Though our task is daunting, our moral duty remains.
Spencer Klavan’s thoughtful reflections on America and its future are measured and understated, reflecting the general mood of ambivalence and uncertainty surrounding the nation’s 250th birthday. Those of us old enough to remember the 1976 Bicentennial have been struck by the dissimilarity in the public mood. Julie Ponzi, writing for Chronicles, noticed this back in 2024: “The hype surrounding both the 1976 Bicentennial and the 1987 Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution was so intense that both events inspired in me an intense interest and curiosity about American history.” Now that the semiquincentennial year is officially upon us, the lack of enthusiasm is even more evident. We don’t seem to know what we should be celebrating, or even whether we should.
With Donald Trump as president, we are at least spared the tiresome spectacle of President Kamala Harris semi-coherently hectoring us about systemic racism and the founders’ alleged hypocrisy. The alternative to such monotonous negativity, however, has not been triumphalist chest-thumping. Even Donald Trump, the country’s most boisterous patriot, hasn’t said very much, yet, about the occasion. I’m sure he will give a stirring speech on July 4, but it won’t be enough to allay several nagging questions: If the achievement of the founders is still worth celebrating, how much of their legacy remains? Does the Constitution continue to work the way it is supposed to? Do the American people possess the moral virtues and healthy opinions necessary for self-government? Can we even speak anymore of one “American people”?
The citizens of the United States, like the founders themselves, have always been cautiously optimistic about the future, as Spencer’s essay notes, but reasonable people can certainly find room for doubts. The gap between this lingering hopefulness that America was and still is good and the Left’s relentless negativity is another indication of how much the country has changed over the last 50 years.
The mid-1970s were just about the time when liberals gave up (half-heartedly and incompletely) their faith in progress. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson could still aspire to building the “Great Society” and declare that he and his fellow liberals were “in favor of a lot of things and…against mighty few.” Fifteen years later, Jimmy Carter would deliver his famous “malaise” speech, questioning whether America was still destined for an ever-brighter future. Today, it is fair to say that leftists are against a lot of things: racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. What, if anything, they are in favor of is far from clear.
How liberalism came to believe in History as a form of moral and political evolution and then lost its faith in progress is a complicated story. What matters is that both the optimistic and pessimistic versions of historicism see the past as something to be overcome. By contrast, the American founders believed that their insights into the principles of good government drew from and built upon the wisdom of the past. For that reason, the framers’ political science has been properly described as “partly ancient and partly modern.”
This deep respect for the roots of Western civilization in Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome informed American education through the end of the 19th century. “Liberal” education was understood with reference to the Latin liber, the root of both freedom and book. Education was seen as training in liberty. Perhaps the most striking example of how deeply this view characterized the American outlook appears in Booker T. Washington’s mild exasperation with former slaves who, according to Washington, should have been acquiring practical skills, but instead threw themselves into the study of classical languages. In Up From Slavery, Washington writes:
During the whole of the Reconstruction period two ideas were constantly agitating in the minds of the coloured people, or, at least, in the minds of a large part of the race. One of these was the craze for Greek and Latin learning, and the other was a desire to hold office…. The ambition to secure an education was most praiseworthy and encouraging. The idea, however, was too prevalent that, as soon as one secured a little education, in some unexplainable way he would be free from most of the hardships of the world, and, at any rate, could live without manual labour. There was a further feeling that a knowledge, however little, of the Greek and Latin languages would make one a very superior human being, something bordering almost on the supernatural.
Within a few decades, this profound respect for the past would come under attack. Influenced by the German philosophers of historicism, higher education came to mean the conquest of the old by the new. Woodrow Wilson captured the radical essence of this view when he declared in 1914, “I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” Education from this point on would gradually invert the framer’s expectation that greater learning would be commensurate with more enlightened patriotism and enlarged civic responsibility. Today, university education is not the bulwark but the enemy of republican government.
The mind-numbing dogmas promulgated in our elite colleges are destroying the very ability to think. As a result, Americans are divided not only by radically different opinions about our history and whether America was or remains good; we can’t even agree on basic questions of justice, morality, and human nature. Indeed, the most prestigious schools teach that there is no such thing as human nature. For a great many people today, the self-evident truths of the Declaration are self-evidently absurd. The mark of an elite education, 250 years after the Revolution, is to regard the laws of nature and nature’s God as white supremacist mythology.
In 1780, while in Paris, John Adams wrote to his wife, remarking that he considered it his duty to study “the science of government.” Then he pens several memorable lines that I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about:
I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
Music and poetry are fine, but I don’t have much interest in tapestry or porcelain, and I wouldn’t fully trust a man who does. In any event, I think Adams got a little carried away in expecting that Americans would ever be able to leave behind the study of “Politicks and War.” Unfortunately, we can’t simply summon a prudent understanding of these subjects out of the ether. The “science of government” Adams referred to depends on premises and conceptual frameworks that have been assiduously undermined.
The salvation of the republic, therefore, must rely on reviving the common sense that still exists among ordinary people. Even that won’t be easy: the MAGA base, I’m sorry to say, has serious problems of its own. The heartland is awash in drug use, shallow commercialism, sexual promiscuity, and civic illiteracy. The odds of solving all these problems are, frankly, long. But so were the odds of defeating the British Empire and securing independence.
My teacher, Harry Jaffa, used to say that education is only possible “one soul at a time.” We might begin where John Adams (and Woodrow Wilson) began: with fathers and sons. There is hard and urgent work to be done repudiating the indecency and dogmatism that have corrupted the American universities. That work might best be done in the home rather than the classroom. Only when this great mass of moral and intellectual error is removed can the conditions for a genuine education in liberty become possible again. If the next generation can undertake the study of “Politicks and War” with clear eyes and unclouded minds, then perhaps their children might navigate what Klavan calls “a dangerous new period in our republican history.”
There are no guarantees in this daunting task; yet that does not absolve us of our moral duty. To quote a line from Addison’s Cato, one of the most popular plays of the founding era, “’Tis not in mortals to command success; but we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.”
