235 years ago today, on March 4, 1789, our current U.S. Constitution went into effect (which is why presidential and congressional terms of office began and ended on this date until the 20th amendment changed those dates). Just two years earlier, at the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in September 1787, Benjamin Franklin had supposedly been asked what kind of government the new constitution had created. His now famous response was, « A Republic, if you can keep it. »
If you can keep it. Franklin’s rhetorical question has acquired a renewed salience in recent years. Perhaps not since the American Civil War in the 1860s has the answer been more in doubt.
In the unique path that American history has followed from the founding, the classical republican tradition was especially dear to the founders, every bit as dear as (maybe more than) the liberal-capitalist tradition inherited from John Locke and the other usual suspects of the Enlightenment conspiracy against traditional communitarianism. The republican tradition has long emphasized citizenship and citizen virtue. Self-government requires citizens who take citizenship seriously. That means that they take community seriously, which is always in tension with the Lockean liberal capitalist individualist tradition, which at its worse degenerates into libertarianism but which remains somewhat problematic even at its best because of its valorization of the individual over the community.
The civic republican tradition has long contrasted republic citizen virtue with corruption, and I think it is really hard to understand the U.S. Constitution and the debates surrounding it without that context. Certainly, one can hardly read The Federalist Papers outside that tradition. What does the civic republican tradition have to say about the disordered values and disordered priorities of our present-day politics?
Also, although the Constitution did not create an explicitly Christian republic and indeed specifically sought to preclude an official religious establishment, the U.S. was from the outset (and certainly since the Second Great Awakening) very much a kind of Christian republic. Of course, even before the First Amendment explicitly outlawed a federal religious establishment, article six specified no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. That said, one of the great examples of American exceptionalism has been the seemingly successful (at least until recently) harmonious combination at the cultural level of the classical republican tradition with religion. Thus J.G.A. Pocock famously observed in his Introduction to The Machiavellian Moment: « that the revival of the republican ideal by civic humanists posed the problem of a society, in which the political nature of man as described by Aristotle was to receive its fulfillment, seeking to exist in the framework of a Christian time-scheme which denied the possibility of any secular fulfillment. » (The Machiavellian Moment, Princeton University Press, 1975).
Hence John Adams’ famous formulation: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Between that and MAGA’s moral and religious corruption, there can be no common ground. A fortiori, what our second president said about citizens’ moral and religious virtue applies as much as and more so to would-be leaders. Hence the famous White House Inscription, taken from a letter Adams wrote from the White House in 1800 to his wife Abigail (and eventually engraved on the State Dining Room mantlepiece in FDR’s time): “I Pray Heaven To Bestow The Best Of Blessings On This House And All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.”
Unfortunately, getting back to Franklin’s warning whether or not we can keep our republic, former President (and present presidential candidate) Donald Trump has tested all the norms of civic republicanism, has pushed them beyond their limits, and in the process has brought us to the brink of one of the founders’ great fears that (as befell republics in the past) ours would fall eventually prey to a non-civically-oriented demagogue. Even if Trump loses and the nation is saved from a catastrophic second Trump term, enormous damage has already been done to our political culture, to elections, to the rule of law, to the presumption in favor of the peaceful transfer of political power, and to the U.S. as a serious, trustworthy ally.
And that, sadly, is how it seems on our federal government’s 235th anniversary!
