Has the American Republic Failed?
Part I: Constitution and Virtue
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“The Constitution was designed to limit government,” reads a meme I was recently tagged on.
“Well, it doesn’t. So, now what?” comes the reply.
I answered thus:
It is not that the Constitution is unable to limit government, it is that virtue in society has been deconstructed by the postmodern and neo-marxist heterodoxy that has suffused our Republic. Too many have come to believe that there is no truth—including the “self evident” truths upon which our country was founded—and that there are no “binary” realities in life—good and evil, fact and opinion, male and female…virtue and depravity.
Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.
The Founders understood that, as Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
To depart from the Constitution and the virtues upon which this country was founded would be to abandon our only hope of upholding our Natural Rights and restoring our Republic. The U.S. Constitution distilled the collected wisdom of millennia, drawing on the best thoughts, traditions and spiritual insights of Hebrew, Greek and Roman times. The Great “Promissory Note,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Constitution, is the near-perfection of the principles set down in Magna Carta in June of 1215, and English Common Law. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” said King in his legendary “I have a Dream” speech. “This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
While it is certainly under attack and infringement today, the Constitution has been a safeguard of liberty for many years. It is a timeless check on the excesses of human nature, and the corruption that tempts the powerful.
Yet virtue is at the heart of our Republic, and without it, ours cannot survive.
“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in a people is a chimerical idea,” as James Madison wrote.
"Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people,” George Washington said. “The general government can never be in danger of degenerating into any despotic or oppressive form so long as there is any virtue in the body of the people."
A republic…must either preserve its virtue or lose its liberty.
The Constitution has not failed the People; the People have failed the Constitution. Our great Republic—this “grand experiment”—is faltering in proportion to the strength of our convictions, our sense of right and wrong, and our national character.
It is We the People who must uphold the Constitution and restore our national virtue. The Constitution merely lays out in order the principles upon which Western Civilization has progressed over millennia and by which one nation under God has achieved a level of human rights previously unimaginable.
John Witherspoon said that, "a republic once equally poised, must either preserve its virtue or lose its liberty, and by some tumultuous revolution, either return to its first principles, or assume a more unhappy form."
Far from abandoning the Constitution and the “first principles” of America’s founding, we must return to them; we must have a revolution—a turning back—to the last, best hope for mankind.
“No people will tamely surrender their liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved,” said Samuel Adams.
This is exactly why I created FreedomTalk, and why I am competing against myriad online voices to bring attention to what we must do to emerge from the present crisis stronger as a nation.
The greatest danger to a representative republic is a democracy. Pure democracies have always failed, as witnessed by the story of Athens. Rule by the mob negates the rights of minorities and inevitably and predictably leads to tyranny. This has all been tried and demonstrated again and again.
I recommend reading The Federalist Papers along with the more contemporary book, The Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk. Democratic rule has been weighed and found wanting.
As Aristotle wrote,
In the first place, the middle class is in most states generally small; and the result is that as soon as one or other of the two main classes—the owners of property and the masses—gains the advantage, it oversteps the mean, and drawing the constitution in its own direction it institutes, as the case may be, either a democracy or an oligarchy. In the second place, factitious disputes and struggles readily arise between the masses and the rich; and no matter which side may win the day, it refuses to establish a constitution based on the common interest and the principle of equality, but preferring to exact as the prize of victory a greater share of constitutional rights, in institutes, according to its principles, a democracy or or an oligarchy.
At present, we have essentially an oligarchy—which we refer to as, “the elite”—running our country. This cabal watches out for its own interests at the expense of the American people. They have operated in shadows, paying lip service to the values of the Republic while cleverly undermining them. They've had the Administrative State (FBI, DOJ, etc.) playing defense for their corruption, protecting their interests. Currently, they have a great number of people duped into participating in protecting their kleptocratic interests in Ukraine…but that is a topic for another time.
But in recent years, this oligarchy of the elite has been exposed and the People are rising up to take back our representative Republic. Donald Trump and others are committed to destroying those who would destroy the Republic, and that is why they are constantly attacking those who would “make America great again.”
Turning to “democracy” would be to step back thousands of years in human progress and repeat history, learning the hard way as the Greeks did that at best, a pure democracy is a break that can only last decades at the most before the next tyrant and oligarchy are ushered back in. It is formulaic and predictable.
The Democrats talk about “defending democracy” because they know that a pure democracy is the shortest path back to the absolute oligarchic control they so love. They do not want democracy because they truly care about the “little people,” they want it because they know that the mob rule of pure democracies always devolves into chaos, and chaos ushers in tyranny.
This is exactly what they tried pulling by means of the lockdowns. It largely succeeded in Canada, but here in America, we’re pretty stubborn about our individual rights, thank God!
The Roman Empire thrived and grew under its Republic, but once the Republic was overthrown, decay set in and ultimately, Roman order gave way to chaos and the often cruel, whims of whichever self-serving demagogue managed to become emperor.
About 1,300 years later, the French Revolution failed to sustain itself, whereas the American Revolution succeeded, because the American Revolution was based on Republican, not Democratic principles. The French experiment descended into the predictable pattern of rule by the mob, followed by tyranny, followed by oligarchy.
Only much later did France begin to emulate the American pattern to some degree, though not with the same Anglosphere heritage and commitment. Macron, today, is part of the global elite oligarchy and the French people are struggling to break free of his administration’s dark despotism.
We have a constitutional crisis in America, yes, but our Republic is not yet done; it can still be redeemed.
But “protecting democracy” is not the concern we should have—that is sophistry and naive to the extreme, as amply witnessed by thousands of years of case studies. Our greatest national imperative is, rather, preserving our Republic and the Constitution by which it is guided.
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