When the children of Israel clamored for a king, so that they might rely on him to protect them from foreign invaders, the prophet warned them that “he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.”  God had been their sovereign, but they wanted what the other nations had.  So He gave them what they wanted.

Any system of government, from a democracy to an aristocracy to a monarchy, is capable of drowning its people in tyranny.  “I see no infallible criterion for defining the nature of a government, except its acts,” wrote John Taylor of Caroline in Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated (1820).  “If the acts of a monarchy, aristocracy and democracy are the same, these forms of government are to a nation essentially the same also.  To contend for forms only, is to fight for shadows.”

How, then, should we define the nature of a republic?  The word itself was batted around by all of the Founding Fathers, but its usage varied.  John Adams, who favored aristocracy and “balanced power,” wrote that the only “rational” definition of republic is “a government, in which all men, rich and poor, magistrates and subjects, officers and people, masters and servants, the first citizen and the last, are equally subject to the laws.”

Taylor assailed this sort of “republic,” which puts its faith in the “rule of law.”  Answering Adams in 1814 (An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States), he asked how this was any different from the government from which they had declared independence.  What guarantees that the law to which everyone is “equally subject” is just—or good?

[T]he bishop would be subject to law in receiving his benefice and his tythes, the labourer, in paying them; a nobility is subject to law in exercising its privileges; a corporation, in growing rich by the aid of its charter; a bank, in collecting from a nation, usury upon nominal money; and a king, in receiving a million, and expending thirty millions annually in corruption and patronage, at the national expense.

Adams’ imagined government would counter this injustice with a “balance of power,” by which each class, emerging “naturally” according to a divine distribution of talent, would find equal representation.  But do such classes really arise “by nature,” according to “God’s design”?  Taylor argues that Adams’ classes are artificial—special interests created by laws and sustained by government.  (Government’s creation of a standing army, for example, creates a “soldier class,” a military interest.  Central banking creates a banking interest.  Etc.)  And man’s lust for power being what it is, these artificial classes would (did) seek to advance their standing among the others, if not dominate them altogether, even taking the moral high ground for doing just so.  “One tyrant may thank God that he is not another tyrant.”

During the infant days of the United States, the means by which the federal government was creating this phony aristocracy was, according to Taylor, its control of the economy, through central banking and taxation—unjust transfers of wealth from one interest to another.

Wealth, established by law, violates the principle, which induced the American states to wage war with Britain.  It separates the imposer from the payer of taxes.  No nation would tax itself to enrich an order or separate interest.  When therefore a nation is so taxed, it must proceed from the power of the order itself, which is invariably the imposer and receiver of the tax; whilst the rest of the nation is the payer.

For Taylor, a true, sustainable republic is not characterized by a “balance of power” among artificial interest groups but by self-government.  “The distinguishing superiorities of our policy, are, the sovereignty of the people; a republican government, or a government producing publick or national good; and a thorough system of responsible representation.”

Who, then, are these sovereign “people,” and what is this “good”?

The people are the farmers.  At the time of the War of Independence, 95 percent of Americans were engaged in farming.  And as many as two thirds of the farming families owned their own land.  The prospect of owning a farm was what had made the colonies attractive in the first place.  The wealth they sought in America was not cash but crops.  But this way of life had been threatened by a distant central government that was cash-strapped and weary from financing its own imperial adventures.  The small colonial farmer found it difficult to hold on to his land when the crown began to manipulate the money supply.  Slapping taxes on him and stifling free trade only made things worse.  What had once been thought a vast land in which a man could own his own farm, pass it on to his son, and help to establish his other children on farms of their own threatened to become a land of tenants, subservient to the central government.

The Federalists’ “consolidated republic” threatened to do just the same.  Federalist fiscal policy created new interests, a new Court Party of paper wealth.  These sundry interests could not live without the farmers, yet they must live off them.  “Mankind are united by the necessity for subsistence in a common interest,” Taylor wrote to Adams.

Those who furnish the subsistence, pay all the taxes.  As subsistence flows from the earth, that may be called the mother of men, liable to make all the disbursements they need.  Hence, all, or nearly all taxes, must be ultimately paid by agriculture, and ought of course to be inflicted by her . . .

According to the Jeffersonian tradition, of which Taylor was the greatest exemplar, the farmer is capable of self-government.  His is the only vocation that is “natural”—that is not a creation of government.  He depends on God to sustain him.  His hands know the soil and the hard work necessary to cultivate it.  His product sustains his family and his community.  His people and his soil are his interest.  Thus, he takes up his arms to defend hearth and home in the local militia, and the mantle of statesman when called upon—all the while eager, as Taylor was, to get back to his land, to the plow.  “And the interdependence of such solid citizens,” wrote M.E. Bradford, “all of them capable of honor in each other’s eyes, all with a share in the patria, is the closest we can come to the providentially provided Garden or ‘golden age’ under the present, unpropitious dispensation.”

