Archives for May 2018

Lecture delivered at “Novus Ordo Seclorum: The American Founding.”

Hoogland Center for Teaching Excellence Seminar
DeLand High School, DeLand, Florida
June 1, 2004

 

As we’ve seen, political regimes consist of four elements: the persons who rule; the institutional structures by which they rule; they way of life, habits of mind and heart of the political community so ruled; the end or purpose of those ruling persons, structures, and way of life.

That regimes matter to us, the Founders saw. Lincoln also saw this, and illustrated it as decisively as could be. Without the institution of the presidency, no Lincoln; without Lincoln, no Union; without Union—what? Continued slavery in the southern states, and the extension of slavery in whatever lands the Confederate States of America would have annexed; a balkanized North America with bigger military establishments, sooner, and the wars that would have come with them, later; more likely victory for one or more of the tyrants of the twentieth century, in the world wars that followed.

If practical politics centers on the question of the regime; if the American Founders intended to replace monarchism with republicanism; if ‘republicanism’ means representative government rather than direct democracy as the means whereby a people can govern themselves; then the executive branch of that representative government deserves considerable suspicion. Executives execute. Will an executive execute us? Even if elected by us, perhaps he might execute, or in some other way punish, those of us who failed to vote for him. Or (given the secrecy of ballots today) he might punish those who publicly oppose his policies—a sobering thought, especially here in Florida, where large numbers of voters are likely to be on the losing side, whoever wins the upcoming presidential election.

In other words, the president fills the office within republican government which looks most suspiciously like that of a monarchy. Might he not turn tyrant? And even if he does not, will not a strong executive compromise our own rights of self-government by hogging public attention, or by doing things for us that we could do for ourselves, or by beating the rest of us to the punch in any number of ways? A decisive executive who commands soldiers and bureaucrats will always worry his fellow citizens. The very existence of an executive raises the regime question, perennially.

In framing the Constitution, the Founders owed us an explanation of how their new executive differed from the old, dubious monarchs of Europe. Delegates at Philadelphia themselves demanded such an explanation. Randolph of Virginia decried the presidency as “the foetus of monarchy,” and Dickinson of Pennsylvania argued that “a vigorous executive…cannot be republican.” At the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Patrick Henry declaimed, “Away with your President! We shall have a king: the army will salute him monarch: your militia will leave you, and assist in making him king, and fight against you: and what have to oppose this force? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue?”

Before considering the Founders’ understanding of the presidency, I first want to draw back to the foundation of their thought, and consider what they meant by ‘self-government’ in the first place. The Founders, including George Washington, the first president, frequently recurred to the idea of ‘self-government.’ Subsequent presidents for a century and a half made much of it. What does it mean?

In classical political philosophy, self-government has two dimensions. Autarchia, which means self-sufficiency or literally self-rule, means independence from the rule of others, not needing what others provide, standing by oneself and for oneself. Self-rule characterizes what we would call ‘sovereign’ political societies, as distinguished from colonies, captive nations, dependencies of one sort or another. In individuals, the most self-ruling person of all is the philosopher, the one whose body and soul needs the least—both materially and intellectually—from his or her contemporaries.

Such a community, such a person, will also need enkrateia or self-mastery, the other dimension of self-government. Enkrateia literally means ‘rule over what is within,’ self-control, the ability of the rational part of the soul, or of the rational persons within the political community, to rule the irrational. Socrates tells one of his interlocutors, “every man is his own ruler,” capable of “being moderate and self-mastering,” the “ruler of the pleasures and desires that are in himself.” The self-masterly person or community most fully develops its own distinctively human capacities, namely, those associated with reasonableness rather than passion or appetite—characteristics human beings share with beasts. As the term ‘mastery’ implies, enkrateia is sterner stuff than autarchia. By nature, the passions should be treated as slaves by a being whose distinctive characteristic is reason, and criminals should be deprived of their liberty or ‘enslaved’.

When a person or community fails to govern itself in this double sense, it becomes not autarchic but anarchic not enkratic but akratic or without rule. Lawlessness in the person and civil war in the community then follow, opening opportunities for tyrants. Such persons and communities lose their chance for a fully human life: They compromise their personhood and lose their political independence. Today, we have seen what we call ‘failed states’ where human life is cheap and living nearly intolerable.

The American Founding.  The American Founders sensed that America was moving in the direction of losing its self-government, asserted in 1776. The classical philosophers were not at all sure that ‘the people’ as a whole could adequately exercise self-government. Some of the Americans were by no means sure of this, either. Nonetheless, in the thirty-ninth Federalist, Publius insists that republicanism alone comports with “that honorable determination, which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the Founders intended to design a government that would enable reason to rule Americans—an ambitious aspiration.

Government by consent means governed by reasoned assent, but what kinds of governing institutions can strengthen reason sufficiently to enable it to govern our often unreasonable souls? As Publius states it, can “societies of men” establish “good government”—government by “reflection and choice,” not “accident and force”? “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” not angels over men or angels over angels, “the great difficulty lies in this,” Publius writes: “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.” For the government to govern itself, “inventions of prudence” are needed, institutions so arranged that “the private interest of every individual” in the government “may be a sentinel over the public rights.” The regime of monarchy could not be arranged in such a way as to ensure that the monarch would be such a sentinel. Could a republic solve this problem, with respect to its executive?

One set of institutions that can filter out would-be tyrants are those that elevate citizens to executive office in the first place. Another set of institutions will determine the powers and the limits to the powers executives exercise, once in office. Publius describes both of these kinds of institutions, taking care to mark the difference between them and the institutions of monarchy.

With respect to electoral institutions, the Founders rejected direct popular elections of presidents for the Electoral College, the institution Florida made famous. As we all re-learned in the presidential election of 2000, the Electoral College requires that a president earn not a popular majority of votes cast nationwide, but a constitutional majority—that is, a majority of the votes cast in the Electoral College, peopled by delegates in each state—each unit in the federal system—delegates equal in number to the United States senators and representatives from that state. The Electoral College thus expresses popular opinion while at the same time constituting a temporary but indispensable institutional layer between popular majorities and electoral victory. The Founders intended thus to avoid the hereditary election—or worse, the violent coup—characteristic of monarchy, while at the same time, forcing electors to think both of the interest of their own states and the interests of the country as a whole. That is, the Electoral College was to inject an element of deliberation into presidential selection.

Publius says that the president’s election will express “the sense of the people” in the initial stage, that of electing the delegates to the College. A republican or representative regime can do no less. At the same time, Publius expects the electors to be deliberate and judicious—persons who understand how their state’s self-interest can only be served b y voting for a candidate who appeals to voters beyond their state, persons who can think about how to put together a winning coalition, persons who know how to rule and be ruled. Publius also sees that although the initial phase of the election may be a rowdy affair, the final phase, the actual selection of the president, will not conduce to such “tumult and disorder.”

