BAZENHEID, Switzerland, 20 April—When I arrived here earlier this month for another of the lectures I am invited to deliver twice-yearly, my remarks were partly written and partly still in sketched-out notes. That evening, jet-lagged after a difficult flight, we were invited to sup at the home of the two energetic organizers of these conferences. In the course of our conversation, our host and dear friend proposed question he considers essential to our moment. “How does one live in dignity,” he asked, “in the face of all that goes on in the world around us?” Poignantly enough, he added, “It is the same question many Germans asked in the 1930s and 1940s.” A German by background (and now a Swiss citizen), he then related a story he once heard, as if to suggest the infinite number of responses available to those who enter upon this matter. There was an ordinary German living during the Nazi regime’s grotesque excesses. When he left for work each morning and whenever he was in public, he made sure to carry two briefcases, one in each hand. “He was never obliged to salute in allegiance to the Reich.” Our host’s question has never since left me. It is indeed essential to our circumstance, it seems to me. So, in its way, is his little story. What follows is the lecture I gave some days after the evening I recount. While I did not think of them this way as I finished turning notes into text, these remarks are in part my reply to the compeling question posed across a dinner table the evening of our arrival. In preparing for publication I have expanded on certain of the points I made at the lectern the afternoon of 7 April. ■ It is well-understood, among Americans who think about such things and I assume among some or many others, that those known as “the Founding Fathers” agonized from the very beginning about the durability of the democratic republic they dedicated themselves to creating. Jefferson, who I admire even if he has always struck me as a little angelic in his expectations, was especially insistent that if the new American republic were to rely on national debt to finance itself it was bound to surrender its virtue to corruption. Always there has been this doubt—at least among the wise if not the unaware and those susceptible to confusing myths and realities. On 17 September 1787, a prominent Philadelphia salonnière named Elizabeth Willing Powel put a blunt question to Ben Franklin. The Constitutional Convention had just concluded its business; Franklin was 81 and infirm. “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Willing Powel asked. “A republic, if you can keep it,” was Franklin’s famous reply. Have we Americans failed to keep it? This is our question, or one of many, in the age of Donald Trump. This concern with permanence or impermanence has been present in most or all modern attempts to revive the classical republic, the res publica of the Romans, “the thing of the people.” Machiavelli addressed this question in the early 16th century, famously in The Prince, a little less so in Discourses on Livy, both written as various crises had brought the Florentine Republic to the brink of collapse. In 1975 a celebrated historian named J.G.A. Pocock published a book he titled The Machiavellian Moment. Pocock meant that occasion when a young republic must suddenly face the possibility that its ideals may fail it and its institutions may give way to instability or one or another form of reaction or despotism. Americans have arrived in their “Machiavellian moment,” I mean to say, and this is to put the case kindly. I suggested a moment ago that our question is whether we have failed to keep our republic, to stay with Franklin’s phrase. Now I confess to a profound ambivalence: In a commentary I published as the Epstein files were made public, I allowed of no question: “We have failed to keep it,” I wrote. “Now what?” is the true question of our time. ■ I have been a little fascinated to walk around Washington since I started doing so during my university years. All those Greek pediments, those Doric and Ionic columns, all those marble steps, the statuary, the grandeur of Pierre L’Enfant’s design. They give a powerful impression of eternal republican principles. This is precisely the intended purpose of all that stone: to ward off the subliminal fears of instability—the never-spoken anxiety that history may sweep away what has been founded in the name of republican virtue. But the columns and cupolas of Washington also reflect a paradoxical problem: In offering those walking among them the reassurance they needed to overcome their anxieties, they induce an attitude of complacency and—its close cousin—irresponsibility. “Our proud democratic republic—it will endure eternally, and we need do nothing but partake of its fruits”: This became the collective presumption among Americans. And this was precisely what Franklin warned against when he replied—a little archly, a little skeptically, I would say—to Elizabeth Willing Powel. Jefferson and Franklin were right to caution those who would follow them, as history makes perfectly plain. A little corruption here, a small favor there, a corner cut here and another there, bribes from lobbyists, nepotistic appointments, misuses of office—all of this ever more routinely until Washington comes to resemble a circus of jobbery and unscrupulousness: It will not matter, for the unshakable republic will remain. At bottom this derives from the exceptionalist consciousness Americans have cultivated since… —since well before Jefferson, Franklin, et al. made America the United States. America’s political history is replete with these kinds of stories, narratives of misconduct, such that it is a question, at least