This is the true republican ideal—a nation of farmers.  It abounds not it laws but in corn.  Its people are defined not by party affiliation or political law but by the mores majorum, the “customs of the fathers.”  It is the agrarian republic Cato wrote of when he spoke of his ancestors who, “when they would praise a worthy man,” would say “good husbandman,” “good farmer.”

Those who would see a republic restored in our time should first seek to be worthy of that adulation, in the season allotted each of us before we return to the earth from whence we came.

This article first appeared in the May 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

John F. Kennedy’s court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., popularized (though he did not invent) the phrase “the imperial presidency” in his book of the same name.  Yet a decade and a half before Schlesinger published his partisan attack, masquerading as political history, on Kennedy’s old foe Richard M. Nixon, a more serious student of the American political tradition, James Burnham, had already written everything that Schlesinger got right, and much more that Schlesinger got wrong.

Burnham’s 1959 book Congress and the American Tradition is his most conservative, and most consistently underrated, work.  Asked by publisher Henry Regnery, in the wake of the McCarthy hearings, to write a defense of Congress’s investigatory powers (which are never mentioned in the Constitution), Burnham gave Regnery much more: a serious work of political history that revives the Framers’ understanding of the nature and role of Congress and places that understanding within the Anglo-American (and more broadly European) political tradition.

What Burnham saw, and what Schlesinger and so many others later failed (and continue to fail) to see, is that the legislative power of Congress is as much (if not more) a constituent part of federalism as it is of the separation of powers.  Burnham makes a persuasive argument that the structure of the legislative branch, as the Framers conceived it, was intended to prevent the sovereignty of the several states from being subsumed into the sovereignty of the federal government—which, he rightly recognized, meant the power of the executive branch: the imperial presidency.

The federal executive was never meant to be a national office in the sense that we find it today.  The president was to act as the head of state when one was required, but more importantly, he was to ensure the faithful execution of the laws passed by the states in Congress assembled: that is, the laws that the representatives of each state agreed were in the common interest of all of their states.

But the evolution (or devolution) of the American constitutional system—both through formal amendments, such as the 17th, which provided for the direct election of U.S. senators, and through the growth of the population beyond the bounds that could be foreseen by the Framers and the destruction of traditional culture—has destroyed the understanding of Congress as an assembly of states gathered to create legislation in their common interest and, consequently, allowed the executive branch to usurp, not only the powers of Congress, but of the states themselves, and of their citizens.

There is a way back, but it requires senators and congressmen to forget everything they think they know about the role of Congress.  As long as Congress is regarded as an assembly of individual legislators and simply one of three branches of a national government, the centralization of power in the executive will continue, because the very aim of Congress is wrong.

Should each state delegation begin approaching legislation with an eye toward the good of its state, however, perhaps something of the original understanding could be recovered.  Rather than look to Republican legislators to thwart the plans of Democratic presidents (and vice versa), states that began to approach federal legislation as South Carolinians or Illinoisans or Arizonans might begin to question whether such legislation is really in the interest of the people they represent.  Such patriotism, it is true, seems unlikely; but the current economic crisis and a massive federal debt that will never be repaid may open up opportunities.  In the near future, all federal mandates are likely to become unfunded federal mandates, increasing the burden on the states at the very moment when they are least able to bear it.

In normal circumstances, economic self-interest is a poor substitute for the ties of kith and kin, but in an age when the latter are denigrated, perhaps the former stands a better chance of bringing about change we can believe in.

This article first appeared in the May 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Classical republicanism cannot survive a modern social and political anomaly that no political tradition before the postmodern era could possibly have envisioned.  That is the rise of an elite that is revolutionary, not conservative or even establishmentarian.  A republic characterized by a bicameral government in which both the upper house and the executive branch are hostile to the traditional notion of an establishment is antithetical to the work as well as to the vision of the American Founding Fathers—in fact, of every republican theorist and statesman.  The resulting chaos is as great as if Louis XIV, instead of attempting weakly to accommodate the revolutionary spirit that succeeded in toppling the French monarchy, had himself become an enthusiastic convert to Jacobinism.  A society in which the destructionists, the antiestablishmentarians, and the professional political and cultural sappers are not only drawn from, but actually constitute, the elite class is the most extreme case of the world turned upside down.  Unfortunately, the world cannot survive upside down, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee standing on their heads for the rest of their lives.  The situation is as unnatural to human society as a country run by the inhabitants of a mental asylum would be, and as sustainable.

Alexis de Tocqueville thought that a true aristocracy must be based on land ownership.  He was right.  When the material prosperity and the political and social power of an upper class, or “elite,” are based on something other than land, which is an actual portion of the bounded national territory, the establishment eventually ceases to care for, or feel a commitment to, their country, its people, and its future.  The transition from landed to industrial wealth in the 19th and 20th centuries weakened that commitment, without destroying it completely.  It was left to the postmodern globalist economy—based on abstract wealth, on information, and on electronic communications—to erase altogether the attenuated loyalties of the elite class.

