The Framers’ Coup might well be the best book ever written on the founders and their handiwork. Modern Americans are entitled to hold the framers in the highest regard, but they should not revere them, or refrain from asking about the inconsistency of their handiwork “with our basic (democratic) political commitments.” More particularly, “the Constitution was designed in part to block legislation for tax and debt relief,” and therefore “represented a victory for one party in a debate that genuinely had two sides” (p.

Their invocation of popular sovereignty was strategic, not sincere. They were affirmatively hostile to democracy (p. The framers believed in “the natural aristocracy of virtue, talent, and education – men like themselves” (p. Klarman urges that committed to this belief, the framers undertook a kind of coup, and it was anything but a democratic one. James Madison, the father of the Constitution, thought that “the people could not be trusted to intelligently rule themselves” (p. And while Klarman greatly admires the framers, his second goal is to show that they were elitists, in a sense even aristocrats, skeptical about the very idea of popular sovereignty. They could not foresee the future, and they made mistakes” (p. The first is to de-deify the framers of the United States Constitution – to demonstrate that they were practical men, “not demigods they had interests, prejudices, and moral blind spots. Michael Klarman’s magisterial book has two central goals.

The Framers' Coup by Michael J. Klarman