This lecture was delivered at two Hillsdale College Symposium events in Kerrville, Texas and Georgetown, Texas in September 2016.
In assigning the title “Where Are We Headed?” to a talk on this year’s presidential election, the organizers of this Hillsdale Symposium may have given you the impression that I’ll be predicting the outcome of the November vote. That would be a fool’s errand—which of course may be the reason it was offered to me. But I learned a long time ago that there are far too many variables in most presidential elections to make accurate predictions two months in advance. I don’t pretend to know what will happen. What is more, all of us hear such predictions every time we turn on the television or open a newspaper. We already have more than enough pundits in this country. What could I possibly add to their mountain of a million molehills?
Besides, when it comes to political predictions generally, I agree with George Orwell. If anything, Orwell was a better journalist than he was a novelist, and in one of his essays he observed that if you ask a man what he foresees you won’t get a reasoned analysis founded on careful observation of the way things are. You will much more likely get an expression of his hopes or his fears. He will tell you not what he thinks but what he feels. You will hear an expression of wishful or woeful thinking. Any sense of the realities of the matter as they exist outside his own head will not trouble him.
So, no election prediction from me. But the question, “Where are we headed?” can have a broader meaning. There is a kind of political prediction that does make sense to attempt. This being an event sponsored by Hillsdale College, it’s quite possible that when the organizers devised the title they had in mind the opening sentence of a famous speech by Abraham Lincoln delivered to the Illinois Republican State Convention in June of 1858. Now known as the “House Divided” speech, it begins, “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.” Americans had reached the crisis of the house divided because the question of whether or not to extend slavery into the territories had so sharply split American public opinion that it threatened the Union itself. Lincoln argued, “Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States old as well as new—North as well as South.” Lincoln based this conditional prediction squarely on what men like Senator Stephen Douglas and U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney were saying at the time.
So today, in 2016, where are we, and whither are we tending, in the larger sense that Lincoln meant? Today, where does American liberty, our natural and Constitutional right to govern ourselves, where does it stand, a century and a half after Lincoln issued his warning and fought a war to preserve the Union on the foundation of that natural right? In answering that question, I begin by promising you that I will show why it is that Orwell’s observation—that people so often think wishfully or fearfully, not reasonably, with little reference to reality—has become so generally true that it endangers our capacity for self-government, for liberty—the very thing that Hillsdale College “educates for,” and which we’re all here to exercise and support.
The results of many presidential elections have been hard to predict, but so far this one has been even less predictable than most. In the Democratic Party, United States Senator Bernie Sanders—a socialist who never ran as a Democrat before—ran a campaign in the primary elections against a former First Lady, United States Senator, and Secretary of State that proved embarrassing-all-too-embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton and the Party regulars. And in the Republican Party, real estate developer and television entertainer Donald Trump—who had never seriously run for office at all, on any level—defeated an array of seasoned governors and senators, all of whom began the campaign assuming that `the Donald’ was more tabloid king than presidential prospect. What is going on, here?
Many commentators point to economic causes, as many commentators so often do. Income inequality is rising, due to the effects of economic globalization. To identify a material or economic cause for any event is the very summit of their wisdom. This would explain a move toward populism and nationalism, all right, but American has seen populism before, and it was very different from what Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders have had on offer. The 1890s saw depression on he farms and a flood of immigrants to our shores, but William Jennings Bryan stood firmly on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—neither of which has figured prominently in the speeches of Trump or Sanders, let alone Clinton. Populism and nationalism against globalization and economic inequality may explain part of what we’re seeing, but there’s more to it than that. We have the sense that none of these candidates understands where we are, or where we are going, although they are quite eager to lead us there.
This political tremor, like those in nature, was very long in building. The tectonic plates have been under increasing pressure for more than a century. We need to go farther back than the past couple of decades to see what really is `going on here.’
I aim to take you back not to any recent presidential election, but to 1840 and the second volume of Democracy in America, the famous book by the French traveler, Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville had arrived here in 1830, commissioned by the French government to report on the American penal system. But his main personal interest in visiting was to come to a better understanding of the political implications of democracy.