Over half a century ago T.S. Eliot, in Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, had his say on the insufficiencies of the meritocracy as compared with the virtues of traditional aristocracy.  By definition, meritocrats rise on their merits.  They also fall on them, as they are supplanted and cast down by rising individuals who contest their hold on society’s top niches, in the same manner that a coalition of nomad lions seizes a pride from older or weaker males, or those with less prowess in combat.  While meritocrats are capable of making individual contributions to society, they, their families, and, more importantly, their descendants do not remain long enough at the top to establish a system of dominant values and guiding traditions for future generations to preserve and follow.  Consequently, while talent and ability are always renewing themselves, the permanent things come to be regarded as transient ones, dependent upon social whim and fashion, while the traditions that bind and develop a society over time are denied a chance to develop.

It has been suggested that a particular type of educational institution might be devised that is capable of training a responsible elite class.  That, of course, is what the French have been attempting since Napoleon founded the lycée system.  In fact, something of the sort has existed in the United States since World War II, when James Conan Bryant of Harvard proposed that “democracy” be made synonymous with an equal opportunity for all to enter the meritocracy (which would then be democratically entitled to lord it over the lives of the great mass of commoners).  Robert B. Reich, President Clinton’s secretary of labor, in his book The Work of Nations (1992), paints a portrait, as devastating as it is fawning, of what he calls the “symbolic managers”: the latest incarnation of the exclusively educated New Class whose narcissism, social irresponsibility, and contempt for their social and intellectual inferiors makes Marie Antoinette look like Jane Addams.  Noblesse oblige can be inherited, but never learned.

Bertrand de Jouvenel thought that power could be defeated only by cells created by itself that, in time, would work to destroy power from within and usurp its place.  Such may indeed be the case with power in America.  Yet it is hard to imagine how the constituent members of such a cell, nurtured within the body of the Beast, could have the faintest notion of the principles of republicanism, in fact of the classical tradition itself.

This article first appeared in the May 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

On November 26, 1798, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Taylor that we need one more thing to complete the Founding Fathers’ work:

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution.  I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of our Constitution.  I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush understood that the people would not pay taxes to pay for their unpopular wars.  They could only be financed by borrowing.  The cost had to be hidden.  Yet, the cost must be paid, and the cost of evading the basic democratic check is horrific: The citizenry is alienated from the government.

On September 6, 1789, Jefferson admonished James Madison from Paris that the country should get straight, “at the threshold of our new government,” how we are going to keep debt from destroying the democracy.  Jefferson’s premise, which he believed to be “self-evident,” is that one generation cannot—either morally or in fact—bind another.  It follows that “No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.”  The “earth belongs in usufruct [trust] to the living . . . [T]he dead have neither powers nor rights over it.”  If one generation can charge another for its debts, “then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation.”  Jefferson continued: “The conclusion then, is, that neither the representatives of a nation, nor the whole nation itself assembled, can validly engage debts beyond what they may pay in their own time.”  Madison wrote back that he generally agreed but thought debt was justifiable if it built a project that benefited the future taxpayer—a useful bridge, for example.  Jefferson answered that the power to borrow was too dangerous to allow exceptions—any exception would expand to destroy the prohibition.

Madison’s argument is plausible, but Jefferson’s camel’s-nose-under-the-tent concern was right.  No government will stay within Madison’s exception.  World War II, the last time this country could make any kind of legitimate case for a benefit to future generations, was in fact financed 47 percent by pay-as-you-go taxes, which provided $137 billion out of a total cost of $304 billion.

Almost all of our debt is what Jefferson called “Louis XV debt.”  “Suppose,” Jefferson wrote Madison,

Louis XV . . . had said to the moneylenders of Holland, “Give us money, that we may eat, drink and be merry in our day; and on condition you will demand no interest till the end of thirty-four years, you shall then, forever after, receive an annual interest of 15 per cent.”  The money is lent on these conditions, is divided among the people, eaten, drunk, and squandered.  Would the present generation be obliged to apply the produce of the earth and of their labour, to replace their dissipations?  Not at all.

Jefferson could not get his 1798 amendment adopted, but the country got more chances to adopt Jeffersonian principles in 1994, 1995, and 1996, when Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA) proposed a Balanced Budget Amendment.  At the time, the national debt was large (about four trillion dollars) but could have been dealt with.  It was not yet a perpetual debt.

Senator Nunn called his legislation the “Jefferson Amendment.”  It required that Congress balance expenses with revenues.  The public consistently supported Nunn’s amendment by 75-percent margins.  The states, which must balance their own budgets, would certainly have ratified Nunn’s amendment, making it part of the Constitution, if the Senate would have submitted it to them.  Nunn needed a two-thirds vote in the Senate and came very close—within a few votes, time after time.  But he was defeated by the Clinton Cabinet, which argued that the economy would crash if the federal government couldn’t borrow.  A New York senator said the amendment’s passage could “lead to the devastation of the banking industry.”  With the defeat of the Nunn amendment, the boat sailed for the Republic.

