Don’t Forget the Founding Fathers

‘W hat would the Founding Fathers think of today’s America?” author Michael Lind asks in a provocative new article for Compact. He then answers his own question: “Who cares?” He proceeds to offer a breezy and ahistorical argument that the conservative movement’s “cult of the Founders” is only a few generations old, largely the product of an attempt to provide “a nonracist definition of the American nation during the civil-rights revolution.”

Has Lind ever been to Washington, D.C.? There, one will find many large — one might say cult-like — monuments to the leaders of the Founding, the most prominent of which were built a good bit before the 1960s. There’s quite a tall one dedicated to the man who is supposed to have chopped down the cherry tree. It’s hard to miss.

Lind would have us believe that this constitutional cult is of modern vintage, a phenomenon that “has no parallels in other English-speaking democracies.” After all, “a British prime minister who declared that 21st century Britain must turn for guidance to Robert Walpole or Pitt the Younger would be considered daft.” It is strange indeed to suggest the British as somehow uniquely forward-looking and rational compared to mainstream American conservatives. This is, after all, a nation whose sovereign is King Charles the Third, a man whose namesakes hailed from the 17th century and who can trace his family lineage back to the House of Wessex, which last ruled in the eleventh century. And, so far as I know, American conservatives (at least those who take understanding the Constitution as a serious project) do not engage in esoteric 17th-century rituals like the Yeomen of the Guard’s searching the basement of Westminster prior to the king’s speech to make sure Guy Fawkes hasn’t struck again. “God, rot all royals! Give us the wisdom of the Americans,” a fictional Charles Fox bemoaned in The Madness of King George. So long as the divine refuses to grant Fox’s request, American conservatives still have a leg up on their British cousins.

There are in fact anodyne explanations for why the Founding is so popular among conservative intellectuals these days, none of which requires interweaving the aftereffects of “Nordicist racial ideology” and the “traditional Teutonic Protestant version of American national identity” into an already overstuffed causal account. For one, there has been an incredible amount of research done over the last 70 years to discover, systematize, and publish Founding-era writings, making today a great time to study the period. The National Archives even offers searchable versions of the papers of a half dozen Founders. No wonder interest has picked up.

For another, it speaks to the split between Left and Right — a divide that Lind seems to know exists, but of which he can only describe the left half. He writes this of the post-war progressive technocracy:

The powerful technocratic progressive strain on the American center left has for more than a century championed expert rule informed by social science, which, like natural science, is supposed to be constantly updated by new findings. In this vision, there is little value in social science more than a decade or two old, much less 18th-century political philosophy.

This apt assessment helps illuminate a key difference between Left and Right. The problem is that Lind cannot describe the constitutional conservative position on its own terms. Hence the decision to set alight a field of strawmen.

Both Left and Right agree that the country is doing poorly these days, that something has gone profoundly wrong in our body politic. A progressive impulse is to blame the Constitution as an outmoded, backwards instrument of government that keeps the country from becoming what it could be. The experts should not be bogged down by a document that is “confusing” because it is “over 100 years old,” as Ezra Klein — the 21st-century embodiment of the progressive technocrat — once put it.

The impulse of conservative intellectuals is to look to the debates surrounding the Constitution on insights for how we have deviated from the positive parts of the founding vision (and conservatives do distinguish between the good and ill), so that we can we revitalize our country’s founding principles. This position is hardly an indefensible one. It is a view that traces its lineage deep into Western political thought, to classical antiquity, no less. Both Plato and Polybius offer a vision of human affairs that is cyclical in its view of the state, noting that constitutions tend to become corrupt over time. Granted, neither of them has been published by a social-science journal in the last 25 years, but they’re both pretty smart fellows. What follows from this, per Renaissance political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli (no glossy-eyed cultist he!) is that reforms of a system should be restorative in nature. As he writes in the Discourses on Livy, it is “good sense” for a republic to “return to its original principles”:

It is a well-established fact that the life of all mundane things is of finite duration. But things which complete the whole course appointed them by heaven are in general those whose bodies do not disintegrate but maintain themselves in orderly fashion so that if there is no change; or, if there be change, it tends rather to their conservation than to their destruction. Here I am concerned with composite bodies, such as are states and religious institutions, and in their regard I affirm that those changes make for their conservation which lead them back to their origins. Hence those are better constituted and have a long life whose institutions make frequent renovations possible.

The conservative interest in the Constitution, far from being a cult-like worship of an old document, is decidedly Machiavellian in its practicality. How do we restore those principles which seem to have been lost? If Machiavelli is right, if states are like bodies that tend to decay and a prudent strategy is to arrest the decline through a return to original principles, then the Constitution becomes an essential document for understanding what we should do next. To be sure, Lind admits that learning from “individual American founders” can be useful, but the conservative position suggests much more — the Founding becomes useful as an expression of how American self-government is supposed to function, and we would do well to consider it carefully.

Just last month, I published a book titled Democracy or Republic? The People and the Constitution. In it, my agenda is not to worship the Constitution but rather to understand it, in the belief that it has practical value for us today. As I write,

[The Constitution] may be old. It may have been created by a bunch of “white slave-owning men.” But it makes sense. The framers did not toss it together at random. They had a purpose to it. And before we dismiss the document out of hand or call for drastic reforms, we at least need to appreciate that purpose. They understood that while democracy was necessary for the survival of the republic, it could potentially be a destructive force. It had to be contained. In offering a solution to this problem, the Constitution remains a substantial achievement in political philosophy. If it does not deserve our reverence, it at least deserves our understanding.

This is not a cult view. Indeed, it isn’t even all that conservative, at least judged by the European model of rightism. It is, rather, quite Whiggish, which much of American conservatism still is. The desire on the right among those of us who deeply admire the Constitution is not to magically transform the country into the agrarian “paradise” Jefferson envisioned. It is, rather, to identify the central principles embedded in the Constitution’s vision of a republic, how it sought to achieve that vision, and to seek out reforms that help us realize this vision.

It’s fine to disagree with this; progressives have long been known to do so. The debate between Left and Right is a good thing, for it keeps both sides on their toes. But those of us who wish to solve our problems through restoration are not cultists. We’re just conservatives.