"A Republic If You Can Keep It"
Some Independence Day thoughts about some very un-American ideas.
On the last day of the Constitutional Convention, a woman named Elizabeth Willing Powel approached Benjamin Franklin on the streets of Philadelphia and asked, “Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy?” According to a journal kept by delegate James McHenry, Franklin replied, “a Republic if you can keep it.”
Franklin’s reply has inspired many an essay. It is striking on this Independence Day in 2024 to ponder the ways in which Franklin’s warning seems all too relevant.
For example, the recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity sure seems to bestow rather monarchical privileges to the American president. For another example, the Daily Beast’s Dan Ladden-Hall notes that, “talk of bloodshed has been a disturbing seam running through conservative rhetoric during this election cycle.” Combine those two sentences and the image that comes to mind is pretty far away from a Republic!
The Trump v. United States ruling was celebrated by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who said — out loud, on the record, mind you — the following sentences:
In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win. We're in the process of taking this country back….
If people in the audience are looking for something to read over Independence Day weekend, in addition to rereading the Declaration of Independence, read Hamilton's No. 70 because there, along with some other essays, in some other essays, he talks about the importance of a vigorous executive…
We also know the importance of the executive being able to do his job. And can you imagine… any president, put politics off to the side, any president having to second guess, triple guess every decision they're making in their official capacity, you couldn't have the republic that you just described.
And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. (emphasis added)
Well now. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump suggests that the aim of Kevin Roberts, Donald Trump, and their ilk “isn’t a new nation born of equality and the law. It is instead to largely reverse the trajectory of the first American Revolution, centralizing power in one leader who happens to look a lot like them.” That sounds ominous for us Americans who like, you know, liberty and democracy.
Maybe Bump is overreacting. What will be included in Roberts’ second American Revolution if Trump and the Republicans win this November?1
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has chronicled some of those things over the past year. Just in the past week, however, we have seen Trump and his reactionary infrastructure propose a variety of new components of this “revolution.” What are they?
The Guardian’s Tess Owen reports on one Heritage-backed plan:
Armed with rhetoric about the “deep state”, a conservative-backed group is planning to publicly name and shame career government employees that they consider hostile to Donald Trump.
This “blacklist” of civil servants, which will be published online, is intended to advance Trump’s broader goals, which, if elected, include weeding out government employees and replacing them with loyalists….
Backed with a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, an influential rightwing thinktank, AAF [American Accountability Foundation] will compile information, including social media posts, about civil servants they suspect will “obstruct and sabotage a future conservative president”. They plan to publish dossiers on those non-public facing individuals, starting with the Department of Homeland Security, and expose them to scrutiny.
“WE ARE DECLARING WAR ON THE DEEP STATE,” AAF wrote in a post on Twitter/X earlier this week.
I suppose when the Supreme Court bestows monarchical powers on the president, the natural next step of the second American Revolution is to ensure government employees declare their personal loyalty to the sovereign ruler. I mean, that’s why our forefathers fought George III, right?
The New York Times’ Chris Cameron reports on another Trump proposal that does not exactly sound like it promotes either freedom or liberty:
Former President Donald J. Trump over the weekend escalated his vows to prosecute his political opponents, circulating posts on his social media website invoking “televised military tribunals” and calling for the jailing of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and former Vice President Mike Pence, among other high-profile politicians.
Mr. Trump, using his account on Truth Social on Sunday, promoted two posts from other users of the site that called for the jailing of his perceived political enemies.
One post that he circulated on Sunday singled out Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who is a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s, and called for her to be prosecuted by a type of military court reserved for enemy combatants and war criminals.
“Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason,” the post said. “Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.”
A separate post included photos of 15 former and current elected officials that said, in all-capital letters, “they should be going to jail on Monday not Steve Bannon!” Those officials included Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris, Mr. Pence, Mr. Schumer and Mr. McConnell — the top leaders in the Senate — and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker.
The list in the second post also had members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, including Ms. Cheney and the former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger, another Republican, and the Democratic Representatives Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, Pete Aguilar, Zoe Lofgren and Bennie Thompson, who chaired the committee.
That all sounds way more reactionary than revolutionary. And, to repeat a theme, the recent Supreme Court ruling makes idiotic, illiberal proposals like the GOP ones listed above entirely plausible.
Kevin Roberts wants Americans to read Federalist No. 70 over the Independence Day break because Alexander Hamilton stresses the importance of a vigorous executive. So I did read it — and I’m not sure Roberts either read or comprehended the whole thing.