Our present situation is the same as Jefferson’s hypothetical, except our lenders are mostly Chinese.  The country is burdened with an accelerating Louis XV debt.  Are we stuck?  Are future generations obliged to apply the produce of the earth and their labor to pay for past dissipations?  “Not at all.”

His spiritual home was his farm in Braintree, and the institutions of New England represented to Adams about as happy a framework for republican government as mankind could hope for (and Adams knew more about the history of republics than any other American of his generation).  He desired a federal republic that, first, could protect the New England nation and, second, keep the larger confederation intact.

If there was anything really “novus” in the novus ordo seclorum, it was truly limited government—a “law to limit law.”  For probably the first time in history, constitution-makers (on local, state, and national levels) consciously tried to divide sovereignty, to keep it from locating in any one place, interest, or office.  This went against all conventional political wisdom, but it perfectly reflected the fierce local patriotism of diverse peoples in several preexisting colonial (or state) polities who agreed that it was necessary to combine into a workable whole.

James Madison famously called their solution “partly national and partly federal”—a phrase he would regret when the Hamiltonians got their hands on the system.  But to a New Englander such as Adams the covenantal origins of the federal—from the Latin foedus (“covenant”)—idea seemed to be ample protection against national power as well as ample opportunity for unity.  To Adams, the key was balance.  Balance required avoiding “simple” sovereignty in any one class, interest, or function of government—giving it rather “in fact, as well as morally,” to the “whole body of the people.”  “My opinion is and always has been,” he wrote, “that absolute power intoxicates alike despots, monarchs, aristocrats, democrats, Jacobins, and sans-culottes.”

Adams learned the technique to achieve balance from his practical experience in drawing up the Massachusetts constitution of 1780.  It required “mixed” government—in his mind, an American version of the ancient political problem of “the one, the few, and the many.”  By balancing the functions of government, putting a small or big power here, snatching some of it away and putting it there, the legislative, executive, and judicial sovereignties could also be controlled.  Mixed government, Adams and many others of his generation knew, might still result in centralization even at the state level, so he wrote into the commonwealth (a synonym, in his mind, for republic) the historic and traditional rights of its citizens, frequent elections controlled at the local level, and the authority of the towns to ratify and also to be perpetually represented as communal bodies.  It gave Massachusetts a strong government: one capable of acting, but one that was still on a tight leash held by the people.

Adams’ Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was probably the most influential model of the age.  Its striking similarities to the U.S. Constitution of 1787 testify to that, although, of course, Adams was not in Philadelphia that summer.  He was, however, present in the central government during its first 12 years.  If he had at times been a republican enthusiast, by 1800 Adams was convinced that Jeffersonian Republicans and Hamiltonian “high” Federalists were ideologues, alike practitioners of the “science of Idiocy.”  As parties, they ate each other’s waste: “Hogs of Westphalia are a saving brood. / What one lets drop, the other takes as food,” he wrote in 1815.  He still held that the federal constitution was “the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen,” but its balance was evermore in jeopardy.

Adams was an agrarian federalist.  He loved real property, local government, and family life, and thought there was a considerable amount of virtue in Americans, in general, and New Englanders, in particular.  He was suspicious of plutocracy in all its forms and in all its locations—banks, the military, government.  He had no more use for “state sovereignty” than he did for its nemesis, nationalism.  He wanted a modest, even isolationist, foreign policy (he always thought his greatest service to his country was keeping it out of war with France in 1798) that promoted exchange but not alliances.

Adams often judged the character of a nation by how carefully its farmers tended their manure piles.  Such a man is not likely to become a despot.

This article first appeared in the May 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

This is not a quibble with words.  To talk of the Republic inclines one to think of America as a single political society in the manner of Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln.  In this view, the states are service agencies created by the sovereign will of the American people in the aggregate.  That will is expressed through the central government, which, for all practical purposes, has the final say on the limits of its powers.  This means that the states are merely administrative units of a unitary American state.  If so, they are not republics at all, but counties.  This is how Lincoln viewed them.  He asked, “What is this particular sacredness of a State? . . . If a State, in one instance, and a county in another, should be equal in extent of territory, and equal in number of people, wherein is that State any better than a county?”  Lincoln was tone deaf to the deep social bonds rooted in place and historic identity that are essential to the republican tradition—the bonds that made it rational for Socrates to take the hemlock and Jefferson Davis to say that if his state seceded he would “hug [Mississippi] to his heart,” and that compelled Robert E. Lee to risk all to protect his beloved Virginia.  A Lincoln scholar, and an admirer, recently acknowledged that “[Lincoln] was intimately attached to almost no one, and this was how he believed community relationships–local, state, and national–should best function. . . . Lincoln’s imagined America was a nation of strangers.”  This is a perfect picture of a modern unitary state, modeled on that of Thomas Hobbes, with an all-powerful central authority guaranteeing rootless and egoistic individuals their “civil rights.”

