Reinventing the Republic
Mackubin Owens runs down the what and the how.
So to reiterate: the political philosophy of the American republic is to be found in the Declaration of Independence. The architecture for implementing that political philosophy is the Constitution. Paraphrasing Lincoln, the “apple of gold” is the Declaration. The “picture of silver” is the Constitution. The latter exists to “adorn and preserve” the former.
Clearly this is not the situation that prevails today. Our presumed governors have cast aside the apple of gold and abuse the frame of silver at will. Unfortunately, what was created as a commonwealth has devolved into an oligarchy, rule by the few whose interests are at odds with those of the people at large. This ruling oligarchy includes not only unelected bureaucrats but also corporate leaders in tech, finance, and media, who establish rules from which they themselves are exempt. The result is the political crisis that we face today: a lawless executive, a Congress and Court complicit in this lawlessness, leading to an out of control federal government that makes a mockery of the idea of a self-governing people.
The change in our view of the relation between the Constitution and the Declaration is the result of the revolution in political thought effected by the Progressives in the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries. Although many historians have treated the Progressives as merely a “good government” reform movement, the fact is that they essentially “re-founded” the American republic, transforming the basis of government from human nature and natural rights to “history” and “progress.” The Progressives asserted a new conception of man as a being who possesses no natural rights, but who does have potentially limitless material needs that must be provided by an administrative state ruled by “experts.”
Thus the Progressives effectively replaced liberty with “efficiency” and the concept of “rights” with prescriptive entitlements. While the Progressive movement is complicated and not always internally consistent, its fundamental “big idea” is that there is no such thing as the sort of unchanging truth claimed in the Declaration. Instead, all ideas arise from particular historical circumstances.
The era following the Civil War and Reconstruction essentially marked a return to the idea of limited government. But during this period, the “social question” began to arise: how was the American constitutional system to deal with the challenges of the post-war urban and industrial revolutions? While during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Lincoln and the Republicans adhered to the long tradition of Anglo-American constitutional principles that gave us both the Declaration and the Constitution, the Progressives—both intellectuals (e.g., Herbert Croly and John Dewey), imbued with the doctrine of progress arising from German political philosophy, and politicians, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—abandoned those principles for a set of so-called modern ideas.
Above all others, Woodrow Wilson, both as an intellectual (he was a professor and the president of Princeton University) and later a politician, embodied the essence of the new political science, arguing that the Constitution was not up to the task of dealing with the complexities of 20th century American life. The Constitution, said the Progressives, was outdated and incompetent to deal with contemporary economic and social ills. If the Constitution was to be applied at all, they contended, it ought to be applied as a “living” document, modified to meet the changes of modern life.
While the founders created a republic based on natural law and natural right, the Progressives believed that there could be no abiding non-arbitrary standard of moral or political judgment, independent of human will. For the Progressives, government must evolve to meet the changing needs and must be guided by similarly evolving standards of right. Thus as the Progressive political scientist Charles Merriam put it in 1920, it is impossible “that any limit can be set to governmental activity.”
A perceptive, insightful summation of the history of the now-defunct Republic, with plenty still to come in the rest of the article that’s worth mulling over. Including this next, although I do have a minor quibble to make with part of it.
The result of the Progressive’s revolution is an increasingly centralized and bureaucratized administrative state that expands relentlessly while increasing the dependence of the citizen-body on government. As Matthew Spalding has written, clients of the state are on the verge of becoming the majority faction that Madison feared as the greatest danger to free governments. Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings about democratic despotism seem more and more prophetic, as an all-intrusive state reduces the people (in Tocqueville’s words) “to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
In conclusion, I cannot express the current crisis of constitutionalism any better than my friend John Marini of the University of Nevada at Reno. “A constitution,” he writes,
is meaningful only if its principles, which authorize government, are understood to be permanent and unchangeable, in contrast to the statute laws made by government that alter with circumstances and changing political requirements of each generation. If a written constitution is to have any meaning, it must have a rational or theoretical ground that distinguishes it from government. When the principles that establish the legitimacy of the constitution are understood to be changeable, are forgotten, or denied, the constitution can no longer impose limits on the power of government. In that case, government itself will determine the conditions of the social compact and become the arbiter of the rights of individuals. When that transformation occurred, as it did in the 20th century, the sovereignty of the people, established by the Constitution, was replaced by the sovereignty of government, understood in terms of the modern concept of the rational or administrative State. It was a theoretical doctrine, the philosophy of history, that effected this transformation and established the intellectual and moral foundations of progressive politics.
