‘A Republic, if You Can Keep It’
by
At its quarter-millennium mark, America must discover anew the sinews of self-governance.
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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.”