Our Founders—who drew from the classical and Enlightenment writers and thinkers throughout the ages—wisely created our nation. The constitutional republic they crafted was based on the experience of Greco-Roman self-governance and the insights of men who illuminated the natural rights of man, free markets, and individual liberty. In designing our form of government, they created gates and taffrails to protect us from onrushing hazards or turbulent seas that threaten to destroy our rights. Such is our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Our Founders warned that we would lose our republic unless we consciously found a way to “keep it.” Witness today the perilous shift toward left-wing extremism, reckless violence, and petulant behavior by those trying to obstruct law enforcement in our streets. It’s strong evidence that we’re in trouble. You would have to have slipped into a deep slumber to miss this.
What would our Founders say about this? I suspect they would be pretty concerned, not with any lack of ability or the law to deal with this trouble, but our will to address it. Unlike the law and written history, will isn’t something you learn, but rather something you summon. Some in the past have doubted our ability to do so.
On 23 May 1857, this sort of discussion was ongoing between Henry Stephens Randall and Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay. Randall had authored The Life of Thomas Jefferson, which was regarded for nearly a century as the most detailed account of our third President. Randall, an educator, agriculturist, and devout Jeffersonian, would insist that Jefferson was reasonably confident the system of government the Founders left to us would survive future turmoil, particularly if people were tied to the land and free to pursue their own self-interest and individuality. Lord Macaulay, a noted English author and former member of Parliament, was of a different mind.
He feared that once America slipped into a condition similar to the 19th-century class divisions and economic struggles that Great Britain experienced 169 years ago, our Constitution would be inadequate to rescue us. In a very detailed letter to Randall, whom he respected, Macaulay maintained, “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.” Writing from his estate at Holly Lodge, Kensington, London, Lord Macaulay expressed his concerns about American liberty and civilization.
“The day will come when, in the State of New York, a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a Legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a Legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why any body should be permitted to drink Champagne and to ride in a carriage, while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a working-man who hears his children cry for more bread? I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from returning; that you will act like people who should in a year of scarcity devour all the seed-corn, and thus make the next a year not of scarcity, but of absolute famine. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation. There is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.
While Macaulay was writing about a 19th-century New York conflict between those “preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith,” and demagogues “ranting about the tyranny of capitalists,” it sounds like today. The far left is engaged in a populist movement inclined to pure democracy that would replace our representative republic with dictatorial power to oppress us, upending both our civilization and liberty.
Our Constitution is the framework for protecting us from our enemies within. But that alone is not enough to secure freedom. We must summon the will to confront our domestic “Huns and Vandals.”
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