THE FOUNDERS FEARED DEMOCRACY WOULDN’T LAST—-MANY NOW AGREE
BY
ALLAN C.BROWNFELD
American democracy is in trouble. The January 6 assault on the U.S.Capitol, the multiple indictments of a former president and other top officials, make it clear that something is wrong. Professor Henry Brady of the University of California at Berkeley, surveying the current state of American democracy, comes away increasingly pessimistic. “I’m terrified,” he said. I think we are in bad shape and I don’t see a way out.”
Even as they created the new government, the Founding Fathers feared it would not last. “Democracy never lasts long,” John Adams observed. “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
In a letter to Edward Carrington, Thomas Jefferson wrote that, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” He noted that, “One of the most profound preferences in human nature is for satisfying one’s needs and desires with the least possible exertion; for appropriating wealth produced by the labor of others, rather than producing it by one’s own labor…the stronger and more centralized the government, the safer would be the guarantee of such monopolies; in other words, the stronger the government, the weaker the producer, the less consideration need be given him and the more might be taken away from him.”
More than 200 years ago, the British historian Alexander Tytler argued that, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury—-with the result that democracy collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship.”
It is interesting to note that the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution also marked the 200th anniversary of the publication of Edward Gibbon’s classic work, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
At a conference held in Washington,
D.C.in November 1975 the question faced by the scholars from throughout the country was: “WhyDid Rome Fall? Are we next?” Speaking of Gibbon’s work, Jaroslav J. Pelikan, Dean of Yale’s graduate school, said that it was a “benchmark of historical imagination.” He spoke of changing attitudes of contemporary America toward the family, of the disappearance of common myths, of moral relativism and self-indulgence. In the Roman Empire, Dean Pelikan noted, only a minority could indulge its senses “Everybody’s entitled to be depraved now,” he pointed out.
Recalling Gibbon’s account of the bread-and-circus mentality, Pelikan said that, “The Roman people considered the circus as their home, their temple and seat of the republic.” Yet, he declared, the circus had not endangered statesmanship. “The difference is that those people did not vote,” he noted, and that they therefore could indulge themselves more responsibly than in today’s America, where democracy depends on the citizen’s fragile knowledge and indifferent suffrage.
History, unfortunately, seems to be on the side of those who have seen fit to draw parallels between contemporary America and yesterday’s Rome. Freedom and liberty have existed in few places and for short periods of time. The Founding Fathers created a system of limited government, checks and balances and clearly defined powers. Instead of having faith in man’s goodness , they looked at the world’s history and concluded that the best protection for freedom was not in an utopian faith that man would act properly and justly,but instead in a system which would not give any man too much power over any other.
The government created by the Founding Fathers is approaching its 250th anniversary and is the oldest existing form of government in today’s world. No other country lives today under the same form of government as it did 250 years ago—-only America. But the future remains increasingly uncertain. In his fable of the wolf and the lamb, Aesop,who lived in the 6th century B.C.,said,”Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant or an enemy, must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves.” Whoever has unlimited power, even if it is a majority of people themselves, has tended historically to become that tyrant or enemy. If the United States is to avoid the decline which overtook Rome, it will require a conscious effort. If history simply takes its course, the future of freedom may not be bright.
As Irving Kristol has written, “Our revolutionary message —-which is a message not of the Revolution itself but of the American political tradition from the Mayflower Compactto the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution—-is that a self-disciplined people can create a political community in which an ordered liberty will promote both economic prosperity and political
participation.to the teeming masses of other nations,the American political tradition says: To enjoy the fruits of self-government you must first cease being ‘masses’ and become a ‘people,’ attached to a common way of life, sharing common values, and existing in a condition of mutual trust and sympathy as individuals and even social classes.”
The Founding Fathers knew that self-government was difficult and arduous. Benjamin Franklin said that the Founders were bestowing to future generations , “A Republic if you can keep it.” Whether the Republic endures is up to us, for we, in effect, are America. It has endured for nearly 250 years and will continue to endure as long as we care enough to see to it that liberty is jealously guarded. The challenge, then, is ours.
On a personal note, I worked in the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives and the Office of the Vice President for many years. Republicans and Democrats did not view themselves as “enemies.” Think of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. Together we won the Cold War and advanced civil rights. Democracy cannot work if we are unable to disagree without being disagreeable and are unable to compromise. Whether our society, the freest in the history of the world, survives into the future is entirely up to us.
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