in my mind, whether the United States was actually what we call in shorthand “a greedfest” from the start. It is a profoundly unsettling question, but at this point it must be asked. Was the republic the Founding Fathers established ever any more, at its true core, than a veneer of democratic ideals and law super-imposed atop a festival of greed and self-interest in which, as they say, all rules are made to be broken? I don’t see a need to dwell on this point, as there is a good way to summarize it. What America has lost over the decades and centuries is the principle of disinterest, which is essential, surely, to any kind of successful republicanism. To clarify, as even most Americans fail to understand this term: To be “disinterested,” as distinct from “uninterested,” means to act for the commonweal without reference to one’s personal interest in any given matter. Maybe my implication here is already plain: When we speak of America as a failing or, indeed, a failed republic, we speak first of a psychological condition. The fate of democracy, whether it endures or disappears, is decided in the minds and hearts of its citizens before it is decided in legislatures, in elections, in courts, or in any of the other institutions on which a republic rests. ■ “Who invented democracy?” I was encouraged to consider this as we prepared for these sessions earlier this year. It is a vital question, and as Cara Marianna pointed out as we spoke of it before joining you, it is important first of all to “de–Westernize” our replies: Many societies not part of what we call “Western civilization”—not least some of the Native American nations that predate the United States by many centuries—developed quite sophisticated form of democracy. An American economist named Hyman Minsky once observed, “There are as many varieties of capitalism as Heinz has pickles.” We can borrow the thought to say there are as many kinds of democracy as there are attempts to establish it. Switzerland’s direct democracy, if you don’t mind my saying so, is an excellent case in point. Democracy, like capitalism, is not a static object. It is not chiseled in marble and granite, eternally impervious to all vicissitudes. It is a living thing, always dynamic, and, so, must be rejuvenated by each generation that inherits it. Sometimes this amounts to reform, or renewal, or restoration, or at the extreme even reinvention—and I consider these various terms to mean different things. Whichever the case, those living bear the responsibility of—here I will borrow from what a dear friend once said of marriages—this comes to the responsibility of “watering the plant.” ■ Americans are now faced with the radical decay of their democracy, which I assume is obvious even from an ocean away. Lest anyone be inclined to romanticize the past—the pre–Trump past, let’s say—the American republic has been drifting toward a state of crisis for many years. At the risk of repeating my remarks on previous occasions, I date this to the events of 11 September 2001, when—to put this simply—the structure of our collective psychology collapsed as dramatically as those tall towers in Lower Manhattan. History, from which America was supposed to be immune, abruptly arrived at that moment. Our great republic was suddenly as subject to the ravages of time as any other polity. This was the true shock of that day. The reality of impermanence was forced in our faces, and very few of us were prepared for this. Two years later something else happened. When the regime of George W. Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003, Americans took to the streets in protest quite as they had during the Vietnam war days. My understanding is that demonstrators could be counted in the millions. And then what happened was that nothing happened. The Bush II regime went ahead with America’s latest war with supreme indifference to the citizenry. As Cara Marianna has explained to me—I having missed this point—it was then Americans began to assume they were impotent in the face of a new kind of power—sequestered power, unanswerable power. Over the decades since we have seen the steady erosion of Americans’ constitutional rights and the ever more evident wall behind which power operates in America. The Trump regime did not set the American republic on this path, but it has radically quickened the pace of the decay I describe. Free speech is under constant attack, along with academic freedom, the right to assembly, and so on. Reflecting Trump’s autocratic tendencies, power is now exercised with indifference not only to the citizenry but to law itself: We now have, and I want to stress this phrase, lawlessness in the name of law. A little while ago The New York Times conducted a lengthy interview with Trump, during which the newspaper asked him if there were any limits on his exercise of power. “There is one thing,” Trump replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He went on to express his indifference to law—specifically to international law, but the record indicates he meant any law, all law. So we are faced now with a choice among those terms I just mentioned. What is the task of our time: Is it to reform our democracy, or restore it, or somehow renew it? And, so many Americans having failed to date to recognize their responsibility to water the plant, as I am putting it, the question immediately arises whether any of these is any longer possible. Maybe we are left with the task of reinvention, but it is not at all clear whether even a project of this magnitude is any longer plausible. “A republic, if you can keep it,” Franklin said two hundred thirty-nine years ago, and he was speaking to us, we the living, as well as to the