A Republic -- If You Can Keep It

A Republic –- If You Can Keep It

As the Constitutional Convention of 1787 drew to a close Benjamin Franklin was approached by a woman who asked “Well Doctor, what have we got? A Republic or a Monarchy?” The answer, of course, has become famous: “A Republic madame – if you can keep it!”

Whether or not we can keep it is becoming more uncertain by the day. Every day there is yet another news story reporting how politician after politician is trying to disassemble a piece of the government that displeases them in some manner or another, usually by refusing to do their bidding. Thomas Aquinas once said:

If the will is perverse, the movements, namely, of the passions, will be perverse also; but if the will is upright, not only are the passions blameless, but also truly praiseworthy.

This is a sentiment that our Founding Fathers would have understood implicitly, yet one, that is today subject to intense debate.

The framers of the Constitution built upon centuries of history starting from ancient Athens and Rhodes through Rome and ultimately even England. Scholars of the time were already well aware of the failures that brought the first Democracies to their knees and did their best to avoid those same mistakes. They constructed the Constitution based upon principles of government and freedom espoused by men such as Locke, Hobbes, Thomas, and Montesquieu. They looked deep into the human soul and foresaw attempts to suborn the freedoms they had paid such a high price for and in the foreseeing, they attempted to avoid those pitfalls also. They designed the Constitution and the subsequent Bill of Rights to withstand a great deal of abuse. They interlocked and reinforced each other; but even so, removing enough pieces can cause the entire structure to fail.

That is precisely what is happening.

America is being attacked from within. By attacking our Civil Liberties, the Electoral College, the Judiciary, the essence of what makes America what it is, they attack the very foundations of Democracy. It is tempting to ascribe these attacks to simple naïveté, or political party intrigue, but to do so would be an abrogation of our responsibility as citizens. They seek to undermine America at a fundamental level, rewriting history if needs be to sustain their cause. Why now? What has happened to make this time and this place the focus?

There has been a change not in America, but in the American people. Not all the people, nor even most of the people, only a small yet powerful minority of disaffected “progressives” that seek to upend what it means to be American. They decry the Constitution as outmoded and seek ways to change it without the consent of the majority. Yes, the Founding Fathers foresaw even this, but in the foretelling, the warnings they left for us are lost upon Americans two hundred years later. We shall see that the Founders recognized the greatest danger to our Nation.

In his treatise "Spirit of the Laws" Montesquieu maintained that the form of government must be driven by one of three principles that act as ‘springs' or ‘motors' to guide the behavior of the citizens and drive them to support the government and make it function smoothly. I prefer to think of these principles as the ‘heart’ or ‘soul’ of the nation, but remember that word ‘spring’, you will hear it again later. According to Montesquieu, for democratic republics such as America, that principle, that “spring” is “love of virtue.”

Now in our Founders' day, they considered themselves, and the vast majority of the citizens of the new nation, men of virtue, just as certainly as they believed King George III was wholly lacking in such virtue. What is virtue then? What did the Founders conceive this virtue to be? A typical dictionary definition would say it was “behavior showing high moral standards”, but is that really enough? Certainly King George was of high moral standard, after all, he issued the “Royal Proclamation For the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Profaneness and Immorality” (1787). It is hard to conceive of more morality (for the time period) than that.

So it obviously was more than just a simple definition of virtue as morality. Consider this definition from Our Ageless Constitution, by Stedman et. al.

America's Founders knew that it takes more than a perfect plan of government to preserve liberty. Something else is needed — some moral principle diffused among the people to unite and strengthen the urge to peaceful observance of law. They recognized that the raw materials of a free government are people who can act morally without compulsion, who do not willfully violate the rights of others, and who love liberty enough to demand that government's power is very limited. They used the word "virtuous" to describe such people.

So now we have a more concise appreciation of what the Founders considered virtue to be. Perhaps a better understanding can be gained by looking at the words of some of the Founding Fathers to gain a better sense of their beliefs.

In his Farewell Address to the Nation, George Washington said:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.... It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

Again from George Washington:

[V]irtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

From Samuel Adams we hear:

We may look up to Armies for our defense, but virtue is our best security. It is not possible that any state should long remain free, where virtue is not supremely honored.

From John Adams:

Virtue must underlay all institutional arrangements if they are to be healthy and strong. The principles of democracy are as easily destroyed as human nature is corrupted!

Again from John Adams:

Statesmen, my dear Sir, may speculate for liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. The only Foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater measure than they have it now, they may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty.

This last statement written in 1776 is prophetic. We gain from this statement and those which precede it a consensus that the Founders did, in fact, understand implicitly the value of virtue and morality to the existence of the new nation and what that virtue consisted of, as well as a sense of the danger to our nation if Virtue were to be found wanting.

Herein lies the problem. In constructing this government, they discovered no way to protect it against a loss of virtue, beyond exhorting Americans to treasure it. Their exhortations have been headed by the majority of the People, yet some have not only turned deaf ears to them, but actively reject the very existence of these warnings. While there have been many minor assaults upon our virtue over the years most met with little success. The Civil War of the 1800s was our only serious trial, and at great cost in blood we surmounted it and continued as a nation, stronger than before. However, just as the wind and the rain can grind down the tallest mountain, so too can the roots of Democracy wither.

