Concluding MOOC Wraps Up Constitution Course, Urges Global Governance

This concluding lecture of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) series serves as a comprehensive wrap-up, offering thanks, reminders, advice, and a challenge to participants.

A Heartfelt Thank You

The instructor expresses profound gratitude to all participants who have completed the extensive MOOC series. While the course is free of tuition and required texts, it is considered "expensive" due to the invaluable time participants have dedicated to it. This commitment is seen as crucial for the constitutional project, which relies on active engagement from citizens across generations. This engagement includes voting, jury duty, public service, paying taxes, and, importantly, not just speaking but also listening, deliberating, and understanding the constitutional system.

Course Reminders: The Written and Unwritten Constitution

The course was structured around two books: "America's Constitution, a Biography" and "America's Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By."

The Written Constitution

The first half of the course provided a detailed tour of the written Constitution. Key takeaways included:

• Organization: The text is well-organized, starting with popular sovereignty ("We the People"), followed by the legislative (Article One), executive (Article Two), and judicial (Article Three) branches, then states (Article Four), and principles of constitutional supremacy, amendment, and ordainment (Articles Five, Six, and Seven).
• Intergenerational Quality: Amendments, added chronologically as "postscripts," demonstrate the Constitution's evolving nature. The course traced this evolution from the Bill of Rights through the Reconstruction Amendments, Progressive Era amendments, and 1960s amendments, which further expanded voting rights and addressed issues like poll taxes.

Beyond the Text: Four Elements of America's Constitution

The second half of the course explored how constitutional culture, experience, and law extend beyond the written text. The American Constitution, in its broadest sense, combines at least four elements:

1. The Written Text: The foundational document itself.
2. Unwritten Principles of Higher Law: These principles, not always textually specified, limit government and are part of the constitutional system. Some are judicially enforceable, while others bind non-judicial actors through legal conscience. This concept would have been familiar to both Americans and Englishmen at the time of the founding.
3. Governmental Organization and Procedures: This refers to how the society and polity are constituted, including the processes, protocols, and institutional features that are entrenched and difficult to change. Examples include formal legal entrenchments like separation of powers and federalism (even if not explicitly written down), and informal mechanisms like America's two-party system.
4. Tools and Techniques of Constitutional Argumentation and Interpretation: The Constitution does not come with explicit rules for its interpretation. These interpretive methods are themselves an integral part of America's constitutional system.

The course emphasized that these four elements are interconnected. While the second half ventured beyond the written text, the text remained central, linked to implicit principles, historical deeds, landmark cases, national symbols, governmental structures, and state constitutional counterparts.

Advice for Continued Learning

For those interested in further study, the instructor offers several recommendations:

• Read the Course Books: "America's Constitution, a Biography" and "America's Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By" are available at libraries, bookstores, and online. Used copies are affordable.
• Explore Endnotes: Both books contain extensive endnotes with references to hundreds of other books and articles, allowing readers to delve into specific areas of interest.
• Read The Federalist Papers: This foundational text is freely available online, in libraries, and in inexpensive paperback editions.
• Contact the Instructor: For those who have exhausted these resources and still seek more, the instructor invites them to email him with their reading history and interests for personalized suggestions.

A Challenge: World Constitutionalism

The lecture concludes with a significant challenge, drawing parallels between the founding of the U.S. and the present global landscape.

The "We the People" Deed

The Preamble, "We the People of the United States... do ordain and establish this Constitution," represented an "epically democratic deed" and a "hinge of human history." It was an unprecedented act of self-governance by a large group of people and a "massive corporate merger" of 13 colonies into a united system. This was essentially "democratic world government for the new world," isolated by oceans from the monarchies and oligarchies of the old world.

A Changing World

The instructor highlights two fundamental changes that challenge this original vision:

1. Global Democratization: The world is far more democratic now than at the time of the U.S. founding. Many nations have adopted American constitutional models, including written constitutions, free elections, free speech, religious tolerance, and peaceful transfers of power. This raises the question of whether the U.S. should remain as isolationist in its constitutional thinking.
2. A Smaller Planet: The "vast oceanic moats" that once protected the U.S. are no longer sufficient. The framers envisioned a nation that wouldn't need a large standing army in peacetime due to its geographic isolation. However, with nuclear submarines and intercontinental missiles, the world is interconnected.

The "Martians Are Coming" Analogy

The instructor uses the analogy of "Martians coming" to illustrate the need for global cooperation. Just as the threat from the British, Spanish, and French compelled the disparate American colonies to unite for "common defense" 225 years ago, today's global challenges may necessitate a similar level of international coordination. These "Martians" include:

• Climate change (carbon dioxide molecules)
• Pandemic viruses
• International terrorism
• Nuclear proliferation

These issues require not just continental but global governance systems. The instructor challenges the audience to consider the possibility of "genuinely democratic global constitutional systems" and "global governance systems," extending the American idea of democracy on a broad scale.

A Call to Young Visionaries

Acknowledging that he may be "too old to figure it out," the instructor quotes from his second book, stating that "the best ideas may well come from the young." He reminds the audience that Madison and Hamilton were in their mid-30s when they championed "world government for the new world" through the Federalist Papers. Today's technology allows for unprecedented global collaboration. The challenge is for "young visionaries" to become "Publius 2" or "Publius Jr." and propose solutions for securing the "blessings of liberty for posterity, not just for Americans, but for all God's children."

The Course Image and the MOOC Experiment

The lecture concludes by revisiting the course's opening image: a montage blending the text of the Preamble with images of historical figures and embodied actions, particularly George Washington. This montage, partly from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia (which the instructor recommends visiting), symbolizes the course's dual focus on text and lived experience.

Finally, the instructor reveals a hidden detail in a photograph of Hillary and Bill Clinton in the same studio where the MOOC was filmed. They are discussing MOOCs and, specifically, the instructor's book, "America's Constitution, a Biography." This serves as a reminder of the MOOC's purpose: to make education, particularly constitutional education, accessible and affordable to ordinary people, echoing the original design of the Constitution itself. The Constitution was intentionally short and readable, and the Bill of Rights was designed to be memorized, all to facilitate popular education.

The MOOC itself is presented as an experiment to broaden access to education from institutions like Yale, aiming to reduce costs and make knowledge more widely available. The instructor reiterates that the success of the MOOC, and indeed constitutional self-government, depends on the active participation of "We the People" – those who dedicate their time and effort to learning.

The lecture ends with a final, heartfelt thank you to all participants for their precious time and engagement.