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by Jason Ross (EIRNS) — Jul. 04, 2025 As
the United States government careens about, occasionally moving in what
appears to be a useful direction, and sometimes doing quite the
opposite, an observer might recall the famous response from Benjamin
Franklin when asked what sort of government the assembled
representatives had agreed upon. “A republic,” he is said to have
replied, “if you can keep it.” This
exchange took place the day after the September 17, 1787, final meeting
of the Constitutional Convention. That meeting opened with a speech
from Franklin, in which he said
that the new government “can only end in despotism, as other forms have
done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need
despotic government.” Has
the U.S. reached that point? Has it forgotten its revolutionary roots,
its devotion to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” to
become, instead, a mirror of the British Empire? The answer to that question—and similar ones in all nations—is up to us. After
the convention, Franklin took the occasion of commenting on the carving
on George Washington’s chair at the convention, to express his hope.
The back of the chair bore the shape of half of a sun above a horizon.
“I have often and often, in the course of the session, and the
vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that
behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising
or setting,” he said, “but now at length, I have the happiness to know,
that it is a rising and not a setting sun.” Today,
the presence of a rising sun can be seen nowhere more clearly than in
the growth of China, whose growth can be seen, in part, as a revival of the American System, with Chinese characteristics. In
his diplomatic visits in Europe, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is
bringing up, explicitly, and implicitly, the most consequential question
today: Will the dominant powers of the 20th century work to advance a
multi-focal world, or will they mire themselves in zero-sum thinking? Franklin
was one of a line of thinkers and doers who brought the world its first
modern republic, whose industrialization and economic rise reflect the
unlimited potential of human creativity, and whose actual founding,
begun more than a century before its Revolution, brought the best of
European thought to a land where it could prosper without oligarchism. It
is for us, the living, to be dedicated to their unfinished work, to the
great task remaining before us: the elimination of geopolitics and
oligarchism in human relations, a transformation made possible by basing
human affairs on the potential of the world’s greatest resource—the
beautiful human species. |