Key to these effects will be two features of the College. First, the electors will meet within each state, not as one group in some central location. Second, the delegates will meet briefly, cast ballots, return home. These features of the law, taken together, will minimize the chances of widespread corruption and manipulation because the delegates will not be able to business together long enough to come to know each other, and thereby come to trust each other enough to ‘do deals.’ And any corruption or manipulation that does occur will be localized to the one delegation, and not spread easily to all delegates across the country.

Since the founding, two things happened to alter this system. The first thing happened quickly. National political parties developed, practically ensuring that almost all delegates to the College would not deliberate but simply vote the party line. This effectively pushed deliberation into the party organizations. Parties, and particularly party ‘chieftains,’ became known for their sagacity in selecting ‘electable’ presidential candidates who would also do credit to the party while in office. This produced some mediocre presidents—Buchanan, Pierce—but also some remarkable ones, including the most remarkable of all, Lincoln, a man to whom backroom wheeling and dealing were not unknown.

Presidential primary elections, designed to test electability more directly, came more than a century after party-driven nominations arose, and only achieved their current highly populist form in the 1970s. Nominations determined by primaries push deliberation into the camps of the candidates themselves, and their hired consultants. This does make for a more tumultuous and also long-drawn-out electoral process, at which the Founders would have looked askance.

These changes notwithstanding, the original architecture of the Electoral College continues to provide the basic goods the Founders intended. It makes presidential selection, in Publius’ words, “dependent upon the people themselves,” while requiring the president-elect to enjoy prestige in many states, not only a few. To enjoy such prestige, “characters preeminent for ability and virtue” are more likely to find favor. Although we delight in criticizing and ridiculing our presidents, it would be hard to say that they are less preeminent in ability and virtue than, say your average college professor, much less your average college administrator—to take two examples that hit close to home. To put it a different way, how many of us really believes, ‘I could do that job’? How many of us would even want the job in the first place?

Publius calls “the true test of a good government” its “aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.” Can the government govern? This brings him to the second set of presidential institutions, namely, the powers of the office and their limits, and how these too differ from monarchic institutions.

Although the republican executive, like the monarchic executive, will also consist of one person, not a committee, unlike a monarch his terms will be limited to four-year increments; he will be impeachable and removable from office; his vetoes can be overridden. Although he will command the military, he cannot declare war or raise troops. He cannot pardon other officials who have been impeached and convicted, and therefore cannot protect those who might conspire against “the public liberty.” The treaties he or his agents negotiate require Senatorial advice and consent, as do his nominees for the Supreme Court and other offices. He can grant no titles of nobility, and so cannot reconstitute the regime of aristocracy in the New World.

Each one of these powers, taken with its limitations, speaks directly to the regime in question, a republic not a monarchy.

For example, the prevention of aristocracy, particularly an aristocracy beholden to the executive, makes republican self-government possible. In one of his last letters, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, not a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” Although there is, he wrote (agreeing with John Adams), a natural aristocracy of virtue and talent, such genuine aristocrats feature no visible markings by which they can be readily identified and thus as it were made automatically to accede to the command of their inferiors. Denying executives the power to grant titles of nobility eliminates one source of artificial aristocrats, even as the electoral system tests the mettle of the natural ones.

The exercise of limited discretion in judicial and other nominations and also in treaty negotiations also separates the republican executive from the monarch. In a monarchy, where sovereignty inheres in one person alone, a treaty can only be as good as the monarch’s word. And any governmental appointee must derive his authority from that sole source of legitimate power. But in a republic, where the people are sovereign, but their sovereignty flows into separate and equal branches of government, constitutional law must require both legislature and executive to ‘buy into’ treaties and appointments, so that the sovereign people’s word can be its bond. Further, in the United States, the senators represent the states; Senate approval of treaties and presidential nominees involves both levels of the federal system, a constitutional majority similar to that effected by the Electoral College.

To the Americans, the British regime, a constitutional monarchy, seemed to have reached a dead end with George III. Eventually, the British themselves concluded that  the monarchy had played itself out as a real regime, and they too became a commercial republic. But at the time of the founding the Americans were exploring new political territory. As Publius asks, can a strong executive be made “consistent with the genius of republican government”? This question goes right to the heart of the regime issue.

Publius calls energy in the executive “a leading character in the definition of good government, and gives four reasons for thinking so.

First, energy is “essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks.” A president may not have time to wait for a Congressional declaration of war, and of course the vast majority of American wars have been fought without any such declaration.

Second, executive energy is indispensable to “the steady administration of the laws.” Congress can make as many laws as it likes, but without vigorous enforcement they will effectively lapse.

Third, executive energy will protect property when threatened by civil disturbance. A memorable example: In the 1960s, when the Watts section of Los Angeles went up in flames, President Johnson ordered in the 82nd Airborne Division. End of riot.

Fourth, executive energy can secure liberty against ambition, faction, anarchy. The best-known early example of this was to be President Washington’s firm response to the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania.

Part of executive energy comes from the character of the executive in power, a topic to which I shall return. Institutionally, however, executive energy derives from five features of the presidential office, outlined in the Constitution. The first is the unity of the executive: Although he has a Cabinet, the president makes the decision. This is not government by committee. If it were, Publius argues, the plural executive would dither interminably, and, after finally acting (or finally failing to act) would not only embarrass itself by finger-pointing refusals to accept responsibility for failure—that much is inevitable—but confuse the rest of us as to where responsibility for a given decision lies. With a plural executive, Harry Truman’s proverbial “buck” would stop—where?

The second institutional prop for executive energy is duration in office. A presidential term must be sufficiently long to allow the president to undertake serious medium-range actions. Without such duration, no serious person would want to bother with the presidency at all, and, as in the provision of unity, no president could be held responsible for actions taken. A four-year terms gives a president time to formulate and pursue policies, and also gives his fellow citizens time to see the first results of those policies, and so to judge them fairly when re-election nears. For example, neither supporters nor opponents of the Bush Administration’s economic and foreign polices will likely say that they haven’t had enough time to come to some fairly strong preliminary conclusions respecting his ‘job performance’ in time for the November 2004 election. Four years is usually a fair test; when it is not, as perhaps in the case of the Great Depression, that may indicate a problem that the government alone cannot solve.