By democracy Tocqueville did not mean the American system of government. Having read James Madison’s tenth Federalist paper, he was well aware that Americans had a republic—a representative government—not a democracy in the ancient Greek sense of a regime in which all the citizens met together to vote laws up or down. Only the New England municipal governments featured such democracy, not the state or national governments. In Tocqueville’s vocabulary, democracy referred not to the government but to the society of America. In America, almost alone in the world at that time, much of society was egalitarian—not, obviously, in the sense that economic equality prevailed here, but because (with two important exceptions) no American could make the monarchic or aristocratic claim, `I am entitled to rule you by right of my birth into the ruling class.’ All Americans were in the ruling class; the people were sovereign. The only aristocrats left in America by the 1830s were the Indians—proud, warlike, and, in Tocqueville’s estimation, doomed to extinction—and the Southern planters—equally proud, almost as warlike, and quite as likely to fight a losing battle against the prolific commercial population of the North.
In Tocqueville’s view, older societies had an aristocratic class that served as a buffer between the central government and the people, a class with the pride and courage to fight back against the encroachments of centralized power. Modern societies, increasingly without such a class, could see one of two regimes: federal republicanism, in which the states and the innumerable self-governing civil associations, organized by equal citizens, could resist the political center; or statist despotism, in which the state, probably controlled by one man, would abolish citizenship itself and rule without effective resistance. France had already seen despotism in the person of Emperor Napoleon I, and it would see it again in the decades-long rule of Napoleon III. In choosing between these two regimes, Tocqueville favored republicanism, in American and in France; he intended in his book to show Europeans how Americans governed themselves, under democratic social conditions, without an aristocracy to defend them from the central government.
But the overt military despotism of a Napoleon was not the only kind of despotism Tocqueville feared. There was another, a kind more likely to overtake even Americans. Now, when giving a speech, one general rule is not to do what I am about to do, namely, to read a fairly long passage by some other writer. But this is a Hillsdale College event, and it’s in Texas, so let’s just go ahead and do it, anyway. And besides, this is easily the most intelligent thing I’ll be saying to you today. Even better, my eminent colleague, the political historian Professor Paul Rahe, is wont to read this same passage in some of his lectures. Here is Tocqueville writing in 1840, issuing a warning in the form of a prediction:
“I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world. I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not se them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a country.
“Above all these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the only agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and procures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?
“So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizens. Equality has prepared men for all those things: it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to regard them as a benefit.
“Thus… the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.
“I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the external forms of freedom, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people”
To prevent this, as I mentioned, Tocqueville recommended the kind of political society he saw in America: democratic, yes, but federal in its governmental structure, with four levels of government: national, state, county, and municipal, each with its own sources of revenue and its own legal duties and prerogatives. And while the society was not hierarchical the way aristocratic societies are, American had instituted civil associations—voluntary organizations of equal citizens (from fire companies to churches to ethnic self-help societies). A republican regime with a federal state, both underpinned by an egalitarian (that is to say democratic) society full of self-governing civil associations: this was how the Americans had solved the problem of democracy. Americans did not need to succumb to the supine stupidity of soft despotism in the centralized, administrative state because they had arranged their society and their government in a way that preserved and strengthened what Tocqueville calls “the spirit of the city.”
What does he mean by “the spirit of the city”? He means what Aristotle means by “politics.” Aristotle begins his book, The Politics, by describing the three kinds of rule seen not first of all in the city but in the family. In a family there is the rule of parents over children, the kind Tocqueville mentioned when he said that the aim of fatherly rule is to prepare men for manhood; there is also the rule of masters over slaves. (which, Aristotle says, could be lessened or eliminated if machines were invented that could move themselves). These are both one-way, command-and-obey forms of rule. But there is also the mutual rule of the married couple. This is a two-way relationship, rule by discussion not command; Aristotle describes it as “ruling and being ruled, in turn.” He also says—and this is crucial to understanding “the spirit of the city”—it is the only genuinely political form of rule in the family. It resembles the rule of free, self-governing citizens who deliberate and choose what actions to take in common. Only human beings can govern themselves this way because we are the only species capable of speech and reason. To govern ourselves politically, animated by this “spirit of the city,” is the very opposite of being a timid and industrious animal, herded by our shepherds or leaders.
