At its quarter-millennium mark, America must discover anew the sinews of self-governance.
It’s hard to believe, but our great nation celebrates its 250th birthday this Saturday. May that celebration, as Declaration of Independence signee and then-future President John Adams put in a letter to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776, “be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”The United States is the oldest continuously functioning constitutional republic of its kind. Empires have risen and fallen. Monarchies have been toppled. Tyrannies have met the ash heap of history. Countless other republics have succumbed to faction, corruption, and decadence. Yet through civil war, depressions, world wars, a century-long “march through the institutions” by the Marxist Left, and so much more, the American constitutional order has endured. Indeed, in many (though not all) ways, it has thrived.
This was never inevitable.
Our nation was built on, and is still dependent upon, a series of assumptions—both explicit and implicit—about sociology, morality, and human nature itself. The Framers understood that parchment barriers alone could never preserve liberty or secure the “common good of society.” Institutions and constitutional structure matter, but institutions and structures are ultimately only as healthy and stable as the people who fill them and imbue them with life.
Adams later summarized this truth with characteristic clarity: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Adams understood that constitutional government presupposes a citizenry that is morally and intellectually capable of governing itself. His presidential predecessor, George Washington, put it similarly in his Farewell Address: “[L]et us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. … [R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
The winning recipe thus emerges and becomes quite clear. And while there is a role for the state here, public virtue must primarily be cultivated through religion, community, and civic education. The Founders assumed that future generations of Americans would remain serious students and caretakers of their own political inheritance. They assumed that American citizens generations hence would understand their Constitution, appreciate the principles of republican self-governance, and remain active participants in that difficult work from the grassroots all the way up through high elected office.
Without that strong civic foundation, ordered liberty cannot long survive. No Founding-era episode captures this truth better than Benjamin Franklin’s famous exchange following the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. When local socialite Elizabeth Willing Powel asked what form of government the great men of the Convention had produced, Franklin quipped, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The genius of that response lies in its conditional nature. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution guaranteed republican government. Indeed, no declaration or constitution could guarantee such a thing. Instead, our Founding-era documents merely made republican self-governance possible. The success of the American experiment would primarily depend not upon judges, bureaucrats, or elected officials, but upon the character, wisdom, and vigilance of the American people themselves. This is surely what a young Abraham Lincoln also meant, speaking just a few decades later in Springfield, Illinois, when he argued: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”
During his early-19th century travels to the fledgling republic, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed that America’s strength did not primarily arise from geography or military power. Rather, it flowed from the habits of self-government that infused American civic life. Citizens formed voluntary associations. They participated in local government. They debated public questions—vigorously, with knowledge and passion. Churches, schools, and families all served as training grounds for republican citizenship. America’s political culture was remarkable because ordinary people viewed themselves not as subjects to be governed but as citizen-statesmen entrusted with the solemn task of stewarding the fate of a nation.
This broader understanding and development represented one of the greatest moral and political advances in Western political history.
For centuries, political power had generally been understood in the West as something wielded by the few—or in the case of monarchy, the only—over the many. By contrast, the Declaration of 1776 and the Constitution of 1787 boldly affirmed that legitimate political authority derives from the consent of the governed and that free citizens possess both the right and the responsibility to direct their nation’s affairs. Republican self-governance demanded far more of citizens than passive obedience. It required informed judgment, patience, prudence, and a well-honed sense of national self-preservation.
It has worked—better, frankly, than any of the Founders could have possibly imagined. But there is a catch: Two hundred fifty years later, many of the assumptions upon which the Founders’ careful handiwork rested appear increasingly fragile.
Many of America’s gravest challenges are not external but self-inflicted. They have gradually eroded both our belief in self-governance and our practical capacity to exercise it.
The first challenge is a structural one: the rise of the modern administrative state.
The Constitution established a separation of powers in which laws would be enacted by elected legislators accountable to the people. Beginning most dramatically during the early-20th century presidency of Woodrow Wilson, however, the federal government increasingly delegated legislative, executive, and quasi-judicial authority to sprawling bureaucratic agencies insulated from democratic accountability. This administrative apparatus has steadily transferred decision-making from citizens and their elected representatives to “expert” mandarins whose purported authority rests not in constitutional legitimacy, but in purported technocratic credentialism.
The result is a profound weakening of republican government itself. Citizens increasingly come to view public policy as something administered by Beltway elites rather than determined through iterative deliberation and slow, tough work of constitutional politics. The all-important Tocquevillian sinews of self-government atrophy in both the civic and political spheres. The chasm between disaffected commoner and emboldened elite only grows.
The second challenge arises from a legal culture that increasingly equates constitutional government with judicial supremacy.
Judicial review occupies an important place within our constitutional order. But over time, especially following the Supreme Court’s little-known 1958 decision in Cooper v. Aaron, many Americans came to accept the proposition that constitutional meaning is determined exclusively—and permanently—by the federal judiciary. The constitutionally proper judicial review of Marbury v. Madison (1803) was thus bastardized and subsumed into the oppressive judicial supremacist regime of Cooper.
That regime departs significantly from the Founders’ vision of coordinate constitutional interpretation and statesmanship among all three branches of the national government. More importantly, judicial supremacy encourages civic passivity. If constitutional questions are viewed as matters to be resolved solely and exclusively by the black-robed denizens of Alexander Hamilton’s “least dangerous” branch, then citizens inevitably become spectators rather than participants in constitutional government. And if there were ever a time to reject judicial supremacy and reassert Lincoln’s competing (and correct) understanding of coordinate branch departmentalism, it is now—after Tuesday’s brutal defeat on birthright citizenship.
The third challenge is cultural rather than institutional.
America’s common culture has become increasingly shaped by a relatively small ruling class concentrated within elite universities, major media organizations, entertainment industries, large corporations, and influential philanthropic institutions. Although these institutions differ in many respects, they often share remarkably similar assumptions about politics, history, religion, family, and national identity. The leaders of these institutions, in short, comprise the American ruling class. And the ruling class’s cultural homogeneity produces a widening disconnect between elite opinion and the lived experience of ordinary Americans.
The consequences of that ever-yawning chasm extend beyond partisan disagreement. A healthy republic depends upon a shared culture capable of transmitting common principles across generations. When cultural institutions instead cultivate historical cynicism, civic alienation, or outright contempt for the nation’s constitutional inheritance and the broader civilization from which that inheritance sprang, the institutions vitiate the very habits upon which self-government depends.
None of this can simply be whitewashed away. --->READ MORE HERE
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