To give scope to personal firmness in the executive, and to stability of administration, a shorter term will not do. To keep an executive on a short leash will encourage habits of “servile pliancy” to the “prevailing current” of opinion, Publius warns in Federalist 71. “The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they trust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.” Alluding to what Rousseau calls the “general will,” he continues: “It is a just observation that the people commonly intend the PUBLIC GOOD. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it…. When occasions present themselves in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests to withstand the temporary delusion in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. Instances might be cited in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure.”  Notice the language of ethics, here: moderation or resistance to passions; the public good or justice; good sense or prudence; courage; and even magnanimity or greatness of soul, the crown of the classical virtues. These virtues will not always be present in a people or in an executive, even an executive of exceptional abilities and virtues, but without institutional support from duration in office, even a president of the most exemplary character will be helpless to bring these or any other virtues to the service of the country. Without a decent duration in office, the careful separation from legislative power would be overridden, and a president would wield only a sham independence from Congress.

The Founders so esteemed the moral and political effects of duration in office that they made the presidency indefinitely renewable. Publius praises experience, “the parent of wisdom,” and the incentive for good behavior in office that the prospect of re-election brings. With characteristically restrained asperity, he also notes that the practice of long-serving presidents will reduce the number of living ex-presidents at any given time—that is, the number of potential political kibitzers.

Third, in addition to unity and duration in office, an energetic executive must not depend upon another branch of government for his salary. Accordingly, Congress shall not change a president’s salary during his term in office. Excepting persons of remarkable virtue, “a power over a man’s [financial] support is a power over his will.” The Constitution denies this power over the president to the American Congress.

While independent of the other branches of government, presidents are to be dependent upon the will of the people, in the long run. This dependence limits their powers but also forms one foundation of those powers. As the only Constitutional officer elected, if indirectly, by the whole body of voting citizens, the president enjoys considerable authority over any other single officer, if not over any other governmental branch. He can claim to speak for the people in ways that no one senator, representative, or judge can do.

In a monarchy, the monarch is sovereign; in the American republic, a president is not sovereign. Nor is the government as a whole. The people are. Therefore, the presidential veto, exercised by an executive overpowered by a constitutional majority vote, expresses one part of popular sovereignty slowing, but not preventing, another part of popular sovereignty’s expression in law.

These four features of executive energy—unity, duration in office, independence of financial support, and dependence upon the sovereign people, all point to the fifth, most important feature: executive responsibility. The word ‘responsible,’ meaning accountable for one’s actions, dates back to the middle of the seventeenth century, but its first use as the noun, ‘responsibility,’ occurs for the first time in English in the sixty-third Federalist, which concerns the Senate. All good regimes require responsibility; a political community or res publica implies publicity or, as political scientists say nowadays, ‘transparency.’ With respect to the executive, responsibility needs sharply different institutional supports in republics than it does in monarchies. A permanent executive or monarch should have a privy counsel—to some extent a plural executive—which will hold him to some degree of responsibility. An elected executive or president, however, must be enmeshed in institutions that hold him responsible to the rulers of that regime, namely, the people.

All of the main constitutional duties of the president require clear lines of authority or responsibility. Effective military command, for example, means (in Publius’ words) “the direction of the common strength.” Treaty negotiations and judicial appointments also must be made to ‘trace back’ to some person who can be held responsible for them by his fellow citizens. Ultimately, the very character of being an executive involves the establishment of one’s reputation by the performance of one’s duties. Legislators legislate; they “prescribe the rules for the regulation of the society.” Executives execute; they execute the laws by bringing the common strength to bear for the making-real of legislative enactments; they also bring the common strength to bear for the common defense, a task that no set of laws can fully regulate or constrain. This is both the danger and the necessity of executive power.

Publius acknowledges that abuses will occur. But he also insists that “the supposition of a universal venality in human nature is little less an error in political reasoning that the supposition of universal rectitude.” Both cynics and idealists are wrong. As framers of institutions, the best the Founders could do was to see that the way the national government was constituted would make rectitude more likely than venality.

The Character of the First President. We have reached the end of what institutional or structural regime-building can accomplish, with respect to self-government and the executive. We turn now to the other dimension of any regime, namely, the kind of person who will rule. The institution of the presidency had an especially fortunate ‘founding example,’ George Washington. Washington quite deliberately conducted himself in such a manner as to set an example for his successors. Not being a fool, neither he nor his contemporaries imagined that subsequent presidents would often equal Washington in character. But they knew that he would remain, as a guide for, or, failing that, as a source of shame to malefactors.

Nonetheless, Washington did not suppose, as Lord Acton later did, that ‘power corrupts.’ On the contrary, under due institutional restraints power strengthens the human soul by involving it in the very public responsibility that Publius highlights. Washington conceived of self-government on several levels, which might be envisioned as concentric circles. First, the government of the ‘self’ or soul requires the rule of reason over the passions. Other levels of self-government include the family, the immediate social milieu—nearby families that comprise one’s local civil society—the local political community, the county, the state, the national union of the states, the world of ‘nation-states’ and empires, nature, and, finally, God. None of these levels or circles of self-government fails to affect the other. The government of the individual soul receives valuable guidance from the other circles of self-government, and to varying degrees they receive guidance or at least petitions from the individual soul. In learning to govern itself, the soul must attend to family, society—all the other circles.

As mentioned, the executive branch poses more acute problems for a self-governing people than does the legislative branch. As Publius repeatedly states, the executive must move with secrecy and dispatch, thereby posing serious questions concerning the requirements for public knowledge and deliberation that the experiment in popular self-government must meet. Further, how shall a man of conspicuous virtue accept the status of an executive—the agent of the will of another, namely, the sovereign people—rather than long for the status of a monarch or an aristocrat? Upon his elevation to the presidency Washington wrote, “Few who are not philosophical spectators can realize the difficult and delicate part which a man in my situation had to act…. In our progress toward political happiness my station is new; and, if I may use the expression we walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.” Washington cited prudence, conciliation, and firmness as the foundations of his conduct in this “last great experiment for promoting human happiness by reasonable compact in civil Society.  Both the greatness and the finality of the American experiment in self-government suggests the attraction of this enterprise to a Washington. 