Self-government or genuinely political rule consists of a moral dimension and a social one. Morally, it means that the self-governing individual is ruled by his or her distinctively human characteristic: reason. Socially, it means the discussion, the consent, the give-and-take life of ruling and being ruled.
In the America Tocqueville saw, two elements of the regime lent themselves to self-government: the structure of government and the civil associational character of our society. With respect to structure, and to bring things back to presidential elections, the Framers of 1787 had designed the path to the presidency to bring men of good character into the office of Chief Executive. The Electoral College meets as a body entirely independent of Congress or the Supreme Court. In Federalist #68, Alexander Hamilton sets down the reasoning behind this. As originally designed, the Electoral College “Afford[ed] as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder” in the election itself. By voting for electors and not a presidential candidate, voters were “much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.” As we know, the Electoral College stopped working as planned—that is, as a deliberative body—as soon as George Washington left office and the Jeffersonians organized against John Adams and the Federalist Party. From then on, Americans were electing persons pledged to a party candidate, not persons prepared to consider and choose a candidate in consultation with delegates from the other states. Nonetheless, to this day the Electoral College does reinforce federalism by ensuring that our presidential elections are conducted as state-by-state campaigns.
Fortunately, in place of the Constitutional system as intended, Americans found a solution based not on governmental structure but on the other part of Tocqueville’s political equation—civil society organized into civil associations. One of the most important political inventions of the generation following that of the Framers was already established by the time Tocqueville arrived here. Professor James Ceaser of the University of Virginia has written about the American system of political parties, designed by a future president, Martin Van Buren, in the 1820s. A political party is a civil association not mentioned in the Constitution but consistent with the democratic-republic regime of the Founders. It is a civil association designed to organize political vote-getting in a democratic society. In order to moderate the “personal factionalism” and “demagogy” seen in the 1820s, especially during the early years of Andrew Jackson’s political career, Van Buren proposed parties that would require candidates to win support not only from the people, but from “seasoned politicians”—party organizers or `bosses.’ The party bosses had every incentive to win because by winning an election for their party they controlled political patronage in the form of government jobs; would-be officeholders had every reason to listen to the bosses because officeholders needed the bosses’ organizational expertise in order to win election and re-election. The prospect of government jobs also meant the nineteenth century saw very high voter turnouts and strong enthusiasm for party candidates. After all, in every presidential election, each local postmaster’s job was up for grabs. There was no civil-service tenure until much later in the century.
There’s an old article by a University of Chicago political scientist named Edward Banfield that describes what happened to the old party system; the article dates back to 1961. Almost alone in the reformist atmosphere of the early Sixties and the Kennedy Administration, Banfield stood for unreconstructed political parties. “Anyone who reflects on recent history must be struck by the following paradox: those party systems that have been most democratic in structure and purpose have been least able to maintain democracy.” He would have been thinking of Weimar Germany and the Third and Fourth Republics in France as prime examples of this. “Those that have been most undemocratic in structure and procedure—conspicuously those of the United States and Britain—have proved to be the bulwarks of democracy and civilization.”
Banfield predicted increased voter manipulation by television news programmers and ideologues if party patronage declined further. A pessimist in Camelot, he predicted that egalitarian reforms would reduce the organized power of the American political system, its ability to get things done. “For as we become a better and more democratic society, our very goodness and democracy may lead us to destroy goodness and democracy in the effort to increase and perfect them.” Twenty years later, after the party reforms of the 1970s, Banfield wrote another article saying in effect, `I told you so.’ “During the Bicentennial period in which we celebrate the achievement of the Founders, we also complete the undoing of it.” The American founding had been undone because the attempt to establish direct democracy within the parties and in our elections—coupled with, I should add, the establishment of the centralized bureaucracy or administrative state Tocqueville had warned of—in practice leads to the ruin of those political authorities who once stood between the people and its most powerful rulers. By the 1980s, the non-aristocratic but not purely democratic bosses who headed the old civil-associational political parties were just about finished. I their place, a centralized by divided elite that attempts to rule a somewhat bewildered, restless people by holding up idols called images and extolling quasi-ideas called `values’ has led us away from Jeffersonian enlightenment and self-government. This has fostered the decline of political experience among ordinary citizens, who no longer understand the spirit of the city, the give-and-take, the ruling-and-being-ruled that only actual civic participation can give.
