America 250: Defending Our Founding Fathers
by Shane Leary
America 250 is a series by The Plains Sentinel celebrating our country’s 250th anniversary by highlighting the people, places, events, and ideas that have defined the Midwest and America.
A shadow hangs over America’s 250th anniversary. While Americans no doubt have much to celebrate, it is difficult to shake the feeling that we find ourselves in, or on the brink of, some kind of political crisis. Our institutions appear increasingly dysfunctional, leading some citizens to apathy, while others turn reactionary.
Among this latter group are Americans on the right who are increasingly critical of the American Founding. These critics tend to point to the moral chaos of our day and blame it on the Founders for their supposed lack of concern for morality and virtue. While we certainly find ourselves in need of greater virtue today, to blame our present crisis on the Founders is neither fair nor accurate. Not only does this position reveal a misunderstanding of the Founding—it betrays a lack of political and moral responsibility on behalf of its critics.
Some members of the American right have increasingly adopted a common and long-established view that the Founders were insufficiently concerned with virtue, or that, despite their concern for it, they failed to sufficiently attend to its cultivation. A particularly influential proponent of this view is Patrick Deneen, a political theory Professor at Notre Dame, who argued in his bestselling 2018 book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” that our present moral crisis has arisen—not because the political philosophy of the Founders has failed—but precisely because it has succeeded. The problems of our day, he argues, can be traced to “the corrosive social and civic effects of self-interest—a disease that arises from the cure of overcoming the ancient reliance on virtue.”
Deneen’s critique of the Founding rests on a timeless understanding of the relationship between politics and morality, particularly with respect to republics. Classical wisdom holds that a republic requires virtuous citizens who readily devote themselves to its preservation, and thus, good founders establish laws and institutions that aim to mold these kinds of citizens. Central to this understanding of republican citizenship is a willingness to set aside one’s own self-interest and sacrifice on behalf of the public good.
Our Founders are said to have rejected this maxim, having instead placed their faith in self-interest and ambition, which they sought to cleverly channel to good ends by way of shrewd institutional arrangements.
Criticisms along these lines have been emerging from the academy for decades. Some are more careful than Deneen and note that the Founders did express concern for virtue, but nonetheless fault them for having failed to make arrangements for its sustainment and cultivation. In either case, the argument leads to the same conclusion: the Founders set us on an inevitable course toward moral chaos, and we ought to blame them for doing so.
While left-wing academic criticisms of the Founding have long exercised influence on popular opinion, it is only recently that right-wing criticisms of this nature have begun to find currency. Both are deeply corrosive, but here I want to focus on the latter.
The effect of this increasingly popular line of attack is to produce irreverence and disdain for both the Founders and the institutions they established, especially among young conservatives. The tendency to blame our current problems on the Founding serves, intentionally or not, as a wedge to open the door to far more concerning opinions and proposals which increasingly abound.
John Howting, an editor at Chronicles Magazine, which purports to commit itself to “defending the traditions and history of America and the West,” reduced the Constitution in a recent editorial to “an old list of laws and political compromises” unworthy of preservation. Curtis Yarvin, the preeminent American monarchist, who once characterized the American revolution as a moment in which “evil triumphed over good,” enjoys increasing popularity. He has ascended from a pseudonymous blog to participating in roundtable discussions—alongside Deneen—on America and her future with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a pillar of the conservative movement which describes itself as committed to “teaching undergraduates the principles and virtues that make America free and prosperous.”
I do not fault ISI for “platforming” or “legitimizing” thinkers like Yarvin. In fact, I am inclined to think that citizens and scholars who have the capability to refute Yarvin and other “postliberals,” and yet avoid engaging with them, are in part to blame for their rise. Rather than ignore or foolishly attempt to “cancel” them, conservatives would do well to take inspiration from the words of Thomas Jefferson, who in July of 1793, implored Madison to publicly refute Hamilton’s interpretation of executive power, sparking the famous Pacificus-Helvidius debates: “For god’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.”
What concerns me is that positions like this are increasingly well-received on the right. A first step, I believe, is to confront this initial wedge, which presents the Founders as blameworthy.
This line of criticism is as old as the Founding itself. While the most extreme variations of these arguments tend to emerge today from “postliberal” camps, one might just as soon characterize them as the reemergence of a kind of Anti-Federalist sentiment. In their complaints, they echo the American Brutus, who, in opposing the Constitution, insisted that our “civil institutions [ought to] hold chiefly in view, the attainment of virtue.”
Contrary to this common criticism, many Federalists in fact readily agreed with Brutus on this point. Take as evidence the proposal advanced by our first Secretary of War—Henry Knox, at the request of President Washington—in his 1790 “Plan for the general arrangement of the militia of the United States.” Under Knox’s plan, citizens would have undergone mandatory religious education and received lectures on republican theory alongside their military training.
Those who neglected to serve would have been barred from voting or running for office until a later age than their peers, which was to be determined by Congress. In his own words, Knox aimed at establishing a “dignified national fabric erected on the solid foundation of virtue.” In his view, this program would have ensured that Americans could rely on the “virtues and knowledge of the people” to defend against the “introduction of tyranny.”
Today’s postliberal critics may be surprised to find such an apparently illiberal—yet thoroughly republican—proposal from Federalists as prominent as Knox, and even Washington himself.