It is this unitary state, “one and indivisible,” that Lincoln and the Republican Party meant when they spoke of “the Republic.”  But such a regime is no more a republic than is the “republic” of the French Revolution or the Peoples’ Republic of China.  When Lincoln looked at Virginia he could not see a genuine political society two-and-a-half centuries old; one that was the leader in forming the American federation; fabled in song and story; and known as the mother of presidents and the mother of states (including Lincoln’s own).  All he could see was an aggregate of individuals in rebellion against “the Republic”—the central government of a would-be Hobbesian unitary state.

Before Lincoln’s “republican” rhetoric, Americans most often described their polity as a “union,” a “federation,” or a “confederation.”  And when it was described as a “republic” or a “nation,” it was usually understood to mean a federation or union.  For example, in a speech celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Constitution, John Quincy Adams describes America as a “confederated nation,” held together by “kindly sympathies” and “common interests.”  And he went on to say that, should these social bonds fail, “far better will it be for the people of the disunited states to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.”  Thirteen years later Adams would sign a document stating that the annexation of Texas would justify the secession of New England.  That is the spirit of American republicanism—rooted, as it must be, in a bold acknowledgment of state and local sovereignty.

The first step toward restoring genuine republicanism is to invert the Lincolnian inversion of republican language by describing America as a federation, not a republic.  Today, such speech might appear odd and even radical.  But there is no alternative.  Talk of “restoring the Republic” cannot escape the connotations of  the inverted Lincoln-ian “Republic.”  But that regime does not need restoration.  Not only is it flourishing, it is now on steroids.

This article first appeared in the May 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

In order to understand what the American president was meant to be, you have to look at the long period before the American War of Independence.  For well over a century the people’s representatives struggled with royal and propriety governors, empowered agents of a centralized power with an agenda of its own.  The American Revolution (not very revolutionary) happened when the royal governors fled to the nearest British warship, and the people’s representatives in each colony-now-state remained undisputed sovereigns.

It was understood that an executive power was necessary—a magistrate to see that the laws were enforced and the safety of the state was guarded.  Unlike the royal governors, the chief magistrates created by the new constitutions were beholden to their legislatures.  In most cases they were chosen by the legislature and served short terms, often only a year.  They had no veto power and very little appointive power.  Pennsylvania had a three-man executive.  They were not even expected to be Cincinnatus, except in emergencies; Gov. John Rutledge of South Carolina, for example, carried out his duties to his occupied state from horseback.  Executive power, clearly, was regarded as a necessary evil that had to be hemmed in.

The presidential office described in the Constitution of 1787 was in many ways an anomaly in history and a departure from settled understanding.  It carried great potential for abuse, all of which has been realized.  There were many (Federalists) who feared the people and who wanted a powerful executive to lend force and dignity to the new general government.  Others accepted as a necessity that there must be a head of state to deal with European monarchies and agreed that, if the chief executive was to enforce the laws, he had a reasonable right to choose his officers.

But note that in appointments and foreign relations the president was to work closely with the senators, representatives of the states.  It was long questioned whether he even had the right to remove officers who had been approved by the Senate.  Until Andrew Jackson, no president thought he had the right to veto a bill just because he did not like it.  He had to believe it was unconstitutional.  We now live in a world in which many people think of the president as “commander in chief” of the government or even of all of us.  But the Constitution meant only that he was to be the civilian chief operating officer of the Armed Forces.  The organization and rules of the Armed Forces were to be created by Congress; and, in fear of an executive misuse of the military—so familiar to the classically educated Founding Fathers, who were also living in the age of Bonaparte—appropriations for the Armed Forces could never be made for more than two years.

The imperial presidency is a recent development.  Andrew Jackson, through his popularity and choleric temper, slightly expanded the profile of the executive office.  Lincoln, of course, usurped extraconstitutional authority with gay abandon.  But it is interesting that most of his abuses of office did not become immediate precedents.  When Grant left office in 1877, things returned to something resembling normal.  Lincoln was never worshiped as a god while he was president—only afterward.  Theodore Roosevelt made the president into a public celebrity as well as a chief magistrate.  His cousin Franklin was adored by millions as a kind of father and protector.  It was perhaps not until Kennedy that the president was actually worshiped by servile people unfit for free government.  And even there, the Kennedy adulation was to a considerable extent a trumped-up creation of the fawning media and was not nearly as widespread as they would have us believe.  It was Bush Minor who was our first emperor, able to do almost anything with only the merest murmurs of dissent from the Congress or the public.

For some, this is a good thing.  (Of course, they will scribble away about the dangers of the “imperial presidency” when the other party is in power.)  As our Founding Fathers knew, there are always many who seek safety and profit by flattering and clinging to the coattails of power.  One fears that too much of the populace today cannot distinguish Cincinnatus from the horse he rode in on, much less from Caesar.