The new `insiders,’ journalists and bureaucrats, lack this genuinely political experience. More, they also lack the political responsibility that the Founders prized and that the old bosses and their candidates had shouldered. If a party boss and his candidates lost too many elections, they would be turned out of work. But journalists and bureaucrats have no elections to lose.
From Woodrow Wilson to George McGovern and down to today, party reformers have disliked the routine politics of getting things done, with its hierarchies and its limited capacity for rapid and radical change. The `open’ system of presidential primaries, which today does not even require that primary voters belong to the party for whose candidate they vote, resembles the factionalized and demagogic system of the 1820s, which Van Buren’s party system was designed to correct.
But is it not true that the old party system lent itself to corruption? It did. But what is the modern, centralized, welfare, crony-capitalist state but a system of legal corruption that wants to think of itself as progressive, high-minded, and scientific? And, with tenure for civil servants, does this not give us a new aristocracy—hardly a humble `service class’ at all? But this aristocracy does not ‘buffer’ us from the centralized state; it is the centralized state. As the journalist Jonathan Rauch remarks in a recent issue of The Atlantic, in the days of party reform “it was easy… to see that there was dirty water in the tub. What was not so evident was the reason the water was dirty, which was the baby.” The baby was political life itself—messy, impure, inefficient, but also socially democratic and politically republican. Rauch calls the hostility toward American self-government ‘politiphobia,’ and right he is: as bureaucracy and the democratization of candidate selection advance together, we look for the `charismatic’ leader who will solve our problems for us, presumably by the copious use of executive orders.
Fundamentally, there have been two ways to organize modern states, two ways to connect the central government to the people. One is the political way: by parties whose bosses control the distribution of government jobs but who also depend on keeping in touch with the citizens who will vote their candidates in or out of office. The other is the anti-political way, rule by professional bureaucrats whose claim to command-and-obey authority is based upon supposedly scientific expertise while democratized, de-bossified elections become competitions for media time and a battle of attention-getting ‘tweets.’ The candidates twitter while Rome churns.
Both political parties have democratized themselves into near-obsolescence, further reducing Americans’ opportunities for real political experience. We often hear it said that regime change or ‘democratization’ won’t work in societies that have no experience in self-government. Well, what about us?
Americans simply govern themselves less than they once did. This fact is easily obscured by the civil-rights victories of women and African-Americans, but it is no less true for that. And the spirit of the city that Tocqueville esteemed has been transformed by mixing the soft-despotic bureaucracy he described with the new technologies of information and entertainment the spectacularly democratic Internet brings. Today, many of us live large portions of our lives in ‘virtual’ reality, an entirely artificial and almost infinitely manipulable alternative world. Aristotle writes that partisans of democracy define freedom badly, conceiving of it as doing what one likes. The Internet is democratic not only in the usual sense that it erects very low ‘barriers to entry’ but also because it feeds this fantasy of false freedom. Virtual reality disconnects us from the natural reality that surrounds us. The problem is that the disconnection is only in our minds; we still sit and move in actual reality. In virtual reality, if I encounter anything or anyone I dislike, I simply hit the ‘delete’ button. But in actual or natural reality it’s not that easy. In political life, for example, I can easily delete Mr. Putin from my computer screen, but I can’t delete his tanks from Georgia just by hitting a button.
Insofar as we funnel our minds into virtual reality, we lose patience with one another much more easily. We hit the delete button or change the channel, instead of talking things out, face to face. We cease to be practical. We cease to face reality, and the virtues that had steeled us to face harsh realities soften from disuse. Even as we rebel against the administrative state, we lose our ability to do anything but disrupt it with projects like WikiLeaks and cyberattacks. Those efforts can damage or maybe destroy, but what can they really build, other than websites—that is, more augmentations of virtual reality?