The Whiskey Rebellion called for the exercise of all these virtues. Washington ordered suppression of the rebellion on the grounds of the constitutional duty of the executive to maintain the rule of law. “To withstand by open violence the lawful authority of the Government of the United States, and to compel thereby an alteration in the measures of the Legislature and a repeal of the laws aforesaid” would be to allow a violent faction to abort the process of popular self-government—an argument to which Lincoln would recur some fifty years later. The rebels were animated not by prudence but by “treasonable fury.” “The very existence of the Government, and the fundamental principles of social order, are materially involved in the issue.” “If the Laws are to be so trampled upon, with impunity, and a minority (a small one too) is to dictate to the majority there is an end put, at one stroke, to republican government; and nothing but anarchy and confusion is to be expected thereafter; for some other man, or society, may dislike another law and oppose it with equal propriety until all Laws are prostrate, and every one (the strongest I presume) will carve for himself.” The successful suppression of the rebellion “demonstrated that our prosperity rests on solid foundations; by furnishing an additional proof, that my fellow citizens understand the true principles of government and liberty: that they feel their inseparable union: that notwithstanding all the devices which have been used to sway them form their interest and duty [Washington alludes to the Democratic Clubs, which he was viewing with increased suspicion], they are now as ready to maintain the authority of the laws against licentious invasions, as they were to defend their rights against usurpation” at the time of the Revolutionary War. He exhorted Congress to “verify the anticipations of this government being a safe guard to human rights.” Self-government requires that the constitutional executive appeal not to his own will but to the principle of majority rule linked to the still higher principle of natural right, and to report fully on his actions to the legislative branch, justifying those actions on those very grounds of American self-government.

Respecting Congress, Washington successfully resisted efforts by some senators to make the Senate effectually his executive council; as historian Forrest McDonald has recounted, Washington also opposed the British ministerial model favored by Hamilton. Instead, Washington reviewed candidates for the executive branch of the federal government according to the criterion to which he had long adhered: reputation for good character, discreetly inquired into when the candidate was unknown to Washington himself. “Administration was therefore highly personal,” McDonald writes, “after the fashion of the pre-bureaucratic eighteenth-century world.” And ‘the personal was the political’ in the sense that Washington’s administration mirrored the self-government of Washington’s soul.

As chief executive, commander-in-chief of the military, and former general of the Continental Army, Washington had much to say on the delicate issue of executive involvement in foreign policy, for which he shared constitutional responsibility with Congress. Among the ‘circles’ self-government, American relations with foreign countries would be crucial to the safe establishment of domestic self-government.

Washington had pointed to the link between foreign policy and self-government during the Revolutionary War: “Nothing short of Independence, it appears to me, can possibly do. A Peace, on other terms, would be, if I may be allowed the expression, a Peace of War.” Old animosities would linger, but having failed to secure independence once, there would be no foreign assistance for Americans now refitted with the imperial yoke. The design for tyrannizing the colonists would be completed at leisure—tyranny being, as the Declaration of Independence observes, a form of the state of war. While foreign assistance is desirable, dependence upon foreign military or financial aid is not; that would only risk exchanging one tyrant for another. Specifically, “hatred to England may carry some into an excess of confidence in France”—precisely the mistake of Jefferson, two decades later. “[I]t is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.”

Indeed, for prudential, balance-of-power purposes, many Europeans might not have wanted a devastating English defeat in North America, fearing the ascendancy there of France or Spain. Americans therefore should declare their dependence upon themselves. To the end of his life, Washington advocated a “truly American” policy, neither pro-British nor pro-French. This is the foundation of Washington’s advice “to keep disengaged from the labyrinth of European politics and Wars.” “[T]reaties and compacts formed by the United States with other nations, civilized or not, should be made with caution and executed with fidelity”; engagements should be prudently selected and governed by that combination of natural right and settled conventions that comprises the law of nations. Natural right, like Washington’s foreign policy, does not a priori favor one nation over another. “My politics are plain and simple,” he told Lafayette. “I think every nation has a Right to establish that form of Government under which It conceives It shall live most happily; provided It infracts no Right or is not dangerous to others. And that no Governments ought to interfere with the internal concern of another”—the principle solemnized in the Peace of Westphalia, more than a century and a half earlier—”except for the security of what is due themselves”—that is, securing their own natural rights. Washington likely had in mind the notorious Genêt affair, when the French ambassador engaged in fitting out a warship in Philadelphia and publicly threated the Washington Administration with “an appeal to the people” if it did not acquiesce. As political scientist Patrick Garrity has written, Washington’s “entire political career” was “directed at creating and strengthening an independent political community with a distinctive American, and republican, character.”

In his Farewell Address, Washington magisterially restated these themes of national self-mastery and self-rule. The United States should observe natural right—”good faith and justice”—toward all nations. It should avoid habitual or passionate hatred or fondness for any other nation. A nation that indulges such passions “is in some degree a slave” to its own “animosities and affections.” Foreign influence “is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government,” playing upon its tendency toward faction. Faction, dependency, partiality, hatred: All counteract the rule of prudential reason, “the best calculations of policy,” and therefore contradict self-government. Having severed, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “the political Bands that connect[ed] one nation to another” as colony to metropole, Americans should observe “the Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations,” namely, “in extending our commercial relations and to have with them as little political connection as possible.” Free trade counters the ‘war system’ of mercantilism, that engine of modern, statist empires. The reciprocal and consensual character of commerce presupposes a fundamental equality in international relations, anathema to imperialists. Permanent political alliance could only bring a militarily weak country like America into another country’s orbit, precluding self-rule—especially in a time when there were no powerful commercial republics.

Conclusion. If reason is the distinctively human characteristic, human self-government must be rational government. Prudential reasoning is the leading form of governing reason, particularly for any constructive (as distinct from theoretical, legal-interpretive, or persuasive) purpose. It is prudential reasoning that moderates human passions and appetites, making them governing. Self-government or government by the consent of the governed involves principled and prudent assent.

Each of the ‘concentric circles’ of Washington’s thought and practice exhibits this rule of prudential reason. On the personal level, the individual masters himself by the prudential application of right principles, an application made usual by habituation. Habituation is strongly linked to family, initially, and soon to public opinion; this is a social and republican individuality. Prudential knowledge should govern both friendship and love, both of which have been known to disrupt political regimes. Love leads to the formation of new families and the need for the exercise of prudence in household management and the larger political economy. Families, household, and markets are protected by the military—the first ‘hard case’ for any self-governing people. Here too, Washington had recourse to habituation (in the form of military discipline), good (the appeal to honor), and prudential self-interest—all most readily inculcated in regular troops, not militia. Politically, prudential reason finds expression in constitutional union with no king but a strong executive. To govern themselves, the people must obey the laws they make; such obedience is the republican incentive for establishing and respecting the rule of law. To make good laws, the people’s governors should strengthen religion (in a nonsectarian manner) and education. Washington and the Founders avoided the bitter secularism-versus-religion quarrels seen in France by guaranteeing the free exercise of religion and encouraging widespread education or ‘enlightenment.’ The theoretical foundation of this practical policy may be seen in the Declaration of Independence, with its reference to the laws of nature and of nature’s God—acceptable to secularists and religionists alike, so long as both remain undogmatic.

The office of the executive is the second ‘hard case’ for a self-governing people. The executive’s virtues are conciliation, firmness and, once again, prudence, all of which are exercised in securing American independence from foreign powers. Such virtues, as The Federalist makes plain, need the strong support of well-designed institutions that enable the executive to maintain a sphere of independence of action without enabling him to control the rest of the government.

