forging of alliances and voting blocs among otherwise disparate socio-cultural communities. In fairly short order, once this process was well and truly set in motion by ambitious political strategists like Aaron Burr (1756-1836) in the 1790s and 1800s and Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) in the 1820s and 1830s, it mattered very little whether the candidate in question found the concept of soliciting votes to be distasteful or not. Campaigning had a matter of political survival. The result, quite naturally, was a drastic increase in per capita electoral expenditures. Whereas a local notable drafted as a candidate for Congress in his home county in late 18^th century Virginia might expect to spend a little money on food and drink come election day for the purpose of showing his beneficence to – and thus validating the loyalty of – his neighbors, a candidate for the same office in the 1830s or 1840s would almost certainly be given to expend much larger sums on pamphlets, commemorative souvenirs, public speakers, rallies, and campaign song sheet music in addition to the traditional libations and vittles. Far from depending on their record of service and forbearance to open the way to political elevation, men who sought after some portion of the public trust needed to sell themselves to the voters by way of increasingly elaborate and all-encompassing forms of personalized advertising.

It is quite possible that Clinton could have brought himself to accept that this would someday be the case. He was, after all, a very canny political operative who understood the value of patronage, bloc voting, and populism better than the vast majority of his contemporaries and rivals. That being said, it would still seem doubtful that he could have easily wrapped his mind around the close relationship that presently exists in American political culture between lobbyists, corporations, tax-exempt organizations, and political campaigns. One reason for this, among others, is that none of these things existed during his lifetime. Political campaigning, as aforementioned, was seen as squalid and uncouth by men of Clinton’s class and generation. Corporations in the late 18^th century were small, limited in scope, and tended to have a distinct public purpose underpinning their existence. Lobbying hadn’t yet emerged as the invaluable right arm of corporate policy-making. And the only social welfare organizations recognized in any formal manner by state and federal governments in the 18^th century were the established houses of worship. Perhaps no single one of these entities or practices is so alien in concept that Clinton could not have been made to understand their purpose or value. He was, it bears mentioning again, a very canny fellow. But the sheer amount of money that corporations now regularly accrue, lobbyists traffic in, tax-exempt organizations donate, and political campaigns spend surely occupies a realm beyond even his wildest fantasies of what was possible given the resources available to the American people. Consider, by way of evidence, the following.

In January of 1791 – in the aftermath of the successful ratification of the proposed constitution against which George Clinton railed in print some two years earlier – the passage of legislation negotiated by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), and Congressman James Madison (1751-1836) made possible the assumption on the part of the newly-minted federal government of the combined debts of the various states. The resulting national debt totaled, to the cent, $75,463,476.52. About forty million dollars of this – fifty-three percent of the total – was domestic debt; about twelve million dollars – sixteen percent of the total – was foreign debt. For the era, it must be said, these were not necessarily astronomical sums. The British national debt had reached about that same size in the middle 1750s, and grew even larger – to a high of £130,000,000 in 1764 – as a result of Britain’s participation the Seven Years War (1754-1763). All the same, seventy-five million dollars was still a very large sum of money in 1791, of the sort that only national governments could conceivably generate and spend over an extended course of years. Bearing this in mind, one is naturally given to wonder how George Clinton – or indeed any of his contemporaries – would have reacted to the notion of a single organization spending the combined total of the United States domestic debt in 1791 – that is, again, forty million dollars – for the purpose of electing a single individual to public office. This is exactly what the National Rifle Association did in 2016, after all. Would they have shrugged, nodded, registered any reaction at all? Or would they have been astonished to learn that a private organization could come into possession of that much money and spend it all, legally, for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election?