Philadelphia socialite whose question prompted this remark. What if we simply have lost it? ■ In 1946 a French novelist named Georges Bernanos, a man of very mixed persuasions, published a book that came out in English four years later with the title Tradition of Freedom. This topic was much on the minds of European intellectuals at the time. The Bernanos book appeared a few years after Fromm published Escape from Freedom and just as Sartre was finishing the trilogy of novels he called The Roads to Freedom. All of the writers were concerned with questions of engagement, individual commitment, and spiritual exhaustion. Parenthetically, the original, 1946 title of the Bernanos book was La France contre les robots: In specific terms Bernanos intended the book as a critique of the Americanization of postwar societies—the “robotization” of Western civilization, whereby technological efficiency threatens to destroy all notions of freedom and replace all human values. Here is a passage in the Bernanos book that is pertinent to our topic, and I wish very much it weren’t. It falls at his conclusion and I will read it in full:
To the extent this passage bears upon our time—and it seems to me dreadfully to our point—it places a severe limitation on all thoughts of a restoration or reinvention. By definition, to restore or renew or reinvent requires people dedicated to the undertaking, and I see little sign most American citizens are even thinking about any such endeavor. What is next, then?—to revert to my earlier question. ■ Machiavelli, just prior to the collapse of the Florentine Republic, urged the formation of citizen militias to defend against the threat of Medici power. After the Republic fell in 1512 and it was too late for such a defense, he famously advocated rule by a prince capable of restoring republican order. He wrote The Prince a year later. Machiavelli’s prince was preoccupied with power, as is well-enough known, but this power was to be exercised, I would say, according to the principle of disinterest I mentioned earlier—not for his own power but for the Republic’s. The Discourses, written four years later, make this clear. That was five centuries ago. Parenthetically, given the rampant lawlessness of our purported leaders I confess to finding a certain appeal in the thought of citizen militias or some 21st century version of the philosopher king, but that is for another conversation. What about us, now? What are we to do in the face of the condition I named earlier as lawlessness in the name of law? Any useful answer must involve one or another form of disobedience, each of us to determine his or her own kind. And the paradox of our time is that our disobedience must begin by declaring our obedience to law while those charged with upholding it breach it. My mind goes in many directions when I consider this question. One of these is to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor active in the anti–Nazi resistance and who, in 1945, gave his life up for what he knew to be right. In The Cost of Discipleship Bonhoeffer famously wrote of “Cheap grace” and its opposite, “costly grace.” “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves,” he wrote. He meant, to resort to a shorthand I think will hold up, the grace of good intentions without action and the acceptance of the risk action requires of those who take it. I associate cheap grace with passivity, with acquiescence in the face of wrongs. Straight to my point this afternoon, Bonhoeffer wrote that, in this state of cheap grace, “we suppose the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.” It follows naturally that costly grace is the grace of commitment, the grace of risk-taking, the grace of acting according to one’s conscience. “Costly grace,” as Bonhoeffer very finely put it, “is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has.” My mind goes also to another pastor, this one named A. J. Muste, who was Dutch by birth and was noted in America in the 1950s and 1960s as a pacifist, civil-rights activist, and a figure in the antiwar movement. In 1952 Muste published a pamphlet called “Of Holy Disobedience.” I have actually found a copy of this brief tract at a used-book store, and it will be in my mail when I return home. The text is easily available on the internet. Ever the committed pacifist, Muste’s immediate intent in these pages was to encourage young people to refuse military conscription, but the case he makes applies far more broadly. Under the subheading, “The Land of Propaganda Is Built on Unanimity,” he quotes the same Bernanos passage I have just read: There are too many obedient men among us. And he then makes—I am quoting here—“a general appeal… to adopt and practice the great and urgent virtues of Holy Disobedience, non-conformity, regimentation, and war.” If we—we Americans most of all—have not altogether missed our Machiavellian moment, and it is very possible we have, I think it lies in these thoughts, and I will conclude with them. If we have responsibilities in our time of lawful lawlessness, and of course we do, they must begin with acting while accepting the price action exacts, and with learning how to disobey. If you appreciate what you read at The Floutist, please consider a contribution. You can become a paid subscriber by clicking the red tab at the bottom of this post. You can “buy The Floutist a coffee.” Or you can support our work via Patreon. Follow us: @thefloutist. And please share this post. Thank you. Thank you, especially, to all of our paying supporters. Your help makes this work possible. You're currently a free subscriber to The Floutist. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. © 2026 Patrick Lawrence |