Within all these ‘circles’ of self-government, individuals, families, social groups, the various levels of government within the country, and the country itself among other countries, look to the most authoritative ‘circles’—those of the laws of nature and of nature’s God. Beyond these laws, God may be conceived variously, inasmuch as the attributes of God beyond those effects knowable to all persons need have no political relevance to the foundation and maintenance of good political communities.

It was by encompassing in his own soul the self-governing efforts of his fellow citizens that Washington could achieve magnanimity or greatness of soul in founding a modern commercial republic, in participating in its governance, and in being governed within it. And it was by governing themselves rationally in their private lives, to the greatest extent possible, that the citizens of that republic could obviate the need to live under the commands of tyrants ruling in the name of virtue. In so doing, Washington made his soul better, and the American people made their souls more like Washington’s. Together, they established the American presidency as the seat of executive action in the national government.

Lecture delivered at “Novus Ordo Seclorum: The American Founding.”
Hoogland Center for Teaching Excellence Seminar
DeLand High School, DeLand, Florida
June 1, 2004.

 

On Regimes Generally

‘Regime change’ is in the news, these days. American now fights a worldwide war against ‘terrorism,’ shorthand for certain international terrorist groups. The best known of these groups, al-Qaeda, has formally declared war on the United States. Current U. S. policy aims at winning this war not only by preventing terrorist attacks; not only by capturing and killing terrorists and disrupting their organizations. More profoundly, it intends to remove the reasons for terrorism by changing the minds and hearts of those who might become terrorists, or support them. President George W. Bush calls this strategy ‘regime change,’ and has begun to enact it in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Reasonable people might well ask: What is a ‘regime’? And why should we attempt to change one, or more than one?

As it happens, today’s catchphrase invokes the central idea of political science, as it’s been understood since its founding in ancient Greece by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Consideration of the regime distinguishes political science from the other social sciences that came along later: economics, with its emphasis on markets; sociology, with its emphasis on mores and folkways; anthropology, with its focus on ‘culture.’

In contrast to the other social sciences, political science is not a recent discovery. More than two thousand, three hundred years ago, Aristotle understood political regimes—what they are, and why they matter to the life of every citizen, and every subject, in any political association. That such a commonsense understanding of political life has endured for so many centuries and remains a guide for us today suggests humbling thought (humbling, at least, to political scientists): Political science is not rocket science. We’ve known the basics for a long time. Heeding what we already know—that’s another matter.

Aristotle’s book on politics follows his book on morality, the Nicomachean Ethics. Why, we sophisticated moderns might ask, would the study of politics follow the study of morality? Contrast, perhaps?

No, Aristotle isn’t joking. (Truth be told, Aristotle doesn’t joke around, much.) Rather, he sees that morality or ethics, the quest for the good life by human individuals and families, must lead to a consideration of political life. Political associations—the small, independent ‘city-states’ or poleis, as well as the huge, sprawling empires of his time—all seek some human good. Aristotle’s Politics begins with a logical argument: Every polis is a partnership; every partnership is constituted in order to achieve some good; therefore, every polis is constituted in order to achieve some good. This presents a problem, however. Partnerships generally, and political partnerships in particular, really aim at something held to be good, believed to be good by those who rule the partnership. Typically, this is nothing more than their own good—a partial good in both senses of the term “partial.” So, for example, if the few who are rich control the political partnership, the polis will aim at the good as the rich conceive it—very often at the expense of the many who are poor. Conversely, if the many rule the polis, they likely will use their authority to fleece the rich. Although the rulers of the polis may intend to obtain the good, to obtain justice for the members of the polis, rulers typically seek only a art of the overall good of the inhabitants of the polis. Political life thus results too often in frustration, anger, partisanship, factionalism, even civil war; that is, political life all too readily self-destructs, defeats its own purpose, namely, securing the good life.

What to do? Classical political science aims at a rational account of the whole of political life, including the overall good of the political association. Such an account can bring us to understand the partial, partisan views of the good, and then to correct them—to balance and moderate impassioned partisans, making them see the advantages to themselves of a broader, more inclusive view of justice than the ones to which they are inclined.

Aristotle begins by asking what a political partnership or association is. He considers the small polis rather than the large empire; in his day, the polis exhibited all types of regimes, whereas empires usually were monarchies. He analyzes the polis in two ways: first, according to the groups that compose it; second, according to the individuals who compose it. This double focus separates him from many subsequent political scientists, who tend more narrowly to think about political associations as collections of individuals, only, or on political associations considered as collectivities, only, or perhaps of collections of collectivities called ‘interest groups’ or ‘factions.’

The groups that compose the polis begin with the family—the mated pair, their children, and their slaves. The family features the three types of ruling that human beings can engage in: the rule of masters over slaves; the rule of parents over children; the reciprocal rule of husband and wife. Aristotle calls the relationship between husband and wife “political” rule, a matter of mutual give-and-take, negotiation, ruling and being ruled, consent. Only among barbarians, he says, do husbands rule their wives as masters do slaves.

Human life does not stay at the level of the family, however. A family lacks autarchia, literally, self-rule or self-sufficiency. Families seldom enjoy the material means to sustain themselves by themselves. Therefore, families extend, and eventually join with other families to form the wider association of the tribe. Tribes in turn form villages, and villages eventually join with other villages to constitute the polis. There is nothing automatic, ‘organic,’ or inevitable about these developments. Each step involves thought and discussion. Political communities are founded; like money, they don’t grow on trees. Endowed with the ability to speak and reason, to deliberate in common, human beings need the political partnership or association in order to secure not so much mere life, subsistence, as the humanly good life. As speaking and reasoning persons, we need to discuss amongst ourselves what the best possible life is for us, and how we might go about achieving that life. Only the political partnership affords human beings the scope of activities needed to fulfill human nature. Only the polis affords us the fullest autarchia or self-ruling self-sufficiency.

Composed in one sense of groups, starting with the family, the polis also consists of individuals—specifically, citizens, those individuals who actually engage in the reciprocal rule, the deliberation and shared action, that characterize political life. Aristotle calls the polis “the multitude of citizens.” This leads him to ask, Who is the citizen of the polis? And this in turn leads him to consider the different kinds of political partnerships, the regimes.

Regimes make political partnerships what they are. The regime is the decisive feature of political life studied by political scientists and, more importantly, discussed by citizens. Regimes first of all consist of persons. Who rules the polis? An oligarch or a democrat? A king or a tyrant? Whether your monarch is the late King Hussein of Jordan or Saddam Hussein or Iraq will make a big difference in your life, and quite possibly in the timing and manner of your death.