One hopes by now that the answers to these questions are patently clear, and that likewise there is no longer any mystery as to why Clinton’s cited contention in Cato V that larger legislatures are less likely to come under the influence of some exterior interest than smaller ones represents something less than a dependable political truism. Clinton, for all his insight, was writing in the midst of an era radically different from our own in a number of fundamental dimensions. There were no formal political parties in the United States of America in 1788, and no political campaigning, no lobbyists, no tax-exempt social welfare groups, and no billion-dollar corporations. And while one might fairly debate whether or not the emergence of the same has made the American republic a more hospitable climate for the democratic expression of individual and community interests, they have inarguably changed the way that Americans think about politics and political organization. Combined, these entities and practices have made it easier than ever before to raise vast sums of money on very short notice, made the spending of said money a practical necessity, and brought about the creation of a set of rules by which said spending might be regulated and regularized. In consequence, while it doubtless would have strained credulity to imagine in the late 18^th century that any single entity or individual could ever possess the resources necessary to effectively buy the ongoing cooperation of a national legislature comprised of four hundred or five hundred members, such an outcome is more or less de rigueur in the present that is 2019.

Cato V, Part VIII: Public Money and Private Interests

Without necessarily faulting George Clinton for arriving at what doubtless seemed to him to be a very reasonable conclusion as to the proper ratio of constituents to representatives based on the information to which he had access, I would nevertheless ask any reader of Cato V to consider the following examples from the present day before affirming the cited passage of that selfsame text as a timeless pearl of faultless political wisdom. Because though Clinton’s affirmation in 1788 that increasing the number of delegates serving in a given legislature will necessarily decrease the ability of that body to be actively corrupted was – and is – reasonable enough on its own as a theory, there are certain things which have occurred since that time whose effects on the practice of politics the author of Cato V likely could not have predicted.

Take the case of contemporary Brazil as an example. The Federative Republic of Brazil, as it is known officially, is structured not at all unlike the United States of America, with a directly elected executive, a bicameral legislature, and a supreme court. The executive – i.e. the President – is elected via a two-round runoff vote, members of the Senate are elected three each via a plurality vote from one of twenty-seven districts, members of the Chamber of Deputies are selected via proportional vote from among the various Federal States, and the Justices of the Supreme Court are appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. As of 2019 there are eighty-one Senators and five hundred and thirty-one deputies in the Brazilian National Congress. With Brazil’s population sitting at slightly over two hundred and ten million, that works out to about two million five hundred thousand people per Senator and four hundred thousand people per Deputy.

Now, already this ratio of constituents to representatives would seem to exceed what Clinton thought was acceptable in 1788 by a substantial margin. Considering the vehemence with which he objected to the prospect of Representatives in Congress being elected from districts sized to encompass a mere thirty-thousand people, one can imagine that his head would have fairly exploded at the thought of a legislator representing ten times that number. Indeed, one can perhaps also reasonably conclude that the author of Cato V would have struggled to conceive of any nation reaching a population of one hundred million without fragmenting into its constituent parts. Born at a time when the British colonies which would at length become the United States of America contained slightly less than one million people, and writing at a time when this selfsame territory encompassed less than four million, Clinton’s imagination would naturally have been limited by both his own lived experience of population expansion and the means by which he believed it possible to sustain a cohesive national polity across vast distances and amidst large, distinct, and semi-autonomous political entities. Easy though it is to forget, the reason that countries like Brazil can function as such is because technology exists – and has existed – that permits the inhabitants thereof to believe that they are all members of the same integral socio-political community. While in 2019 this communications infrastructure might most often be thought to include television and social media, it has in the past also encompassed print media, radio, telephones, telegraphs, trains, and even permanent roads and bridges. As most of these inventions fall well outside the experience of George Clinton’s lifetime – with the exceptions of roads and print – it would have been only natural for someone in his position to conclude that there was a definite limit on the number of people which could be included within the borders of a single nation before it effectively ceased to be a cohesive nation at all.  