The destruction of states’ rights and the centralization of power unchecked in the federal government have contributed to the creation of the imperial presidency.  Even so, the office could not have developed as it has without the compliance of Congress.  The Founding Fathers did not imagine that the Congress would be so faithless in its own duty that it would abet presidential usurpation.  Nor was it foreseen that the president would become a party leader with an agenda to force through for the satisfaction of his supporters.  And, of course, the complications of world wars, real and imagined, have played a large role.  Beyond all this, there seems to be a sick spirit of leader worship across the land.

Could the president ever again become what he was intended to be—a person of recognized ability and integrity who is charged temporarily with seeing that the laws are faithfully executed and necessary relations with other governments are carried on—and nothing else?

That was American orthodoxy for most of our history, but beginning in 1937, the Court—frightened by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s overwhelming electoral success and concerned by his charge that the justices were applying “horse and buggy” notions to their interpretation of the Constitution—began to rewrite that document, in accordance with the President’s preferences.  The first thing the justices changed was the allocation of power between the state and federal governments, as they began to permit Congress to regulate virtually all of American life.  In the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s, the justices, often influenced by trendy psychological or sociological theories, took control of state education, of state and local law enforcement, and of legislative reapportionment.  In 1973, out of whole cloth, the Supreme Court created a constitutional right to abortion, and, in similar acts of judicial legerdemain, the Court forbade mandatory prayer and Bible reading in America’s public schools.

Campaigning for president, Sen. John McCain repeated George W. Bush’s claim that, if elected, he would appoint judges who would understand the difference between judging and legislating.  Barack Obama, a former constitutional-law professor who is more closely in tune with the current biases of the academy, declared that he would choose justices who had some sense of what it meant to be an outsider, or a member of a minority, or a teenage mother.  Obama was strongly signaling that he believes the judicial role is to change the law in a more progressive direction—toward the reallocation of resources and power to minorities, women, labor, and other favored constituencies of the Democratic Party.

Obama was the choice of a majority of the American people, and, alas, popular opinion now seems to reject what we Americans have always gloried in: the rule of law itself.  Can anything be done?  Have we completely lost our cherished notion that ours was supposed to be “a government of laws and not of men”?  For decades Republicans thought that, if only Republican presidents could put conservative jurists on the Court, there could be a return to the jurisprudence of the Framers, but with some exceptions (Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito), this strategy has failed.  Some—most notably, Chronicles contributor William Quirk—have urged Congress to control the Court by “stripping” it of jurisdiction to meddle in areas better left to the states, but that requires a Congress committed to reining in judicial abuses.  We now have a congressional majority that celebrates them.  Worse, the few efforts that Congress has undertaken to strip jurisdiction—in the area of wartime executive discretion, for example—have been blatantly and wrongly rebuffed by a majority of the Court itself.

Probably the only means of restoring the Republic’s original understanding of law is to remind the American people how that understanding came to be.  The Framers, having studied the manner in which English monarchs misused the courts to serve their own purposes, sought to ensure that our law would protect citizens’ most important interests: life, liberty, and property (after John Locke’s formulation).  Those Framers also understood that there could be no order without law, no law without morality, and no morality without religion.  They were, in short, the antithesis of the secular humanists who are now ascendant in our country.  Those in charge are currently in the process of imperiling private property itself, and one can only hope that they do not extend their efforts to endanger life and liberty.  Out of the current chaos, however, may come a realization of an earlier, better way.

This article first appeared in the May 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Free Men of a Republic
by Thomas Fleming

ROUND TABLE

Can the Republic Be Restored?

“A Limited Presidency” by Clyde Wilson
“Adams’ Federalism” by John Willson
“Just One More Thing” by William J. Quirk
“Is America a Republic?” by Donald Livingston
“Reviewing Judicial Review” by Stephen B. Presser
“The Classless Republic” by Chilton Williamson, Jr.
“The United States, In Congress Assembled” by Scott P. Richert
“A Share in the Patria” by Aaron D. Wolf

NEWS

The Martyrdom of Chas Freeman
by Justin Raimondo
Failing the Israel Lobby’s litmus test.

REVIEWS

Infelix Culpa?
by George McCartney

Richard Green, ed.: Graham Greene: A Life in Letters
Norman Sherry: The Life of Graham Greene

plus

Catharine Savage Brosman on Robert Gildea’s Children of
the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914

John M. Vella on James Pereiro’s “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement:
At the Heart of Tractarianism

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Spain: Antifascists on the March
by Christie Davies

VITAL SIGNS

Arms: How Things Change Out From Under Us 
by Paul Craig Roberts

Education: A Teacher Complains   
by Carey Harrison

COLUMNS

Sins of Omission      
by Roger D. McGrath

Under the Black Flag   
by Taki Theodoracopulos

Letter to the Bishop   
by Joe Ecclesia

The Rockford Files     
by Scott P. Richert

European Diary    
by Andrei Navrozov

In the Dark    
Watchmen, Duplicity
by George McCartney

What’s Right With the World
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS
The Alphaville Dictionary   

