On Keeping Republics

Original article here

Benjamin Franklin’s exchange with a curious woman outside the Constitutional Convention has become proverbial. She: “Was the new government to be a monarchy or a republic?” He: “A republic, if you can keep it!”

Franklin knew only too well how rare and fragile republics were. In his own time, there were only three of any consequence, all European. Two, the Dutch and Venetian, were sclerotic antiques on the verge of extinction. The third, the Swiss Confederation, was a jumble of statelets, soon to be overrun by foreign armies. Beyond Christendom’s borders, there were no republics at all.

There had, of course, been notable republics in antiquity. But they had lived precariously. Humanity’s historical default wasn’t liberty under law but despotism’s bloody abuse. That’s why Franklin hedged his good news with a strong caution.

Franklin’s sober realism remains in order. True, constitutional government is more widespread now than in his time, at least nominally. But tyranny persists, and freedom’s hold, even in its Western homes, appears increasingly precarious. Forces both brutal and insidious work continuously to undermine it, making republics still needful of vigilant keeping. And, more than anything else, this keeping depends on giving citizens “a republican education.”

The inhabitants of a well-kept republic must have an awareness of both its paradoxical character and the nature of the forces that endanger it. Republican governments possess citizens, not subjects. To prevent a citizenry’s subjugation, a republic’s mechanisms of power must be finely tuned, effective, but constrained. Yet their successful operation depends on more than simply artfulness of design. A republican memory, recollections etched deeply in collective public consciousness, is vital as well. So too are republican instincts, grounded in a realistic grasp of human nature and the patterns of political behavior it normally produces.

Humans are notoriously self-regarding, dedicated to self, kin, and kith. They are avid to protect what’s theirs but blasé about what belongs to others. They tend to be shortsighted, discounting the longer good, even when it’s their own. They usually reduce complex issues to moralized simplifications and spectra of differences to stark dichotomies. Ignoring common welfare, they wallow in factionalism. Franklin and his colleagues were well aware of these human failings, which is why they labored so ingeniously to erect a contrapuntal government in which, it was hoped, ego would counteract ego. But the long roll of good times since the Second World War has dulled the edge of the realism they also counted upon, a realism that, when keen, sharpens suspicions of utopian schemes and wishful thinking. A republican education must now be enlisted to restore that which has been lost.

Above all else, a republican order finds its psychological cement in shared memory, especially of what it is like to be prey to willful authority. In Franklin’s day, there remained a vivid recollection of King George and his parliaments. But promulgated via chapbooks, sermons, pamphlets, and editorials were accounts of English events even further removed: King John and Magna Carta, Oliver Cromwell and a severed royal head, “The Glorious Revolution” and King James’ banishment, and the constitutionalist heroism of the likes of John Hampden and Algernon Sidney. These and other remembrances resounded through the minds of the revolutionary generation, high and low. They are now being buried in amnesia.

For evidence take the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s ongoing survey “What Will they Learn?” wherein it is revealed that a mere eighteen percent of the 1133 higher education institutions still mandate courses in basic American history or government, and only twenty-six a literature requirement, the major vehicle by which students get introduced to the interplay of human nature. Worse yet is “the treason of our clerks” via a radicalized professoriate that has poisoned much of the remaining curriculum, presenting American history and politics as dark chronicles of exploitation and dispossession. The habits of the heart that should sustain republicanism are thus turned against it. The recent outbursts on America’s campuses of naked support for mass murder show how fierce the resulting fanaticism—the antithesis of a republican spirit—has become. At best, it will be a long road back.

But there is evidence that that path is at last being trod. Over the past several years, new civic education programs have been sprouting up on the campuses of major American universities. Neither liberal nor conservative but truly “republican” in character, they seek to provide the opportunity to learn, from a multidisciplinary perspective, what free citizenship both means and requires. And in academia, just as elsewhere, personnel is policy. These programs are blessed in being able to recruit sizeable numbers of new faculty members interested in republican survival. They therefore constitute a major and long-awaited breakthrough.

So far, there are ten of them, five at large public universities in Ohio and one apiece at flagship schools of the Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas systems. In other states, legislatures and regents are actively debating similar initiatives. Needless to say, they will face determined ideological and bureaucratic resistance from academe’s “deep state.” They’ll need determined support from the general public in order to push back against it. Attention from the patriotic sectors of the media, like American Greatness, will be essential to producing it.

There is no single cure for the ills that beset republics, including our own. Mortality is built into them. But just as knowledge of how the body works contributes to the physical health and longevity of individuals, so too does a knowledge of history, human nature, and republican tradition sustain our republic’s constitutional health and survivability. As Dr. Franklin would surely have agreed, only when republicanism is taught can it be kept.

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Steve Balch was the founding president of the National Association of Scholars and director of the Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University.