Today, our choice is between republic and oligarchy. To recapture the former, let us recur to the truths of the Declaration of Independence as expressed by President Calvin Coolidge in a speech commemorating its 150th anniversary:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Otherwise, our crisis of constitutionalism and all its attendant woes will continue.
Not quite; it will continue indefinitely, unless and until enough of us recognize one stark fact: The Constitution is no more than a document—mere words on paper, expressing certain ideals that, until relatively recently, most Americans claimed to revere. It has no power of its own, no practical or corporeal means of enforcing the ideals it proposes. Reasonable, aware Americans ought not to expect it to; they are the ones charged with the duty of protecting and enforcing it, not vice the versa. It cannot defend itself, it must be defended.
This is tacitly confirmed by the simple fact that many, many of us have sworn an oath to do precisely that: upon enlisting in the military, joining the police force, or accepting elected office as what used to be called a "public servant." Every last one of them swore that oath completely aware of what it meant, as should those of us who did NOT swear any oath. OUR duty is to see to it that those who did, most especially the elected officials, are held rigorously to account for fulfilling it. Ignoring, shirking, or otherwise failing to uphold this solemn and sacred responsibility, then, cannot fairly be taken as an indication that the Constitution has failed us, but rather that we have failed the Constitution.
Until that solemn and sacred duty is reaffirmed, taken seriously, and fully and firmly upheld, all efforts undertaken by freedom-oriented Americans who prefer properly limited government—“election” campaigns, peaceful protest, indignant op-eds, lawfare—will continue to be frustrated. Said Americans will have no hope whatever of prevailing in the gloomy twilight of the eternal struggle against tyranny and despotism.
Three of the proverbial “four boxes of liberty”—soap, ballot, jury—have availed us not. That leaves us with just the one.
The four boxes of liberty is an 19th century American idea that proposes: "There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and cartridge. Please use in that order.”
The soap box represents exercising one's right to freedom of speech to influence politics to defend liberty. The ballot box represents exercising one's right to vote to elect a government which defends liberty. The jury box represents using jury nullification to refuse to convict someone being prosecuted for breaking an unjust law that decreases liberty. The cartridge box represents exercising one's right to keep and bear arms to oppose, in armed conflict, a tyrannical government. The four boxes represent increasingly forceful methods of political action.
And so, as I like to say, here we all are. To adopt the four-boxes format, there are five basic questions journalists of a bygone age were admonished to ask when reporting on an event: Who, what, how, when, and why. At this point we’ve taken care of four of the Five Ws:
We know who’s done this to us—Progressivists
We know how they did it
We know why
We also know, most of us, what option remains as a last-resort recourse, though the vast majority of us are either unwilling to take action, or even to admit to themselves that it might ever become necessary to do so
This dismal ratio will almost certainly remain essentially unchanged; having been indoctrinated in the government schools—their training reinforced by Progressivist-dominated news outlets, entertainment media, the universities, and the culture generally—the Unwilling Majority disdain liberty in preference to personal comfort and a hallucinatory stability. They will not be moved by importuning which emphasizes freedom and a return to something at least resembling proper Constitutional governance.
Which leaves what the Real American minority might call their Band Of Brothers—We Few, We Unhappy Few—with but one final question to wrestle with: when.