POETRY
Rough Ocean and
The Color of the Ocean Last Summer
by Jonathan Chaves

ON THE COVER

Cover art by Scott P. Richert and Sandy Faulkner.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

The title of Alan Moore’s 1986 comic-book series Watchmen alludes to the Roman satirist Juvenal, who asked, “Who watches the watchmen?”  He was cynically warning that there was no way to control an inconstant wife since she would easily beguile any guard put in charge of her.  Juvenal’s question has often been invoked in purely political discussions ever since.  How does a society protect itself against its supposed protectors?  In the aftermath of the Bush administration’s expansion of executive powers following September 11, the query’s contemporary relevance is quite patent.  But as I watched Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Moore’s comic book, it occurred to me that the question might be leveled with yet a different purpose.  Just who is watching this film?  And how is it affecting them?

At the theater I attended, the meager audience comprised mostly adolescent boys—the film’s demographic, as the marketers say.  They were watching a ponderous curriculum that included a paranoid history lesson, a quasi-medical demonstration of the body’s various breaking points, and a graphic disquisition on sexuality complete with demonstrations of foreplay and intercourse.  In short, Watchmen is a $150 million educational film as serious and solemn as such productions come, only with higher production values.

Its history lesson willfully alters known facts but only to get at essential truths.  It’s 1985.  America won the Vietnam War in 1975 with the assistance of Dr. Manhattan, a blue radioactive superman, along with a league of other more or less normal superheroes.  As you might imagine, the Soviet Union has been neutralized in the bargain.  The Russian leaders quake at the thought of Dr. Manhattan, who can bend matter to his will.  They’re understandably reluctant to get bent.  And, did I mention, Richard Nixon is in his fifth term, scornful as ever of the traitorous East Coast Harvard Establishment?

Nixon’s still that paranoid chucklehead.  He can’t help himself.  With the war over, he’s forbidden his superhero allies their usual fascist fun: no more suiting up to kick scoundrels in the cause of truth, justice, and the American way.  Odd.  You’d think Nixon of all people would have continued to support the superheroes’ extralegal civic-mindedness.  Weren’t such shenanigans his stock-in-trade?  Most of the superheroes have submitted to the new dispensation, going quietly to seed until one of their number, the nihilistic Comedian, is tossed to his death from his high-rise apartment.  Enter Rorschach in fedora, trench coat, and a white cotton mask on which black-ink shapes are forever shifting in homage to his name.  This hero is more paranoid than Nixon.  He decides there’s a plot afoot to bump off all his cronies, and it must be stopped.  Meanwhile, Ozymandias, a superhero-cum-businessman with a fixation on Alexander the Great, scolds the titans of the automotive and oil industries in his Park Avenue redoubt.  “Your oil is a drug, and you are the pushers,” he coolly informs them as he proposes an alternative energy system of his own to be given away.  Lee Iacocca protests.  “Free is just another word for socialism.”  Good old Lee.  Too bad he has to take a bullet in the forehead in this alternate history lesson, but, as Ozymandias almost says, saving the world’s not for sissies.  Moore’s outlook is decidedly Stalinist.  And like Uncle Joe, he’s not at all shy about it.  To make the utopian omelette, it’s necessary to break a few eggs.  Quite a few, as it turns out in Moore’s story, and as it did in more conventional history.

Moore’s alternate history creates a scenario dear to left-wing sensibilities.  How satisfying to have Nixon still around!  Fictively speaking, his continuing presence cuts through the ambiguities of the recent past, including Ronald Reagan’s inconvenient triumph over communism, and reveals a terrifying truth.  America is a fascist state run by a power-mad elite.  This justifies everyone’s suspicions, gives substance to every grievance.  It doesn’t get better than this.

Faithfully rendering Moore’s lurid imaginings, Snyder has also retained the comic’s mood of adolescent petulance.  The world of Watchmen is being ruined by uncool adults, and the kids shouldn’t stand for it.  Adult-in-chief is Nixon, party pooper extraordinaire.  His squelching of superhero antics may seem paradoxical, but it’s really just a manifestation of his middle-class obsession with square ordinariness.  He’s intent on squeezing every ounce of hipster fun out of life, leaving the world a dank and crummy place, its inhabitants teetering between resignation to dowdy conformity, on one hand, and indulgence in furtive, unseemly pleasures, on the other.  Take Dan Dreiberg, a.k.a. Nite Owl, the superhero obviously modeled on Batman.  Nite Owl has permanently parked his owl-visaged hovercraft beneath his Manhattan brownstone, hung up his cape, and acquired a gut of spreading proportions.  Meanwhile, just a few blocks from his home, porno theaters thrive under garish neon; prostitutes accost pedestrians, offering the promise of easy thrills; and criminals brazenly rob and beat the citizenry.  As Rorschach says in his neo-noir growl, New York City “stinks of fornication and bad consciences.”  Yikes!