In the early 1900s psychologists and behaviorists such as Walter D. Scott and John B. Watson suggested that:

Man has been called the reasoning animal but he could with greater truthfulness be called the creature of suggestion. He is reasonable, but he is to a greater extent suggestible.

This escalated rapidly but it was not until after World War 2 that significant cracks began to appear.

Paul Harvey made it clear in his 1965 monologue “If I Were The Devil” that virtue itself was under attack:

If I Were the Devil,

If I were the Prince of Darkness I would want to engulf the whole earth in darkness.

I’d have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree.

So I should set about however necessary, to take over the United States.

I would begin with a campaign of whispers.

With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve, “Do as you please.”

To the young I would whisper “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that “man created God,” instead of the other way around. I would confide that “what is bad is good and what is good is square.”

In the ears of the young married I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be “extreme” in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct.

And the old I would teach to pray — to say after me — “Our father which are in Washington.”

Then I’d get organized.

I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull, uninteresting.

I’d threaten TV with dirtier movies, and vice-versa.

I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing, less work. Idle hands usually work for me.

I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could, I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction, I’d tranquilize the rest with pills.

If I were the Devil, I would encourage schools to refine young intellects, but neglect to discipline emotions; let those run wild.

I’d designate an atheist to front for me before the highest courts and I’d get preachers to say, “She’s right.”

With flattery and promises of power I would get the courts to vote against God and in favor of pornography.

Thus I would evict God from the courthouse, then from the schoolhouse, then from the Houses of Congress.

Then in his own churches I’d substitute psychology for religion and deify science.

If I were Satan I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg

And the symbol of Christmas a bottle.

If I were the Devil I’d take from those who have and give to those who wanted until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. Then my police state would force everybody back to work.

Then I would separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines and objectors in slave-labor camps.

If I were Satan I’d just keep doing what I’m doing and the whole world go to hell as sure as the Devil.

Paul Harvey was addressing the very same Virtue we have been discussing, the one that built America, and now 50 years later everything he predicted, and everything that John Adams warned us about, has come to pass. Paul Harvey composed his monologue during a major paradigm change in advertising theory. Communication of information (and misinformation) had just become practically instantaneous. Society began to change rapidly in ways that traditional institutions had difficulties in adapting to. Some institutions were actually suborned in the change. Paul Harvey understood at least some of what was to come, and he was right to fear it.

A generation later ushered in the information revolution. We, the programmers who were there on the ground floor, in our naïveté thought only of how this was going to free mankind. How little did we understand the reality of what we had done. Tim Berners-Lee, who is widely regarded as the inventor of the Internet, has himself now come to regret it. He once envisioned that “in the wrong hands, it could become the destroyer of worlds.” It has found those hands.

Thanks in large part to social media, delivered courtesy of the Internet into every American household virtually for free, the psychology of advertising that first began to appear in Paul Harvey’s day has now been weaponized as a political tool and mass dispersed to an unsuspecting audience. The results have been nothing less than catastrophic. Unable to tell truth from falsehood Americans, nay, the World, follow their feelings or worse, believe what they are told to believe. No more rational decisions. No more contemplative answers. Virtue? Morals? Reason? Civility even? Gone with the wind. The Internet did not save us. It has doomed us.

Today we have not just citizens, but even influential politicians attacking the very structure of our government. Some wish to abolish the Electoral College because it displeased them in the last election, never mind all the times it worked in their favor. Some wish to threaten the Judiciary to destroy the separation of powers by subjugating a branch of government to their will, again, because it currently does not do their bidding, never mind all those times when it did. Some wish to repeal civil liberties that are the very cornerstones of our nation, because these freedoms are antithetical to the exercise of power. All of them are in service to a personal accretion of power. And every single one of them has complete access to a bully pulpit.

I mentioned earlier that some of our institutions were suborned in the changes. This is where that becomes relevant. The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights is partly about “freedom of the press.” What does one do when it is the Press itself that has lost all virtue and is actively engaged in pulling the nation apart? What then? What do you do when the last bastion of a free people is now complicit with those who are attempting to tear down the very fabric of the world they report on? Does that sound like Paul Harvey? Of course it does. If our virtue were intact, this would not, could not happen. When John Adams became President, he was quoted as saying:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice ambition, revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The people attacking America are nearly devoid of virtue, of reason, of principle, everything which drives and sustains a Democratic Republic. They have renounced religion, most especially because it does not countenance their immorality, and yet these same people represent themselves as paragons of virtue and morality. What was that Paul Harvey said?

What is bad is good and what is good is square.

America has not yet lost its heart, its soul, as a nation. But it is sorely beset. If we lose this battle, we may survive, for a time, but not as a land of freedom, but rather a land of oppression, America in name only. The path these attackers would lead us down, is one of fear, fear of the government. Virtue is now replaced with a different “spring”, the spring which according to Montesquieu is the spring that drives despotism. Our heart will have become black, our soul lost.

Is America doomed to despotism? Or is America simply doomed? Time will tell, but Lincoln once said: "a nation divided cannot stand", to that I would add, "a nation that has abandoned its heart and soul cannot stand.” One final thought, from Alexis de Tocqueville. In his travels across America, he wrote:

America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

Make America Good Again