“The Crisis of the Middle Class

Constitution” by Ganesh Sitaraman

Book Review by Dennis Slater, MD

President Thomas Jefferson famously said that one of his proudest moments in politics was the abolition of
entail (a legal device to pass on property to one’s descendants) and primogenitor (a legal rule in Virginia by which
property is passed on to the oldest son in Virginia), which “laid the axe to the root of Pseudo aristocracy”. To
understand how this simple fact laid the foundation of the United States Constitution you can reread and rethink
your soporific high school and college textbooks on the European Enlightenment and the American Revolution, or
you can read Ganesh Sitaraman’s profound and inspiring thesis, The Crisis of the Middle Class Constitution,
which traces the origins of the middle class from the ancient Greek philosophers to John Harrington. Although
it was John Locke who penned the constitution’s most memorable phrase expounding that government preserve
“life, liberty and property”, it was John Harrington who understood that political power flowed from property
ownership, the only tangible form of wealth prior to the Industrial Revolution. Civil strife and revolution were
inevitable consequences of inequality between the property owners and the poor. Agrarian laws in Colonial and early
constitutional America promoted an equitable distribution of property among the citizenry and resulted in a large
middle class of property owners, counteracting the avarice of the wealthy and mitigating the passions of the poor.

Fast forward two centuries and the United States Constitution has weathered the travails of economic upheavals
– the Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age of industrial barons in the 19th century, two world wars, the Great
Depression and the Great Recession – because of the stabilizing impact of the resilient middle class. Sitaraman
explains all this in a fast frame, rollercoaster of a book, a veritable action thriller replete with colorful heroes and
villains. The only sad, sad truth is that our republic is now threatened by our worship of wealth, as well as the
dramatic shift of political power to corporations and the wealthy elite, who myopically foster economic policies
leading to the demise of the middle class. Sitaraman warns that if we remain on this path our democracy will
devolve into an oligarchy and plutocracy, and possibly anarchy. He offers a modest prescription to expand the
middle class and rebalance the economy: a steeper progressive income tax, a livable minimum wage, strengthening
unions, free college education, guaranteed healthcare, regulation of essential infrastructure (such as internet
service), and campaign reform.

Sitaraman overlooks an essential feature of modern America – the vanishing culture of E. Pluribus Unum and
a void of a national narrative, leaving us with a profound absence of connections as a people. Patrick Keenan,
a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, terms this loss of community “anticulture” in his newly
published and provocative polemic “Why Liberalism Failed”.

Until we reconnect as a society, bound by the constitution, regarding all races and creeds as brethren, and
recapture our American character, our laws will be dispassionate and hollow and our culture will inevitably
decline.

Good luck to us. Read this book. g

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