Of course, Knox’s vision for a national effort to inculcate virtue through the militia never materialized, nor did the countless attempts to found a national university made by other Founding Fathers on both sides of our earliest party divisions, including Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, and Thomas Jefferson.
While one may fairly note the Founders failed to establish a national institution for moral and civic education, we cannot accuse them of neglecting to try. These proposals failed in large part due to broader political divisions concerning a shared national vision for moral and political education, and relatedly, contentious disputes over the boundary of federal and state authority, and the proper objects of each.
While one might then be tempted to blame the division at the Founding that precluded these efforts, today’s critics ought to first recognize the Founders’ profound achievement in managing to preserve and strengthen our Union against such intense political division in the first place. Moreover, if the division between men like Brutus and Knox lay not in whether institutions ought to aim at cultivating virtue, but primarily in whether those institutions ought to be established at the national level or that of the states, one might fairly ask why the states themselves did not make a more serious effort to emulate these Federalist proposals.
But the fact remains that the Founders did not establish national institutions for moral education, and that we appear increasingly in need of a renewed moral education today.
A defense of the Founding aimed at these critics will prove unpersuasive to them if it declines to recognize the severity of our current moral crisis. John Adams famously said that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” and would thus be “wholly inadequate” to govern an immoral and irreligious people.
If Adams was right, then a cursory glance at the moral landscape of contemporary America provokes acute concern. Judged in light of traditional American moral opinions, such as the importance of religion and the family, the dangers of greed and excessive self-interest, and the importance of voluntary political association, civic engagement, and service, life in America today may well give cause for alarm.
Compared with much of American history, Americans today are less religious, less likely to marry, and less likely to be raised in a two-parent household. American commerce appears increasingly avaricious and speculative—whether one looks to apparent increases in leverage and speculation among institutional investors, the explosion of zero-day options trading among retail investors, or the meteoric rise of online sports betting.
Related to both trends, Americans are more likely than ever to engage in pornography as a commercial pursuit. We are less likely to serve in the military, join clubs and associations to serve our communities, or speak to our neighbors. In many ways, political engagement has declined precipitously. A notable exception is the increase in voter participation in national presidential elections, which itself may well reflect an increasingly unrepublican faith in the executive as our preferred receptacle for political longings.
In short, we have come a long way from our Puritan roots, and our commitment to ordered liberty increasingly appears closer to an excessive embrace of license.
For those who understand republican government as integrally reliant on moral virtue, all this offers ready explanation for the dysfunction of our political institutions today. But it is not clear that today’s vice discounts the virtues of our Fathers, or that it calls for the abandonment of our institutions.
Ironically, we might find a useful defense of our institutions in the arguments of another Anti-Federalist who opposed their establishment. During the ratification debates, a Pennsylvanian under the name Candidus criticized his fellow citizens for being “too apt” to blame their institutions for their problems, and asked them rather to consider: “may not our manners be the source of our national evils?”
While Candidus was misguided in his estimation of the Articles of the Confederation, his words offer a needed correction to many Americans today. What do we rightly aim to celebrate this 250th anniversary, if not our great fortune in having inherited the institutions established by the Founders, of which we owe so much for our still exceptional liberty, prosperity, and power?
We would do well to heed Candidus’ criticism and think twice before attributing our moral and political problems to the Founders and the institutions they established. Yet doing so would involve something both difficult and distinctly American—taking responsibility. It will always be tempting to blame the Founders for present political problems, just as it is tempting for an adult with bad habits to blame his or her parents and upbringing.
Both share the opportunity to liberate oneself from taking responsibility for their own discontent, but doing so is neither useful nor praiseworthy. If we wish to ensure that our descendants will continue to have a republic worth celebrating, a better reaction to today’s circumstances would be to begin with gratitude for all that we have inherited, and to reflect both on how it is we began to lose our virtue, and what choices might begin to lead us back to it.
Adopting this view, one might begin to see issues with the narrative today’s critics advance. For one, if the Founders set us on an inevitable course to the manners and morals of today, how is it that Americans retained an exceptional moral seriousness for so many generations?
Many of us American men need only look back to our grandfathers to see a generation of Americans who displayed considerable virtue. They lined up in droves to fight on behalf of their country, took chivalry seriously, engaged in their communities, and in general, were of superior manners to American men today. Where did these men come from if their regime was rotten to its core? My own grandfather, who taught me a great deal, grew up in Alliance, Nebraska, and so it is only fitting I defend him and his fathers in The Plains Sentinel. Were he here today, he might offer us a distinctly American opinion: that improving one’s own life entails making better choices, and that begins with taking responsibility.
Yet improving the political choices we make is more complicated. It requires institutions that are structured to effectively mediate disputes between citizens. Thankfully, if there is anything we have received from our Founders, it is institutions built to do just that. Before we blame our institutions and their architects for our problems, we ought to begin by considering whether we are failing to sufficiently engage with those institutions. This consideration will likely reveal that we lack sufficient understanding of how our institutions work.
Fortunately, the Founders provide a remedy to our ignorance in the trove of writings and disputes they left us. Therein lies the profound danger of today’s postliberal criticisms of the Founding—that in convincing us to blame the Founders, they would turn us away from them. While casting blame might offer immediate satisfaction, in the long run it will tend to enervate us politically, as it will steer us away from seriously engaging, and perhaps even emulating, the prudence and virtue we descend from.
Shane Leary is a PhD Candidate in American Politics at Baylor University. His dissertation examines the Founders’ debates over militias and standing armies.