The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions
Finding the Right Combination of Passion and Reverence for the Constitution, the Rule of Law, and Reason.
Programming Note: This fall McLennan Community College will present the first annual Kenneth Winston Starr Memorial Lecture featuring noted public intellectual Os Guinness as our inaugural distinguished speaker. Stay tuned for more details. In preparation for his appearance, I am in the midst of a deep dive into the voluminous writings and speeches of the acclaimed author and social critic. And I keep coming across one of his favorite Abraham Lincoln quotes.
Almost two centuries ago, in his prodigious Lyceum Address,* postulating the near imperviousness of the United States to foreign attack, a youthful Lincoln observed:
If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
As we approach our 60th quadrennial national election to select a president of the United States, many of us cannot shake the dark sense, as a nation of freemen, we are flirting with suicide. Look for plenty of horse race analysis and election punditry in the months to come as the contest quickens, but, today, a few comments on American fragility in relation to current events.
Last Week in Washington.
Currently under indictment in New York, under investigation in Georgia, and the target of two probes under the auspices of the Department of Justice, a civil jury in Manhattan found former president Donald Trump guilty of sexual battery committed at some uncertain date in the 1990s and defamation for vehemently denying the charge after it surfaced in 2019.
The former president and declared candidate for a 2024 restoration, unbowed and unrepentant, appeared on a CNN Townhall ostensibly aimed at Republican primary voters. To rave reviews from his diehard fans, calls from the resistance to permanently remove him from the public square, and general dismay from the rest of the voting public, Trump repeated once again his defamatory claims of innocence and seemingly reinforced his status as the frontrunner for the GOP nomination.
Last week, a House Committee on Oversight published evidence that the Biden Family received, through a complicated system of limited liability companies, more than ten million dollars in compensation from foreign entities without any indication of value provided for services rendered. In the face of these revelations, the New York Times emphasized no evidence linked the President himself to any illegal activity associated with the corruption of his immediate family.
On the other side of the aisle, journalists continued coverage of a sudden-onset crisis of confidence regarding the Supreme Court of the United States. Amid a steady stream of reportage alleging conflict of interest and compromised ethics among Republican-appointed justices, reporters charted the Court’s plummeting public approval among Democrats. And media observers wondered aloud whether this “ethically challenged” 6-3 majority remains capable of meting out “equal justice under law.”
Meanwhile, our elected representatives in the federal city continued to debate when and under what circumstances they might extend our “debt ceiling,” the legislative mechanism by which Congress enables the federal government to borrow money to pay for current deficit spending and interest on the accumulated debt over time.
A national debt that has doubled since 2013 and now stands at:
$31,700,000,000,000.00.
That is, THIRTY-ONE TRILLION, Seven-Hundred Billion Dollars.
Our current debt now equals 134 percent of the total revenue of goods and services created in a high output year of the United States economy. If we divided up the debt equally among all American citizens, our individual portions would equal $94,821. Or, divided by actual taxpayers, we would require $247, 766 per capita to balance our books.
In our current condition, Congress is now required to raise the borrowing threshold every couple of years in TRILLION DOLLAR chunks.
Quick Joke: What is the difference between a billion dollars and a trillion dollars? Answer: About a trillion dollars.
Recalling a season of fierce protest during the tumultuous summer of George Floyd, and the riotous incursion into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, precipitated by the stubborn reluctance of President Trump to give up power in the face of a certified election loss, last week protesters stormed the New York Subway system demanding justice for a citizen killed at the hands of another citizen in a tragic and opaque struggle of perception and brute force that could have only transpired in the absence of law and order in a public space.
Related, in any given week, we are reminded that approximately 500 American victims of homicide violently lose their lives to a growing number of disturbed, substance-abusing, or just plain anti-social persons of malicious intent.
We are in a bad place. Have we been here before?
January 27, 1838. Serving in the Illinois House of Representatives, Abraham Lincoln, a young lawyer-politician with a rising local reputation and an energetic national vision, bemoaned a “fearful” series of “outrages” and a pervasive “disregard for law” present in the “every-day news of the times.”
Addressing the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Lincoln enumerated a collection of instances of savage brutality, ripped from the headlines of the day, in which mobs filled with righteous indignation imposed violent populist justice in spaces in which government seemed incapable of redress. Blaming not just the bloodthirsty mobs, Lincoln also called out “executive ministers of justice” who, by their inaction, precipitated the “mobocratic” spirit.
What are the wages of corrupt and ineffective government?
Lincoln spelled out four deleterious consequences to the absence of law and order. First, in the frenzy of the mob mentality, if not from the beginning, the unbound crowd eventually, inevitably, undoubtedly will harm innocents. Moreover, in a vicious cycle, lawlessness promotes more lawlessness. In such a state of uncertainty, with villainous delight, miscreants inimical to restraint who harbor a “lawless spirit” find ample encouragement to be “lawless in practice.” As a result, even the reliable citizens upon which good government chiefly depends, grow tired of an ineffective administration of justice and lack of protection. In the absence of an ordered society, even the best people lose their “attachment” to government and default to more brutish methods of control. Now, in this arbitrary reign of terror, the age of the demagogue begins, which marks the end of the American experiment in government by the people.
In essence, Lincoln summarized the classic pitfalls of rule by the people and, as a cautionary note, an ancient cycle of despotism.
For Lincoln, in 1838, what were the causes of his present danger ?