No doubt, Hamilton praises the virtues of a vigorous, unitary executive as compared to collective executives like, say the Roman Consuls. But Roberts failed to notice an important reason for why Hamilton preferred a unitary executive — to know who to blame for corrupt actions:
Responsibility is of two kinds — to censure and to punishment. The first is the more important of the two, especially in an elective office. Man, in public trust, will much oftener act in such a manner as to render him unworthy of being any longer trusted, than in such a manner as to make him obnoxious to legal punishment. But the multiplication of the Executive adds to the difficulty of detection in either case. It often becomes impossible, amidst mutual accusations, to determine on whom the blame or the punishment of a pernicious measure, or series of pernicious measures, ought really to fall. It is shifted from one to another with so much dexterity, and under such plausible appearances, that the public opinion is left in suspense about the real author. The circumstances which may have led to any national miscarriage or misfortune are sometimes so complicated that, where there are a number of actors who may have had different degrees and kinds of agency, though we may clearly see upon the whole that there has been mismanagement, yet it may be impracticable to pronounce to whose account the evil which may have been incurred is truly chargeable….
It is evident from these considerations, that the plurality of the Executive tends to deprive the people of the two greatest securities they can have for the faithful exercise of any delegated power, first, the restraints of public opinion, which lose their efficacy, as well on account of the division of the censure attendant on bad measures among a number, as on account of the uncertainty on whom it ought to fall; and, second, the opportunity of discovering with facility and clearness the misconduct of the persons they trust, in order either to their removal from office or to their actual punishment in cases which admit of it….
I clearly concur in opinion, in this particular, with a writer whom the celebrated Junius pronounces to be “deep, solid, and ingenious,” that “the executive power is more easily confined when it is ONE”; that it is far more safe there should be a single object for the jealousy and watchfulness of the people; and, in a word, that all multiplication of the Executive is rather dangerous than friendly to liberty.
In other words, for Hamilton a principal virtue of a unitary executive is to identify who is responsible and accountable for actions that arouse the suspicions of the citizenry — and to punish them where appropriate. The idea that this executive should be immune from legal consequences if he were to abuse his power is the exact opposite of why Hamilton wanted a unitary executive. Hamilton wanted the president to be able to take bold actions - and he also wanted the chief executive to also bear responsibility for abuses of power.
In other words, the president of the Heritage Foundation is either too stupid or too craven to know that his second American Revolution would undermine the actual American Revolution we celebrate today.
248 years ago today, America’s Founding Fathers declared their independence from Great Britain, explaining that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
None of that paragraph sounds anything remotely like what the Donald Trumps or Kevin Roberts of the country are proposing. As someone who would like to keep the American Republic, I would suggest that for the good of the country, all citizens should recognize that Trump’s campaign platform is not merely stupid and illiberal. It is downright un-American. And on this Fourth of July, I would encourage citizens who value the principles of the American Revolution to fight like hell to keep the Republic we have and defeat those who wish to take it from us.
Happy Independence Day!
The odds of that pernicious outcome have decidedly increased over the past week.
Thanks for this, Dan. As coauthor of an Intro American Politics textbook titled Keeping the Republic, now being revised for its 12th edition, this Franklin story and all its implications are always on my mind. Trying to write that revision right now, in real time, while all these events are taking place is a bit paralyzing. When I read the quotation from Kevin Roberts about the country being able it avoid bloodshed if the left just surrenders quietly almost made me physically ill. I hadn’t heard the whole speech and wasn’t aware that he was relying on Federalist #70 for his defense of the Court’s immunity ruling. Of course he assumes most won’t read it so thanks for putting it out there. Such an important argument — the Constitution isn’t perfect (though, quite possibly, perceptible) but the whole point is to hold power accountable and limited, even though the whole enterprise is more complicated and risky than the Articles of Confederation.
I wonder what kind of contortions you have to go through in your brain to believe that Hamilton would have been okay, or even happy, with a revolution to empower the executive over all the branches and the citizenry, with the intent to fulfill an illiberal Christian Nationalist agenda through the mechanism of an amoral psychopath.
I can’t get over my constant surprise that the Constitution is being so thoroughly undermined from within while most of us continued to hold our faith in the guardrails. We titled our book Keeping the Republic 25 years ago because it was apparent this could happen — It was in progress long before the arrival of Trump. But it is amazing how much the acceleration of the destruction can be due to one truly amoral, self-interested human being.
Here's another thought that extends this analysis. It's plain that this has been a steady counter-revolutionary movement gathering steam since 1964. You'd think it would at least slightly pain the older conservatives who used to do a lot of flag-waving and Constitution-celebrating as a patriotic counterpoint to their vision of an unpatriotic left to find themselves embracing talk of coups, violent suppression of enemies, and a lack of interest in the Constitution (I mean, we have a SCOTUS judge who is more interested in 16th Century English law as a binding precedent than the Constitution). But it evidently disturbs very few of them and I think what that shows is that they were only happy to live in a Constitutional republic as long as it wasn't *really* all that democratic, free or equitable--as long as the laws on the books and the enforcement of those laws accepted racial underclasses, the second-class status of women, and barriers to elite status. Once the U.S. started to be more like what its laws and ideals clearly implied, then a course was set for overturning and suppressing not just the new consensus about American liberty but all the people associated with producing that consensus.