On its face, then, it would be hard to imagine Clinton reacting with anything other than horror and amazement at the continued existence of a country like Brazil, let alone to the knowledge that Brazil is presently about average for its population in terms of the size and composition of its various political institutions. And yet, having confronted the numbers which a great many modern republics – or else representative democracies – are forced to contend with when attending to the task of governance, he would surely have had no choice but to agree that such measures as have regularly been taken are both necessary and proper. Consider, by way of evidence, the theoretical state of the Brazilian House of Deputies if even the ratio to which Clinton objected in 1788 were applied. If, for a population of two hundred and ten million, each Deputy represented thirty thousand people, the lower house of the National Congress would have to contain at least seven thousand Deputies. Not only would this substantially exceed anything that George Clinton or his fellow Founders could likely have imagined, it would represent the largest legislative body in human history. By way of comparison, recall some of the numbers that Clinton may well have been contemplating as of the late 1780s. The United States of America, as aforementioned, contained just slightly less than four million people at that point in time. At a ratio of no more than one Representative for every thirty thousand – as described in the text of the proposed constitution – the lower house of Congress was set to contain a maximum of one hundred and thirty-three members. While the actual number ended up being substantially lower – due to certain districts containing more than thirty thousand people – this is the base figure that Clinton had to work with and the number upon which he could – and presumably did – fix his disdain.

One hundred and thirty-three Representatives, it seemed, were by his reckoning too few to adequately reflect the diversity of interest and opinion possessed by the contemporary inhabitants of the United States of America within the context of a national legislature. What ratio would he have preferred? While it’s hard to say exactly, a reasonably educated guess might but the figure at something like ten thousand per district rather than thirty thousand. This would have yielded a House of Representatives comprised of four hundred members, a number which compares quite reasonably to the contemporary British House of Commons and its five hundred and fifty-eight MPs. Granted – and as discussed at length thus far – the House of Commons as it existed in the late 1780s hardly represented a favorable basis of comparison for a truly representative electoral regime. But at the very least it did function. Widespread corruption notwithstanding, the five hundred and fifty-eight members of the lower house of Parliament managed to form governments, formulate and approve legislation, and conduct investigations without consistently devolving into an intractable patchwork of multifarious factions. By the standards of the 18^th century, in short, it was possible for five hundred and fifty-eight people representing half as many distinct communities to go into a room somewhere and come to some kind of workable agreement on the issues of the day. Having observed this fact, it would accordingly seem reasonable enough for some like George Clinton to arrive at the conclusion that a legislature comprised of one hundred and fifty fewer members should have been able to function equally well, if not better.

 That being said, four hundred, or even five hundred and fifty-eight, is a far cry from seven thousand. And though modern communications and transportation technology has, as aforementioned, allowed magnitudes more people here at the dawn of the 21^st century to cultivate a more cohesive sense of community than was conceivable at the end of the 18^th century, the interests that govern countries like Brazil have still not attempted to push the ratio of constituents to representatives much beyond what George Clinton could have observed in contemporary Great Britain. The Brazilian Constitution could most certainly be modified so that the House of Deputies contained the aforementioned seven thousand legislators. An amendment to that effect could be proposed, and approved, and adopted in fairly short order, with the Brazilian people standing to enjoy a more granular representation in the lower house of the National Congress than they do at present. In spite of it being both possible and potentially desirable, however, such a measure has never been attempted, or seemingly even contemplated, in Brazil or in any other comparably large representative democracy. Germany, with a population of eighty-three million hasn’t tried it, or France (sixty-seven million), or Italy (sixty-million), or the United Kingdom (sixty-seven million). More than likely this is because the governing interests in all of these countries – and the electorates, presumably – have independently concluded that legislatures above a certain size, regardless of the population they are intended to represent, simply aren’t a good idea. They aren’t manageable; they’re not efficient; they don’t function, in essence. The causes behind it are doubtless varied, but the evident validity of this conclusion is spoken to by how widely it is observed. Even India, a nation of over one billion people in 2019, maintains the membership of the lower house of its national legislature at a mere five hundred and forty-five. Rest assured this was not happened upon by chance; the governing interests in India came to the same realization as did their counterparts in other representative democracies. That is to say, notwithstanding actual population figures, there is a limit beyond which the size of a legislative assembly becomes a hindrance to its ability to perform its intended role. 