The ‘social media’ dimension of virtual reality exaggerates another feature of democratic society described by Tocqueville. In aristocratic society, the social pressure to emulate others or to draw back from thoughts and actions others deprecate comes ‘from above’—from our social superiors, those who have established their claim to have been born to rule us. In democratic society, social pressure from above dissipates, replaced by social pressure that comes at us from all around us. We all remember ‘peer pressure’ in school, but the experience of being swarmed by nasty and often anonymous tweets can cause us to draw back even further from saying what we think—unless we too put on the mask of the avatar, which amounts to shedding responsibility for what we say to one another. Madisonian responsibility disappears under this hyper-democratization of public opinion.
All right. That was the introduction to my talk. Now a word about this year’s election.
How has this affected the 2016 election. This year, once again the Constitution is at issue, although in some ways less obviously so than in 1912, 1932, or 1964. The one candidate who based his campaign squarely on the hope of restoring the original understanding of American constitutionalism, Senator Ted Cruz, didn’t survive the primaries. Moving into virtual reality, then, what do the campaign websites of the two nominees tell us about how they understand American constitutionalism?
Senator Clinton’s website has been entirely redone since she won the nomination. The last time I looked at it, the old website featured “112 reasons (and counting!) Hillary Clinton should be our next president.” One of them was that the next president will likely nominate several Supreme Court justices, a remark implying that Senator Clinton would surely make wiser choices than her opponent. Overall, however, the Constitution did not loom large on the list. Solar panels, background checks for gun purchases, student loans, health care, abolition of “sentence disparity between crack and powder cocaine” all got a shout-out. And perhaps above all, Senator Clinton is “a progressive who gets things done”—that being a slap at Senator Sanders, a socialist whose record of legislative achievement had not furnished him with any major talking points.
It’s fair, then, to say that on Clinton-for-President website 1.0 the candidate self-identified with Progressivism and therefore with the notion of an “elastic” or “living” Constitution, whereby we go from law made by legislators to law made by judges, bureaucrats, and presidents via executive orders. Her list of legislative proposals did not say, but merely assumed, that they are constitutional, for the evident reason that under a living Constitution any ‘live law’ or law-like edict is constitutional. In the immortal words of Senator Clinton’s Progressive ally in the House of Representatives, Congressman Nancy Pelosi, upon being asked if nationalized health insurance is constitutional, “Are you kidding?” Or, as Ring Lardner chronicles the reply of an impatient father to his inquiring boy, “Shut up, he explained.”
Clinton-for-President website 2.0 is quite different. It still gives us a substantial list of policy proposals. But it never mentions the Constitution or even the Supreme Court at all.
In 2013 Senator Clinton became the proud recipient of the Liberty Medal, awarded annually by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The Center selected her “in recognition of her lifelong career”—maybe she was baking Cookies for Peace with her mother at the age of two—”in public service and her ongoing advocacy effort on behalf of women and girls around the globe.” That is, the Constitution Center honored her for nothing specifically constitutional. Nor is the award intended for anyone necessarily national, that is to say, American. Last year, it went to the Dalai Lama—an estimable man, but a Tibetan or, if you prefer, a ‘citizen of the world’—a sort of virtual citizenship, inasmuch as the world doesn’t really offer citizenship in itself, having none to offer. Judging from this pattern, globalism trumps both nationhood and constitutionalism at the National Constitution Center. Globalization, however, does suggest a new way of organizing the world, one that vaguely resembles the old international society of aristocrats. Aristocrats married across national borders, forming a sort of interlocking network of birthright rulers. The new international aristocracy consists of a non-titled but exceedingly wealthy elite of similarly cosmopolitan orientation. Such personages do not need constitutionalism; they transcend it.
Speaking of trumping, the website of the Republican Party nominee turns out to be an interesting mixed bag, so far as the Constitution is concerned. The good news is, it actually mentions the Constitution—or, at least, one part of it, the Second Amendment. And it doesn’t merely assert the right to bear arms. It goes further, saying where the right does not come from: “The Constitution doesn’t create that right—it ensures that the government can’t take it away.” The right to bear arms “is about self-defense, plain and simple.” If we already have a right to defend ourselves, prior to our Constitution—and indeed we were defending ourselves when we fought for our independence from the British Empire—then where does the right come from? Mr. Trump’s website does not say, but at least it doesn’t contradict the fundamental principle of the Founders, that rights exist by nature.
