Thanks to Carl for his synoptic overview of the APSA Meeting.

Jim Ceaser was in fine form in his comments in response to all the deserved praise of his life and work. It’s true enough that he didn’t answer directly my question concerning whether, in his opinion, more of The Federalist should have talked up the veneration that time bestows on everything as a key to sustaining good government and a good Constitution. He did invent the category “rational veneration,” which, I think, goes along with his other conservative categories “rational patriotism” and even “rational faith.”

Now Federalist 49 doesn’t really make veneration seem rational; it’s a quality acquired by anything that’s old and hard to change. I notice, for example, that I’m being venerated a lot more these days.

It’s rational, however, to venerate anything that’s good or beneficial, to want it to benefit from every human inclination that resists change. The progressive challenge is that it’s only rational to venerate the Founders and their Constitution if what they gave us is good and remains relevant to meeting our needs or securing our rights. We Founderists deploy veneration to fend off the progressive challenge, but finally we also have to show that veneration is deserved.

In another sense, “rational veneration” can be even more conservative, though. We might want to exercise a preferential option for the traditional or customary, given that the forces of change are distorted by rather blind ambition and abstract and untested theory. ”If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Ain’t broke is a much more lax standard than running smoothly or functioning flawlessly. Stick with whatever has tolerably passed the test of time. As long as the car still moves, keep driving it as is. (I really do live by that “insight,” which I also apply to the relationship between physicians and my physical body.)

Jim explained that one reason veneration can’t be a big theme of The Federalist is that Hamilton and Madison really thought of themselves and wrote as radical innovators. They were experimentalists, in some large measure, when it comes to pushing the envelope concerning the human capacity for self-government and to reconciling democracy, liberty, and good government. Their theme: ”It is broke, and it needs a radical, unprecedented fix.” Those conservatives moved by caution and veneration probably voted against the Constitution.

Jim highlighted the fact that the authors of The Federalist “branded” themselves as Founders in conversation with other great Founders. They wanted the Constitution and the resulting way of life they built to endure longer than even Rome, and they wanted the fame accorded to great Founders. Founding, from that view, means cutting off destructive forces from both the past and the future. America begins as the first polity built on reflection and choice in the unprecedented appeals to Nature and Nature’s God, in the Declaration of 1776, and is “implemented” by the consciously and rationally designed Constitution of 1787. Jim mentioned along the way that teaching that there was nothing much good here prior to 1776 remains the project of today’s Founderist political scientists. Tocqueville, he added, corrected that excess by highlighting the fact that all our actual democratic political institutions began with the Puritans. Tocqueville went too far in the other direction, but it’s worth noting that most actual historians think more along his lines.

Jim also talked about how the Founderist conception of American progress — articulated so well by Lincoln and Coolidge — is of improvement within the framework designed by our Founders. Their “restful” principles are the foundation of egalitarian and technological progress rightly understood. That definite view of who we are and where we should be going opposes an amorphously restless or “indefinite” view of progressive transformation in which the destiny of the particular individual with natural rights and all that is lost in some reverie about our collective destiny (see the Transcendentalists, Whitman, progressive technocrats, etc.).

Narratives about vague, indefinite perfectibility, Tocqueville tells us, are characteristic of democracy as such. And a limited view of possible improvement that come with a fixed idea of human nature is characteristic of aristocracy. So the veneration inspired by Founderism these days is an attempt to give America a kind of aristocratic narrative. That narrative would be facing various forms of critical and democratic assault even if Hegel had never written or Woodrow Wilson had never studied in Germany.

As Jim said, the very phrase “American greatness” — insofar as it depends on the greatness of particular American individuals — opposes itself to every trend these days in our country’s highly democratic scholarly study of history. Why should we privilege the Founders? There’s no denying that they were more elitist than we are. In Tocqueville’s view, all we Founderists are employing the aristocratic “teaching method” in presenting the American political narrative. We are, of course, just and truthful to do so, insofar as we are correcting the stupid and reductionistic theoretical excesses of our time.

So I’m going to stop here, just before I get to Jim’s inspirational and truthful conclusion concerning higher education, in which he quickly but instructively sampled Heidegger a bit about the true, technological danger facing us. Neither Jim nor I can remember his especially memorable “takeaway” final sentence. Let me know if you do.

One more point: Our friend PAUL SEATON turns SIXTY today. Shall we be democrats and lie by telling him that sixty is the new forty? Or shall we be aristocrats guided by the relatively fixed truths about the nature and destiny of every particular man and woman and remind him that sixty is still sixty?