The sanctification of the Constitution has also involved no small amount of ethnic chauvinism. The blessings of American democracy, we’ve been taught, are inherited exclusively from England, where the very first written constitution, the Magna Carta, was issued in 1215 and the first parliament was called fifty years later.
By the mid-19th century, many white Americans were so convinced that they were the sole inheritors of the love of liberty and the habits of self-governance that they imagined it to be an almost racial trait that was passed down from one generation to the next. In January of 1845, Democratic Representative Alexander Duncan of Ohio told his colleagues that he thought “there seems to be something in our laws and institutions peculiarly adapted to our Anglo-Saxon-American race, under which they will thrive and prosper, but under which all others wilt and die.”3 In the early 20th century, a prominent Oxford historian proudly proclaimed that “parliamentary institutions” were “incomparably the greatest gift of the English people to the civilization of the world.”4
Now, I realize that this type of sanctification of the Constitution has had its purposes. Racial aspects aside, it fosters the reverence sometimes required to abide by its more absurd and out-dated elements. But treating America’s legal framework as some sort of mystical tablet also obscures our understanding of its critical role as social contract and source of our rights. The other problem, of course, is that the myth is based on a false premise.
In 2009, in his book The Life and Death of Democracy, Australian political theorist John Keane “politely questioned”—in his words—“this English prejudice.”5 His research had led him to conclude that in 1188, a generation before the Magna Carta, Alfonso IX, the newly-crowned seventeen-year-old monarch of the Kingdom of León, had convened Europe’s very first parliament, or cortes in Spanish, within the cloisters of León’s Romanesque Basílica de San Isidoro.
Of course, it had not been unusual for Europe’s kings to gather with lords and bishops. But Alfonso did something entirely new for European royalty, which was to invite representatives from the towns. This was the first recorded gathering of all three estates—nobility, the Church, and burghers. The most basic definition of a parliament is an assembly involving various social groups of the realm, including representatives of towns.
But why would a king whose power was said to be granted directly by God seek to hold discussions with townsmen? For one, he needed money to fight back the encroaching Muslim armies and plenty of Leonese were unhappy with the imposition of new taxes. Secondly, Alfonso may have feared that an alliance between angry nobles and townsfolk might form against him. In any case, according to Keane, the king was determined “to defend and expand his kingdom, even if that meant making political compromises that might dilute his kingly powers.”6