Regimes also consist of structures, that is, of institutions whereby the rulers rule. A man with a tyrannical soul might be rendered relatively harmless, if hemmed in by the institutions of, say, aristocracy or republicanism. In such regimes, the would-be tyrant would find himself ‘checked’—prevented from committing the worst depredations he envisions.

Conversely, a ruler who might be rather mild when wielding limited power might turn tyrant if let loose in a country without well-designed political institutions. Power may not corrupt, but power does show the character of the one who wields it. Well-designed institutions will incline the ruler to show his better side.

This suggests a third aspect of regimes. A given set of rulers and ruling institutions will decisively effect the ‘mores and folkways,’ the way of life of its members. An ambitious young person coming up in an aristocracy, where rulers thirst for honor through displays of military prowess, will be rewarded and punished for different virtues and vices, different habit of mind and heart, different behavioral patterns, than in a country where the leaders admire and possess wealth, where money-making, not war, seems the best way of life. This dimension of the regime, its way of life, tends to produce an ethos, a character, in the citizens, individually and collectively.

Finally the rulers, ruling institutions, and way of life of the regime aims at some purpose, some end, some telos. Regimes are ‘teleological’ or purposive. Part of their purpose is to form a good character (as the rulers understand ‘good’) in the citizens, but the purpose may also go beyond that—typically, to secure justice for its members, whether ‘justice’ is held to mean the advancement of God’s kingdom on earth, security of unalienable natural rights, or the dominance of a supposed master race or class.

After outlining these two modes of analysis—the polis as an association of groups and the polis as an association of individual citizens—Aristotle combines them. Insofar as it exhibits the characteristics of the groups that compose it, the polis will exhibit one or more of the forms of rule first seen in the family: parental, political, or masterly. Insofar as it exhibits the characteristics of an aggregation of ruling individuals, it will be either large or small—that is, it will be the rule of one, few, or many individuals. Aristotle can now do what any scientist wants to do: He can classify poleis with respect to their ‘species’ or regime type.

If one person rules over his subjects in a parental way—that is, ‘for the good of the children’—that regime is a kingship.

If one person rules over his subjects in a masterly way—that is, for his own selfish interests, as if the subjects are slaves—the regime is a tyranny.

If a few persons rule in a parental way, and rule one another reciprocally or ‘politically’ as husbands and wives do, in a household, then the regime is an aristocracy.

If a few persons rule in a masterly way, typically with an eye toward enriching themselves at the expense of all others, even if they rule one another reciprocally, then the regime is an oligarchy.

If many persons rule themselves in the ‘political’ way, then the regime is a mixed regime—’mixed’ because such regimes typically combine several kinds of rule, especially oligarchy or the rule of the few who are rich, and democracy, the rule of the many who are poor.

If many persons rule the minority (typically, the rich) in a masterly way, squeezing them for their money, the regime is a democracy.

Thus there are three good regimes—kinship, aristocracy, and mixed—along with three bad counterparts—tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Aristotle’s use of the term ‘democracy’ for a bad regime takes some getting used to, at least for us today. He means what we mean by ‘tyranny of the majority.’ Americans old enough to recall the unjust legal discriminations imposed upon ethnic and racial minorities, discriminations now outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, will know the sort of things he means. Although pre-1964 America was by no means a bad regime overall, insofar as the majority oppressed minorities, the regime was bad and deserved to be reformed.

Moving any polis towards the good requires rulers who understand political science in this straightforward, commonsense way. A bad regime will need considerable reform; a very bad regime will justify revolution, that is to say regime change. Unjust persons may also attempt to revolutionize a good regime, bend it to their own purposes, their own (defective) definition of ‘good.’ Good or bad, a revolution or regime change might be violent or non-violent. Many revolutions, including the American revolution, have involved the use of force, but some, like the “Velvet Revolution” of Czechoslovakia in 1989, when the old Communist Party oligarchy gave way to a commercial republic whose first president was the playwright Vaclav Havel, come off without a shot fired in anger.

All of this means that political science, knowledge about politics, is architectonic. Political science classifies political partnerships as they exist in the real world, and also tells members of those partnerships how better to design them so that a more just, more fully human way of life may result. Aristotle gives numerous recommendations with respect to architectonic ‘design improvements’ for every kind of regime, for, as he puts it, “to reform a regime is no less a task than to institute a new one from the beginning.”

Aristotle’s fundamental insights stand through the centuries. In his book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, political scientist Fareed Zakaria writes that religious beliefs, social customs, and other ‘cultural’ features of human societies do not by themselves determine human behavior: “If you get the politics and the economics right, culture will follow.” Similarly, although the rule of law matters greatly for the defense of civil, political, and economic freedoms, behind the rule of law remains the rule of law makers—the regime. It is of course also true that the ‘cultural’ preconditions of a political founding, the circumstances in which the founders find themselves, will open up some regime possibilities, and at least temporarily foreclose others, and that habituation in ‘the rule of law’ will incline rulers to moderation and justice.

As citizens, then, few things attract our attention more quickly than any proposed change in the basic structure of our regime, or as we more usually say, any change in our constitutional law. After all, what does a documents such as the United States Constitution constitute, if not the fundamental ruling structures of our government and, indirectly, the kind of persons who are likely to hold positions within those structures and wield legal powers at our behest?

Political architecture requires much more than mere blueprints, designs on paper. We call the authors of such paper regimes ‘utopians’—and ‘utopia’ means ‘nowhere,’ or at least nowhere except on a piece of paper. Aristotelian political science seeks political regimes that work not on paper, not the regimes of coffeehouse ideologues, but practicable ruling institutions, designed by and for a politics of prudence. Such politicians deliberate to find ways to move their country toward the moderate center between the vicious extremes of unjust factions.

To find the political center requires even more than prudence; it also requires theoretical reasoning, the discovery of the criterion by which all regimes are properly judged. That criterion is justice, the good of the whole, what classical philosophers call natural right. Natural right is natural because it is discovered by examining human beings in all regimes, and by seeing what characteristics all human beings share, beyond the conventions of those particular regimes. Natural right is right because it consists of those principles that are good for human beings everywhere and always.

What must be good for any being—animal, vegetable, or mineral—is the unhampered exercise of its defining characteristics. For example, once you have observed a red oak—preferably, many red oaks, growing under a wide variety of conditions—you should know some things about what is good for such an organism and what isn’t. You will know that it can’t be good for a red oak to be placed in darkness and left there, to be deprived of water, to be uprooted, and so on. To be a good, a flourishing red oak, the plant needs certain conditions. A good human being, and a good partnership of human beings, also need the right conditions for flourishing, according to their natures.

