It won’t surprise many who follow Glenn Beck to hear that his “The Original Argument” is one weird book. The premise: Those essays by John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, gathered in 1788 as “The Federalist,” are so critical to understanding the nature of the U.S. Constitution, and therefore to renewing our nation today, yet so hard to understand and so downright boring, that they cry out for handy summary and translation into modern English by Glenn Beck.

And  yet the main text doesn’t come from Beck.  He wrote an introduction and put his name on the front cover and his photo on the back, but in what is easily the most interesting part of the book, one Joshua Charles describes its genesis. (I use the term advisedly; Charles discerns the hand of Providence in the affair.) In 2009, as a piano performance major at the University of Kansas and a fan of Beck’s radio and TV shows, Charles began translating the Federalist essays, unbidden, into modern English. Then he heard Beck himself say on the radio how badly the country needs just such a translation. The youngster’s jaw dropped. Going to genuinely amazing lengths to meet the man, Charles succeeded in pressing his early versions on Beck. In what Charles justly calls a dream come true, the master and the acolyte teamed up.

Together they have identified seven “core themes” in the 85 Federalist essays, and they selected 38 of the essays to publish in modern translation, re-ordering the essays by grouping them under each theme:  9, 10, 39, and others, for example, come under a theme drawn from Franklin, “A Republic, If You Can Keep It”; 78 and 80 are grouped under “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” drawn from “Superman.” Charles’s essay translations were refined via group effort, and “Glenn and his team,” Charles says, wrote easily scannable, one-page summaries for each of the translated essays, breaking them down by “The Message,” “Original Quote,” and “Relevance to Today.” The team also wrote brief, generously sub-headed intros for each of the major themes.

Hence the oddball volume here under review: a preface by Joshua Charles that explains all that; an introduction by Beck amping the Federalist essays’ importance to the founding and reminding us that reading the original essays can be “excruciatingly boring”; introductions to each of the seven themes; the 38 translations, each with a one-sheet summary; and appendices presenting the Constitution as cross-referenced to the essays, the Articles of Confederation, and Jay’s “Address to the People of New York.” That’s the new Glenn Beck book.

Since in the original Federalist essays, obscurely defensive rhetorical flourishes proliferate, especially from Hamilton — “I am well aware that it would be disingenuous to resolve indiscriminately the oppositions of any set of men (merely because their situations might subject them to suspicions)”, etc., etc.  — it’s fair enough to call them boring, and it’s undeniable that few people have read all or even 38 of them. While some of the more obscure numbers can be revealing in various historical and political contexts, it’s never been clear to me that reading or knowing the gist of more than a few major ones would be critical to any fundamental, active engagement with our country, or especially to renewing it in the spiritual way that Beck and Charles envision. It’s a truism that Madison’s ideas about the purpose and mechanics of representation and republican separation of powers are benchmarks of historical literacy that Americans would do well to engage with, and many guides and annotated anthologies exist to serve that purpose.

“Translating” the essays manifestly doesn’t serve that purpose. As a soporific, Publius has nothing on the piano major Joshua Charles, who plods gamely through the originals sentence by sentence, largely aping their paragraph structure, topic sentences, and transitions, replacing outdated expressions with modern ones, breaking up long sentences even while leaving traces of wayward 18th century capitalization (especially when describing the federal government: “the Central government,” “the National government,”  ”the General authority,” etc.).

If replacing “This has relation to two objects” with “This element is directly related to two points,” or “a man will be interested in whatever he possesses, in proportion to the firmness or precariousness of the tenure by which he holds it” with “a man is interested in whatever he possesses in proportion to how firmly (or precariously) he possesses it,” were really supposed to make irresistible reading out of  Federalist 71, where Hamilton blathers unconvincingly about why a four-year presidential term is optimal, the project would be a failure.

But since ordinary readers are even less likely to wade through Charles than motivated ones through Publius, the modernization’s ineffectiveness isn’t a measure of Beck’s book’s success. Nobody who can’t read the originals will read these versions either, so the translations are irrelevant. What will compel reader attention, in a way that the translations don’t even try to, are the brief intros to each theme, and the one-page summaries, along with Beck’s and  Charles’s introduction. And there, where the action is, the book’s real theme becomes clear.

Here’s the first sentence of the book, in Charles’s preface: “Our Founders strongly believed that Divine Providence played a critical role in the birth of our country.” Scanning subheads in the theme intros yields “One Nation, Under God” and “The Almighty’s Finger.” “The Message” of Federalist 1: “America is special because our rights come from God, but those rights must be protected by a central government that serves the people.” That essay’s “Relevance to Today? Even President Obama seems to have mixed feelings about American exceptionalism.”