Speaking to a citizenry fifty years removed from the War of Independence and the Constitutional Convention, the lanky prairie political philosopher noted the passing of the revolutionary generation. What the mighty armies of the British Empire failed to accomplish, the “silent artillery of time” had achieved. The men and women who sacrificed and bled for the Glorious Cause—and carried those memories in their souls—were fading fast, gone almost every one.
True Enough. Less than two years earlier, the “father of the Constitution,” James Madison, often dubbed the “last of the founders,” passed away at the age of 85 in a state of physical collapse and mental agitation. Andrew Jackson, a teenage soldier in the First War for Independence and a national hero of the Second, at seventy years-old, completed his final term as the 7th president of the United States in 1837. The “Old Hero” (although not so much to Lincoln’s Whig sensibilities) represented the last veteran of the Revolutionary War to serve as chief executive of the federal republic, and, with the exception of the short-lived administration of William Henry Harrison, the last president born before the decisive American victory at Yorktown.
Two weeks shy of his twenty-ninth birthday, Lincoln considered this “Young America” on the move in which the median age of the national population was 17.8 years old. To the state representative from Sangamon County, the country seemed adrift, confused, and too often twisted by unchecked “passion” that threatened the rule of law and the fabric of a just and democratic society. While passion fueled the Revolution and the effort to incept a new nation, passion in the current moment drove disunity, mistrust, violent political discourse, and vigilantism.
More importantly, what was the cure?
The Abraham Lincoln of 1838 called for a renewed reverence for our shared history and the Constitution, a rededication to law and reason, and a collective commitment to teach American values in homes and classrooms with evangelical fervor.
Easier said than done.
Of course, Lincoln led no such movement in his lifetime. In truth, the fractious perils of 1838 grew worse by 1848 and worse still by 1858. What saved the nation Lincoln imagined? Ironically, it was the existential crisis of civil war, hastened by his election as president, testing whether the nation based on founding principles he envisioned might survive. The fiery trial allowed Lincoln to preside over a new birth of freedom and, posthumously, a protracted era of national success and the unity of purpose necessary to perpetuate the government and the laws.
Coincidentally, another four score and some-odd years following the Civil War, one more great and defining struggle, World War II, summoned once again our better angels and provided a crucible for a revitalized America at home and abroad. In the words of John F. Kennedy, the “torch [had] been passed [once again] to a new generation of Americans—born in [the twentieth] century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace” and united around a shared sense of heritage and purpose. And, here we are, like Lincoln, the children and grandchildren of a greatest American generation, prosperous but unfocused, and fretting over the perpetuation of our political institutions.
Like all historical analogies, this echo from the past offers more variances than exact parallels and provides no clearly modulated set of instructions in the present to avoid catastrophic mistakes in our uncertain future. If we set aside the metaphorical “Twitter mobs,” we do not face rampaging citizens physically burning and hanging our neighbors. In fact, compared to a nation simmering over the impending political crisis of slavery and killing one another in the streets in fits of rage, for most of us, upon serious and honest reflection, our lives seem fairly secure and peaceful. And the stakes seem fairly low.
Abstractly considered, a civil judgement against Donald Trump for boorish acts of vile behavior the likes of which he previously admitted perpetrating in other instances, whether guilty or innocent by mere circumstance in this particular case, surely constitutes at the very worst a delicious comeuppance of little consequence.
And, to insert the news of this week, if national law enforcement and intelligence agencies, in combination with a national news media with hearts in the right place, cut a few corners to obstruct the path of a president clearly unfit for office incautiously elected by the American people, are we not merely expediting a salutary outcome that would have occurred once the restoration of national sanity prevailed? “In this case alone, it was as well the way it was, as it could otherwise have been.”
But the example in either case is fearful.
Our problem today, no longer united around a shared history, divided over the meaning and value of the Constitution, polarized on so many levels and identities, we are frantically debating issues to which the most persuasive argument is always the one that comfortably confirms what we already believe. The vast majority of us, no longer honest brokers, only accept what we consume when it conforms exactly with what we desire to be true.
What is good for the goose—is only good for the goose. The gander be damned.
I do not always agree with President Obama, but he has this right:
Speaking to his worry that we are engaged in “a divided conversation, in part because we have a divided media, a splintered media,” he posited, “we almost occupy different realities.”
For different reasons than Lincoln listed—but events just as fearful—we are losing faith in the rule of law, efficient government on all levels, and we no longer expect the dispensation of fair and impartial justice. We have given up looking for good faith partners on the other side of our partisan divide we can trust, with whom we can work together to solve problems, or even deal with us fairly.
We are in a bad place. And, while the advent of Donald Trump plays a minor role in our sad state of domestic turmoil, the real enemy is us. We have taken this far beyond Donald Trump’s meager power to enflame or destroy. We were, are, and ever shall be the agents of our own destiny as it relates to perpetuating the unfinished work of our experiment in self government so far nobly advanced.
One more twist, this Sunday, as luck would have it, the preacher called on us to keep hope alive.
Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.
A mature Lincoln, ruminating on his campaign to bring freedom to the enslaved, called the United States of America the last best hope of earth. Fair enough. My pastor invoked the early Christian church compelled even in the face of persecution to live and preach the way of Jesus. They believed in a world redeemed by God.
I look forward to hearing from an always hopeful Os Guinness in September. It will be a good moment to engage the author of A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future, one of his thirty published books.
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*With gratitude to my good friend and colleague, Andrew Clayton, a brilliant thinker, and a scholar of philosophy and the “new science of politics.” His long admiration and devotion to the Lyceum Address, more than any other factor, led me to an extended study of this essential window into the mind of Lincoln.