Won’t individual persons and groups differ in the conditions they need? Yes: What is good for one may not be good for another. Your meat may not be my poison, but sometimes it might be, and it could very easily be my indigestion. Therefore, justice or natural right consists of treating equals equally, and ‘unequals’ unequally. We treats nuns and axe murderers differently (to imagine a rather stark contrast) in accordance with their very different natures. Nonetheless, we do treat them equally insofar as they are human beings and fellow citizens; the nun and the axe murderer, each accused of criminal acts, should receive fair trials, as befits a being that is at core rational, and so responsible for his actions. (If, on the other hand, the axe murderer turns out to be clinically insane, we do not punish but rather restrain and treat, as befits a being not at core rational.) Or to take a more benign example, in school we might justly treat an athlete differently than an egghead, even as we try to lead both to responsible citizenship and gainful employment; different in abilities, they are equally in need of a livelihood, and indeed a life, and so ought to be treated equally in one sense, unequally in another.

 

On the American Regime, Specifically

Between Aristotle’s Athens and the Founders’ Philadelphia, three massive facts intervened, complicating but not dissolving this basic understanding of political communities and of political science. First, prophetic religions with universal claims took hold in large parts of the world; second, the modern state transformed the political landscape of Europe; third, social democratization began to take hold, eroding the old aristocracies.

In Christianity, and later in Islam, political communities saw several promising but also alarming new things: universal religions, pervading many political communities not only one, as did the established civil religions; prophetic religions, their members required to call to account those who ruled locally in the name of God; religions that saw in human beings not merely virtue and vice but holiness and sin, and the consequent need not only for goofd morals and the performance of civic duty but for salvation. How could these new religions integrate themselves into political communities without civil and international war? Although Islam commended war, Christians themselves viewed physical as opposed to spiritual warfare as highly questionable; the very universalist, prophetic, and salvific properties of Christianity seemed to make factionalism both wicked and inevitable.

In Christendom, neither the late Roman Empire nor the Europe of the Middle Ages saw a stable political solution to the latter challenge, a challenge that grew even more acute with the rise of the modern state. As envisioned by Machiavelli and elaborated by Hobbes, the modern state aimed at solving the religio-political problem by centralizing all political authority in one set of hands. In modern states, unlike the ancient empires, politicians or ‘states-men’ could now project power far beyond their capital cities, into the lives of every citizen or subject, in two ways. The technologies provided by modern science empowered militaries to bring state authority farther and faster than ever. Genuinely worldwide empires were now winnable. And the scope of state power could now be sustained institutionally because the new science of politics included the invention of modern bureaucracy, which could keep authority present in the lives of every person in a regularized, routine way. Bureaucracy changed the habits, the ethos, of every modern society; it ‘politicized’ the members of political communities in ways hitherto unseen.

This ‘politicization’ of society under a central state in turn fed the movement toward democratization in society. With the old aristocratic classes weakened and/or co-opted by the state, commoners could now bid for rule. And they wanted to bid for it, so that they could exercise some control over the new, ‘in-you-face’ state. That is, democratization of society under the central state led to the push for democratization in politics.

That very democratization of society, however, could also lead to a vastly empowered form of tyranny. With no armed aristocracy to block them, monarchs could attempt to crush all opposition, ‘atomize’ it in order to subordinate it to the state apparatus. Thus Tocqueville’s startling prediction: Someday the democratic republic, America, and the socially egalitarian but politically tyrannical Russia will each “control half the world.”

Because Christianity drew the attention of Europeans to the intractability of sinfulness, political scientists saw that the regime question, ‘Who rules?’ must be supplemented even more powerfully by the regime question, ‘How to rule?’—that is, to the second element of regime design, the structural or institutional element. If the persons who rule will always be tempted to evildoing, and if the ethos of any political entity will tend toward corruption (owing to original sin), getting the institutions right, ‘allowing for’ sinfulness but redirected human energies toward good ends, sometimes ‘in spite of ourselves,’ will seem a much more urgent risk. The centralizing institutions of the Machiavellian/Hobbesian state only increase this urgency.

You see this in the forty-seventh Federalist. There, Publius cites Montesquieu, a philosopher who well knew the Machiavellian terrain, and who argues that an institutional design flaw—allowing legislative, executive, and judicial powers to be gathered in one set of hands—is the very definition of tyranny. Aristotle would have said it’s the very definition of monarchy, which might be kingly or tyrannical, but the Founders are even more cautious than the prudent old philosopher. Their experience as well as their religion had led them to be.

Hence their argument in the Declaration of Independence. Given the tendency of George III toward seizing legislative and judicial powers to go along with his executive power—evidence of “a design to reduce [Americans] under absolute Despotism”—a substantial plurality of Americans endorsed regime change. Before thinking of regime change anywhere else in the world, Americans enacted it for themselves, and substantial numbers of them died or fell into ruin for it. The exercise of prudence, it turned out, did not relieve Americans of the need for courage and self-sacrifice for one another’s sake.

Regime change, for the Americans, aimed at the conscientious and prudent securing of unalienable natural rights for themselves and their posterity. Prudential regime change does not require only the removal of the tyrannical government. It requires political reconstruction, the founding of a new regime more likely to secure natural right. That was the work of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, a work of architectonic political science aimed at the establishment of just, civil peace among the United States.

The passions of individuals and, even more, the passions of groups necessitate government. Conscience alone does not always suffice to restrain us, and in the words of Publius in The Federalist, “the favorable attributes of human character are all valuable, as auxiliaries, but they will not serve as a substitute for the coercive provision belonging to Government and Law, mildly administered.” Unfortunately, government and law may not be mildly administered because those who administer them may fall into the same passions. The Founders addressed this problem by so structuring the government they constituted as to moderate the passions of the powerful. “The structure of the Government itself” serves as “the only effectual safeguard” against the abuse of power, the possible war by the government itself against the unalienable rights it is intended to secure. This structure, and the social structures it encourages to organize ‘beneath’ it, operate on a principle well articulated by Publius: “The best security for the fidelity of mankind is to make their interest coincide with their duty.”

Because “the experience of the ages proves that with exceptions too few to impair the rule, men can not be held to the performance of delegated political trust without a continued and practical responsibility to those whose benefit it is conferred,” government by consent must occur not only at the time of the founding. Consent must become a means of government.

If justice in practice requires consent, and human vice in practice requires government, government by the consent of the governed raises striking opportunities and problems. Fortunately, human nature is not entirely corrupt. “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires an active degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualifications in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence,” Publius argues. “Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.” They enable men to govern themselves. Government by consent (that is, by reasoned assent) is self-government. Unlike many writers today, Publius never speaks of ‘autonomy,’ which literally means ‘self-law,’ giving oneself the law. Being a law unto oneself is no way to govern oneself. Reasoning is the natural law, and self-government requires obedience to it, first, with self-made laws coming second, and remaining consistent with it.