It goes on and on. In a thin guise of a re-engagement with Hamilton’s, Madison’s, and Jay’s dry, focused effort to persuade New York to ratify the U.S. Constitution, the story of Beck’s new book is Beck’s usual one, as far from the Federalist trio’s political purposes in their essays as can be imagined (regardless of their scant and occasional references to divinity, which the Beck summaries stretch well beyond the breaking point): the transforming power of God in history, and the transcendent importance of America in executing that power.
“America is special because our rights come from God”: Glenn Beck, Joshua Charles, and their readership think Alexander Hamilton, of all people, not only believed in that bizarre formulation — derived from what can only be their utter and deliberate misunderstanding of the Declaration’s preamble and the old English theory of natural rights — but also went out of his way to explain it in his introduction to the Federalist. Like I said: weird.

Guest Contributor William Hogeland, a frequent contributor to Salon.com and the Huffington Post, is the author of The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty and Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent: May 1 – July 4, 1776.

Despite his recent departure from Fox News, Glenn Beck remains a media phenomenon. He’s created an organization that grinds out new books at an amazing pace. His latest, The Original Argument: The Federalist Case for the Constitution Adapted for the 21st Century, is already a New York Times bestseller.

Beck is to be credited for popularizing the discussion of Constitutional issues fundamental to the founding of our republic. However, I think it’s fair to criticize his recent effort on several grounds.

I was surprised that by the second page of his introduction Beck made a significant historical error of the sort he ought to take pains to avoid. He cites a quotation by William Byrd II as an example of the kind of dischord that existed among the thirteen states at the time of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and subsequent state ratification debates:

Those opposed to the new constitution, collectively called the “Anti-Federalists,” were generally wary of the power wielded by the larger states and were concerned that the structure being proposed–a true republic–could never work in practice . . . Then you had groups like the Puritans, Virginians, and Quakers, who seldom agreed on, well much of anything. As Virginian William Byrd II said of the Puritans, ” A watchful eye must be kept on these foul traders.”

Byrd, it turns out, died in 1741, almost half a century before the Constitutional Convention. A well known Virginia politician and writer, Byrd’s critique of the Puritans was probably one of the last made while such a clearly identifiable culture existed. It’s an argument, applied to a world in which there were still those in New England who could be called “Puritans.” By the Constitutional Convention of 1787, however, the “Puritan” culture of New England had disappeared, replaced as it was by the “Yankee” culture. I was surprised that this anachronistic error was caught by neither Beck nor the fairly large staff that worked on this project.

Beck also errs by accepting at face value the commonly held, but  incorrect view,  that The Federalist Papers significantly influenced the outcome of the ratification debates. With the exception of Hamilton’s New York State, The Federalist Papers  had little impact on the debate in the other twelve states, as scholar Pauline Maier suggests in her new book, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution .

Finally, Beck also fails to point out a rather significant problem with The Federalist Papers. Much of Hamilton’s argument (he wrote 51 of the 85 essays) was written more as a type of persuasive propaganda than as an accurate representation of the type of federal government Hamilton wanted to see develop.  The full extent of Hamilton’s deception wouldn’t be revealed until the nation witnessed the whirlwind Hamiltonian program of  constitutional and extra-constitutional policies enacted into law during his six years as the first Secretary of the Treasury.

I can see the attraction of basing a book on The Federalist Papers. When you’re in the business of writing New York Times best sellers every six months, it’s easy to run out of ideas, and modern interpretations of “the classics,” such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and The Federalist Papers fit well into the production schedule.

Mr. Beck, however, would have done a greater service to a true understanding of the arguments surrounding the ratification of the Constitution by focusing, as James Madison suggested during the Congressional debates on Hamilton’s Bank of the United States proposal, on the debates of the ratification conventions of the thirteen states. It is there that the bargain was struck, not in the newspapers of New York where The Federalist Papers were published. This was especially true in Massachussetts, where the constitution was ratified in January, 1788, and North Carolina, where it was first rejected in June 1788. The turning point was the promise made in Massachusetts that a Bill of Rights would be the first order of business of the new federal government. Delegates to North Carolina’s first convention didn’t think that promise would be honored. By the second convention, in late 1788, they felt assured that it would be.

That story, if not material for another Glenn Beck best seller, would make an outstanding Voices of the Tea Party e-book.

Michael Patrick Leahy is the editor of the Voices of the Tea Party e-book series and co-founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter and the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition. His new  e-book, I, Light Bulb: A Death Row Testimonial, will be published in July, 2011. His new book, Covenant of Liberty, will be published by Broadside Books in spring, 2012. He can be reached on Twitter at @michaelpleahy .