Similarly, the website is consistent with, without clearly enunciating, the idea that the American union rests on a social contract among its members. “A nation without borders is not a nation” is a sentence implying that human beings come together to form nations, and not that nations arise from ‘blood and soil’—a European notion that has caused no end of trouble in the past two centuries. The call to “end birthright citizenship” also suggests a contractual rather than a biological bond uniting Americans. And it suggests that the widespread interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment as establishing birthright citizenship is mistaken.
Extending the search beyond the website itself, we learn that Trump is no Progressive when it comes to his understanding of the Constitution. In a televised interview, Anderson Cooper asked, “Do you see the Constitution as a living, breathing document, or do you see it as something set in stone a long time ago?” A college professor might object that the dichotomy is false and prejudicially stated. The Constitution isn’t “set in stone”; it has been amended 27 times. And the phrase “a long time ago” implies that in its original intent is somehow irrelevant to this day, outmoded. But true to his tendency to go ahead and gulp down his interrogator’s bait, then dare him to try to reel him in, Trump went right ahead and replied, “I see the Constitution as set in stone.”
His critics are not so sure that he does. For example, when challenged on his stated intention to expand the libel laws to protect public figures such as himself, he cited not the U. S. Constitution but English common law, which does indeed put the burden of proof of libel on the alleged libeler and not the libeled. The obvious problem (as a patriot like Trump should see) is that this isn’t England. Critics have also pointed to Mr. Trump’s apparent enthusiasm for a rather expansive definition of eminent domain, one that seems to include takings of property not merely for clear-cut public goods—a highway, for example—but for the benefit of private developers (such as himself) whose acquisitions would lead to increased revenues or the municipality, and therefor (so his argument goes) serve the public good. That strikes many of us as a bit of a stretch.
Probably the most intense unease about Mr. Trump’s constitutional bona fides arises in considering the general tone of his campaign. Entertaining and unforgettable it has been. But even his most devoted supporters find it hard to claim that he has elevated the tone of American political discourse. A candidate who takes pride in refusing to keep a civil tongue in his head raises understandable worries about his respect for the framework of civil society itself. The rule of law, including constitutional law, requires an underlying tone of law-abidingness and civility if we are to sustain it.
On this 240th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, a year away from the 230th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention, we see a presidential election contest between two candidates who give constitutionally-minded Americans cause for worry. The Democratic Party candidate gives every sign of continuing the longstanding Progressive effort to replace American moral and political principles, in part by treating the Constitution as malleable. To Progressives, the Constitution doesn’t really constitute anything. The Republican Party candidate articulates a reasonably sound basic understanding o the character of American constitutionalism, but also veers off that foundation in ways that do not build confidence in his civility, what might be called his constitutional temper.
In this, Americans have reaped what academia has sown. Whether we consider the original, university-bred Progressivism of Wilson’s generation, with its elastic or living constitution, or the state-building, centralizing, ‘Brains-Trust’ New-Deal liberalism of FDR and LBJ, or the denigration of civility seen in the New-Left campus politics that has ensconced itself in academia and in the realms of entertainment and the news media in the past half-century, American educator have poorly served their fellow citizens. Although Hillsdale College teaches students in many ways as they were taught when the College began in 1844, when its curriculum was typical of small, liberal-arts colleges, it has since become (to borrow a term from current political debates) an ‘exceptional’ place, mostly because the other colleges and universities have turned away from their original missions. Had the universities continued to follow the path laid down by the Founders in the Northwest Ordinance, and by Jefferson in his plans for the University of Virginia, and by Franklin in his plans for the University of Pennsylvania—or the original intentions of the service academies at West Point and Annapolis—American constitutionalism and American statesmanship would have a very different tone, and our candidates for high office would be different kinds of men and women. Hillsdale would not be ‘exceptional’ in the least.
The older kind of education was founded on the classics. Far from matters of merely antiquarian interest, the classics always make us look at real things—real human nature, real politics, and the need to live within those realities, not in fantasy worlds of infinite progress or wish-fulfillment. For the Greeks and the Romans, even the gods are human-all-too-human, and in the Bible there is only one perfect Man.
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