Republics had existed before, of course. Publius distinguished the American republic from the others in its use of representation. The practice of popularly electing persons from the people for the purpose of governing the people “was neither wholly unknown to the ancients nor wholly overlooked in their political constitutions.” Some ancient regimes featured an assembly in which the people at large might gather; such institutions tended to fall prey to demagogues who worked on popular passions. Under such passionate circumstances, genuine self-government cannot exist. “The countenance of the government may become more democratic,” Publius allows, “but the soul that animates it will be more oligarchic. The machine will be enlarged, but the fewer, and the more secret, will be the springs by which its motions are directed.”

The impassioned character of popular assemblies made other branches of government seem necessary to the ancients, and officeholders in other branches typically were drawn from the ranks of ‘the few’—aristocrats, oligarchs, who were supposed to balance the passionate ‘many.’ This was the Aristotelian ‘mixed regime.’ In America, representative government allowed all branches of government to fill their offices with ‘commoners’; even the Supreme Court consists of nothing but commoners. There were no titled aristocrats here and no royal family. But neither would—could—there be large popular assemblies on the national level. Representative government enabled America to have an unmixed republic, while avoiding the worst dangers of pure democracy and of republics with overly-large popular assemblies.

In this unmixed republic as designed by the Founders, all American citizen-rulers are elected by their fellow citizens or appointed by such elected representatives of the people. There is no purely democratic branch of government, no Athenian-style assembly,  no element of ‘participatory’ democracy whatever, except in some localities that have the ‘town-meeting’ form of government. There is no national-level ‘direct democracy, either—government by plebiscite or referendum. There is no oligarchic or aristocratic branch, such as the English House of Lords. The American republican government, Publius wrote, “derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people,” and is administered by persons with limited terms, or, if life-tenured, during “good behavior.” Representative government moderates both the strife and the unjust majoritarianism that popular government gives vent to. Elected representatives “refine and enlarge the public views” by study and debate; to this day, the path to respect in the United States Congress is to convince your colleagues that you really understand the topics your committee deals with—whether it be agriculture or national defense, banking or foreign policy. At the same time, owing their election to broad coalitions, representative rarely succeed as ‘one-issue’ candidates. They have every incentive to seek the adjustment of diverse interests.

Representative government thus maximizes the role of reason in politics and minimizes passion. “It is the reason, alone of the public that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.

In addition to being an unmixed republic, America is also a commercial republic, unlike the military republics of antiquity—notably, Rome. Commerce guards unalienable rights by promoting what the Scottish philosopher David Hume calls “parties of interest” and discouraging “parties of principle.” By parties of principle Hume refers primarily to the violent and uncompromising religio-political factions that fought civil wars in early modern Europe. The Founders also recognized this problem; Publius very nearly begins The Federalist with a condemnation of fanatic wars. A regime that guards the unalienable right to property by leaving citizens at liberty to engage in commerce thereby encourages them to direct their attention and energy to a form of peaceful and regulatable competition, a competition that stands not on uncompromising appeals to principle but on negotiable compromises, deal-making. Commercial republicanism fosters an ethos of busy-ness, of material self-interest tempered by reasonable discussion in the civil society of the modern state.

By affirming the unalienability of the right to property, commercial republicanism puts definite limits on the tendency toward oligarchy or aristocracy that wealth brings. This point remains one of the most-overlooked of the Founders’ insights. Free commerce rests on the principle that you are entitled to keep the products of your own labor. Your labor and its products belong to you, not to some lord of the manor. Abraham Lincoln states this principle most forcefully: “Labor being “prior to, and independent of, capital, [it] deserves first consideration in civil society.” To slave owners, liberty means the right “for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor”; for genuine republicans, liberty means the right “for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor.” Slave owning means the enforced perpetuation of dependence by a faction among a people who had declared their independence on the basis of the laws of nature and of nature’s God, and of Creator-endowed unalienable rights. This contradiction could not endure forever, and did not.

Representative government and commerce both make it possible for the American republic to be extensive. With no need to assemble the mass of citizens in one place, with no religious establishment and no requirement of universal adult participation in military exercises to enforce unity of spirit among citizens, the United States government can encompass a large, diverse population on immense territories—unlike the smaller republics of antiquity. Size strengthens stability when stability depends less on force than on reasonable commercial relations. Those factions which do arise can seldom rule; if they rule, they can never rule for long.

Factional rule is also seriously impeded by what Publius calls the compound character of American republicanism. The Constitution famously separates the powers of its government into executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and then balances those powers. this system of ‘checks and balances’ prevents factions within the government (whether or not they represent factions among the people) from seizing control of more than one branch at a time, and also prevents one branch from dominating the others.

The Founders also instituted a federal republic, “a system without an example ancient or modern,” Publius proudly maintains. Federalism lends a political and governmental structure to the constitutional union that commerce provides on the level of civil society. All American ‘states’ must have republican regimes; the people inhabiting these small republics then pool part of their sovereignty in order to set up a system of republics, large and powerful enough to defend itself (and by so doing defend the natural rights it is intended to secure) from foreign and domestic predators. With their right to bear arms guaranteed in the Constitution, the citizens of each state also retain the power to guard themselves from any attempt by the federal government to injure those rights.

The unmixed, commercial, extensive, compound, federal republic, founded upon consent and the rule of law, secures unalienable rights for its citizens. It links those citizens to their government through the practice of representation. The people are sovereign, under the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. By separating government from sovereignty, keeping it with the people, American republicanism prevents Machiavellian statism while retaining the supreme advantage of that statism: its ability to defend itself amidst the dangers of the world. But popular sovereignty can only do so insofar as it recognizes its own moral limitations, namely, its limitation by those laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, the God endowing them with unalienable rights. The structure of the federal and state governments was designed by the Founders to encourage such recognition by frustrating the worst passions and channeling the others into peaceful and just pursuits.

Slavery was the principal flaw in the Founders’ republic, one they had inherited from the original settlers and hoped would disappear in time. Slavery contradicts natural right, and it also contradicts republicanism. That is, slavery violates both the moral foundations and the political structure of the American regime. James Madison saw this clearly. In an unpublished note written during the composition of a series of essays he published in the Jeffersonian newspaper, the National Gazette, in the 1790s, Madison observed: “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part instead of the whole, in the hands of property, not of numbers. All the ancient popular governments were, for this reason, aristocracies, the majority [of their populations] were slaves.” “The Southern States of America, are on the same principle aristocracies,” the great Virginian (himself a slaveholder) admitted. Given the constitutional requirement for republicanism in each state, Madison knew that his observation was political dynamite. That dynamite exploded in the 1860s.