Being made to realize this practical truth of modern democratic organization – along with the aforementioned ability of modern communications technology to forge relatively cohesive political communities out of vast and disparate populations – would doubtless have altered no small portion of Clinton’s thinking on the subject of legislative representation. Sincere though he may have been in his assertion in 1788 that the people of the United States stood to be dangerously underrepresented in the version of Congress described in the text of the proposed constitution, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine that his sense of conviction would have long withstood exposure to the realities of 20^th and 21^st century representative democracy. The figures which generations of statesmen and legislators have since been forced to content with far exceed anything which he was likely prepared to imagine, let alone take into consideration when crafting a stable model of democratic governance. This isn’t to say it was wrong of him to even question the scheme of representative government modeled by the Framers in the text of the proposed constitution, or to postulate the existence of a relationship between legislative composition and legislative behavior. On the contrary, Clinton should be admired for his willingness to question what so many others quite easily accepted, and for the incisive manner in which he did so. That being said – and as the preceding and proceeding discussions hopefully make clear – the subject of democratic representation was far more complex than he was either aware or willing to admit. And this is not even to mention the much thornier subject of political corruption.

Or perhaps “corruption” is the wrong word for it. What Clinton seemed to fear was that the small number of representatives chosen by the American people to speak on their behalf in the lower house of Congress would be too few to resist being influenced by some outside force whose interests were at odds with the general public will. Increase the number of representatives, he avowed, and the likelihood of such an outcome fades in proportion. If this was a valid theory, of course, the largest legislatures would necessarily be the least prone to having their collective will captured or subverted. 

In point of fact, however, this is demonstrably not the case. Consider, by way of example, the aforementioned National Congress of the Federative Republic of Brazil. As mentioned above, the upper house of the same contains eighty-one Senators, the lower house just over five hundred and thirty Delegates. Combined, this cohort of six hundred and twelve legislators represents a figure nearly six times larger than that which caused George Clinton to object so aggressively in 1788 to the paltry size of the proposed United States Congress. If one hundred and fifty-nine was too few – being the maximum number of Senators and Representatives permitted under the terms of the proposed constitution at the time that Clinton was writing – surely the author of Cato V would have agreed that six hundred and twelve was at the very least adequate. Mayhap it was conceivable at the end of the 18^th century that a single individual or organization could, with the proper resources, sway enough legislators within a group of one hundred and fifty-nine to essentially turn the legislative process to their own personal ends. But surely it was not possible for same outcome to result from among over six hundred of the same? Surely no one could muster the means to influence that many people towards a single goal?

As recent history has proven, of course, someone could indeed. Following what initially appeared to be a fairly routine investigation into money laundering by Brazilian law enforcement authorities beginning in 2008, a series plea deals, confessions, and further inquiries conducted between 2014 and 2017 went on to reveal the existence of a massive criminal conspiracy involving Petrobras – the Brazilian national petroleum corporation – as many as nine major construction firms, and dozens of politicians and party functionaries from across the political spectrum. Essentially, some portion of the executive leadership of Petrobras had, for a number of years, engaged in a deliberate campaign of overbidding on construction contracts with the various firms in question – the conglomerate Odebrecht being chief among them – in exchange for sizable kickbacks. In order to ensure that these contracts were approved – and would, in future, continue to be approved – both Petrobras and the construction companies also made large sums of money available to the members of the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, and the ruling Worker’s Party who were each of them responsible for proposing, lobbying for, and authorizing the same. According to reports compiled after the fact at the behest of Brazilian investigators, this cohort of public servants included at least twenty-nine sitting Senators, thirty-four sitting Deputies, and twenty-three mayors, former mayors, former ministers, or former members of the National Congress. Marcelo Odebrecht, former CEO of the eponymous construction firm, affirmed following his own arrest and conviction for bribery that control over an account containing 40 million Brazilian reals was also given to the office of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2010 and transferred to the control of his successor Dilma Rousseff at the beginning of the following year. In total, some 6.2 billion reals (US $2.5 billion) were found to have been misappropriated, about half of which has thus far been recovered.