But let’s not overlook Snyder’s lesson in physiology.  When Nite Owl and his girlfriend, Silk Spectre, are cornered by murderous street thugs, they take on the bad guys with cool aplomb.  They grab the knife-wielders’ arms, breaking them in two.  Splintering bones rip through muscle and flesh, their gleaming white tubes oozing purple marrow.  Great fun.  In another scene, Rorschach, temporarily imprisoned for his vigilante behavior—he peremptorily introduced a child murderer’s skull to a meat cleaver—traps a fellow inmate’s arms in his cell’s bars.  Then, to get at Rorschach, another inmate power-saws through the entangled arms in living color.  This is not to be missed by kids hankering to perform emergency-room amputations.  I also liked the scenes in which dogs tear apart the remains of the aforementioned girl.  Not much left for the hospital, but quite illustrative nevertheless.

And then there’s the sex ed.  The usually impotent Dreiberg finds superhero activity better than Viagra.  After a mission, he’s suddenly in the mood.  He and Silk Spectre strip their latex costumes and enjoy languorous sex in their hovercraft floating over Manhattan.  Very educational indeed.

Despite a few ironic moments, Watchmen is too self-important to laugh at itself.  The tone is high Dostoyevskian with Nietzschean accents.  Unfortunately, the material is comic-book kitsch.

So, who’s watching the Watchmen?  Our children, I’m afraid.  I wonder what they will take from its lessons.

Writer-director Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity offers a nimble adult alternative to Snyder’s flat-footed schoolboy lessons.  The film is perhaps the most amusing, intelligent romantic-espionage-thriller-mystery-comedy to be released in more than a decade.  It has the additional recommendation of providing potent relief for the headache corporate America has recently visited upon us.  And this, despite its principal actors, Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, neither of whom possesses the kind of light touch usually required by such material.  Gilroy has fashioned a glib, time-shuffling script with pacing and dialogue so nearly foolproof that even the dour, sneering Owen and the strained, impetuously toothy Roberts are unable to sink the movie.  In fact, Gilroy, who directed 2007’s masterful Michael Clayton, plays on their liabilities to add an extra comic dimension to the film.  Owen’s natural glower makes him the perfect foil for Roberts’ manic need to one-up him.  In the film’s elaborate commercial espionage plot, he’s always a step or two behind her machinations and finally descends into a state of perpetual guardedness in her presence—quite proper for a man who distrusts the woman he loves.

In secondary roles, the always welcome Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti play pharmaceutical CEOs locked in mortal combat, and they make the film positively hum with a heartening malice.

The story begins with Roberts and Owen meeting cutely in Dubai.  She’s with the CIA, and he’s formerly of MI6, now freelance.  He tries a variation on the don’t-we-know-each-other gambit, and she counters, “Are you drunk?”  As it turns out, each has something the other wants.  Roberts has her body; Owen, some secret intelligence.  Soon, they’re in his room, where the usual happens discreetly off-camera.  For Roberts, however, it’s not love at first bedding.  She calmly drugs Owen and walks off with his intelligence both literally and figuratively: the two oldest professions in dazzling action.  For the next five years, Owen plies his trade round the world but stays ever on the alert, hoping he might one day see this mystery woman again.  Then, on a sunny day in Manhattan, he spies her in Grand Central Station, and the chase is on.  Or so it seems.  This is a movie about appearances that have only a glancing relation to reality.  Not until the end do we see just how glancing.  The mystery is abetted by the film’s constant time-shuttling.  Cleverly unhelpful directions announce “Five years later,” “Two years earlier,” “18 months before,” and, most piquantly, “12 hours later.”  This temporal gamesmanship is one of the film’s many delights.  Another is the titanic battle between two pharmaceutical CEOs over who will cash in on the next stupendous breakthrough in their industry’s personal-appearance sector.  Appearances again.  Tighten your focus.  Or maybe not.  In this film, the closer you look, the less you see.

Wilkinson and Giamatti make their first appearances at an airport, not at all cutely.  Their corporate jets sit outside a hangar, their nose cones pointing menacingly at each other.  Each stands alongside his respective jet with his entourage of polished yes-men.  The CEOs regard each other balefully and then march toward each other at an accelerating pace.  The sequence is silent, but we can tell from their twisting mouths and thrusting gestures that they’re spewing vitriolic insults.  Once in reach, they begin to grapple old-manfully.  The episode is executed with all the panache of an inspired Laurel and Hardy routine.  The silliness of the paunchy, lumbering executives, the consternation of their hired help, the gleaming white planes paying mute witness to the human cargo they’ve just disgorged—it’s all a joy to behold.  These are the arrogant, pampered beneficiaries of hundred-million-dollar bonuses, and nothing could be more satisfying than to watch them roll around on the tarmac biting each other’s calves.

The battling corporate chieftains unwittingly bring Roberts and Owen together again.  They are now scheming corporate spies, and they know an opportunity when they see one, and . . . But that’s as far as I’m going.  It would be treasonous to divulge more.