Now, obviously Petrobras and the aforementioned construction firms did not succeed in paying off over half of the total membership of the Brazilian National Congress. That is to say, their attempts to take hold of the institutions of Brazil’s public administration for their mutual financial benefit did not involve buying the cooperation of a controlling majority of the national legislature. Of the aforementioned six hundred and twelve members of the National Congress, only sixty-three sitting lawmakers were named in official reports as having taken money from one of the relevant organizations. Far from representing fifty-one percent of the total, this figures stands only slightly above ten percent. As it turned out, however, Petrobras and the construction firms didn’t need to buy a majority in the National Congress to get what it was they wanted. They just needed the right people in the right places to go along with their plans at the right time. It was for this reason, among other public officials, that they specifically targeted President Da Silva and President Rousseff, the treasurer of the ruling Worker’s Party, and the President of the Chamber of Deputies. Whereas the aforementioned coterie of Senators, mayors, and ministers doubtless served to guide particular construction projects through the processes necessary to secure their final approval, these key individuals between them arguably held the power to either facilitate the entire scheme or choke it off altogether. By buying their cooperation, the relevant executives at Petrobras and the construction firms thereby guaranteed that their shady dealings would enjoy a gloss of legitimacy and that potential internal investigations would be discouraged at the highest level.

That fact that Petrobras is a public company assuredly also went some distance towards narrowing the number of officials whose cooperation needed to be purchased. Because company revenues – generated by the ongoing exploitation of Brazil’s petroleum resources – are technically the property of the Brazilian government, company expenditures connected to major infrastructure projects must in turn by approved by members of the same. If Petrobras needs to build a pipeline, for instance, or a refinery, or new shipping facilities, it can do so only once the relevant construction contracts has been approved by the National Assembly and the President. Because these kinds of projects are doubtless quite common, it accordingly follows that any given contract shouldn’t raise many eyebrows when presented to the relevant authorities. Having knowledge of this state of affairs, the aforementioned conspirators could thus quite easily slip their inflated bids into the normal flow of business between Petrobras and the Brazilian government without having to secure the cooperation of more than the absolute minimum number of public officials. Beyond this relatively small group of beneficiaries – i.e. a few key Deputies and Senators, the leader of the lower house, a party treasurer, and the President – everyone else involved in the aforementioned approval process could safely be relied upon to assume, absent proof to the contrary, that nothing out of the ordinary was actively taking place. They would be made to facilitate corruption without ever knowing or benefiting, their ability to prevent the same stymied by a carefully targeted application of resources and attention. 

To be fair, Petrobras as its currently exists almost certainly represents a species of corporate organization that someone like George Clinton would have struggled to conceive of at the time he penned Cato V in the waning months of 1788. As discussed at length – my God, at length – in a previous series, what corporations did exist in the Anglo-American world at the end of the 18^th century tended to be both limited in scope and possessed of fairly narrow practical authority. Essentially, they functioned to make up for the financial or resource deficiencies which served to prevent a given state or national government from engaging in this or that project or enterprise whose end result was thought to be of substantial benefit to the general public. Rather than raise taxes and allocate personnel for the purpose of repairing a road, say, or building a bridge, a government might instead cede some portion of its authority to a private organization by way of a charter in order to see the same end accomplished at a reduced rate or according to a more efficient timetable han it could have managed itself. Petrobras, to be sure, aligns more closely with this description of a corporation than most modern multinationals, the stated purpose of which has far more to do with increasing share value than generating some manner of demonstrable public benefit. But its sheer size and behavior would still seem to place it well beyond what someone like George Clinton was likely prepared to imagine.

The aforementioned Bank of North America was perhaps the closet corporate entity in terms of scope and purpose with which he might have been familiar. Its purpose was to facilitate government spending; its share releases were authorized according to a government-defined plan. But the Banks was still, at its heart, a private institution whose operating capital came from private sources. Petrobras, by comparison, is a fundamentally public entity, its majority shareholder – to the tune of 64% – being the government of Brazil and the revenue it generates being government property. Corporations on this model, while quite common today – from Petrobras, to Mexico’s Pemex, to Norway’s Equinor, to Saudi Arabia’s Aramco – were completely unknown to the likes of George Clinton, thereby necessarily limiting his ability to conceive of the means by which corruption might be facilitated completely within the sphere of government. The danger, as recent events in Brazil have made clear, lies not just with individuals or organizations exterior to government whose resources might permit them to compromise the same. It can also originate with entities that exist – quite intentionally – somewhere between the public and private spheres. Their mentality having been molded by the need to exist in the latter, they may in turn attempt to use their connection to the former to further their pursuit of profit at the expense of the public good.