Can We Keep Our Republic?

When asked the type of government the Constitutional Convention had created, Benjamin Franklin famously replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Franklin and the Founders understood that given a flawed human nature and its passion for power, no form of political order can survive if it is not continually maintained and defended against attempts to dismantle it in order to empower one faction at the expense of others, thus diminishing their freedom.

Since the election of Donald Trump, we have been watching one of the most serious assaults on the Constitutional Republic in our history. With the current efforts of the Democrat-controlled House to engineer public support for impeachment, this three-year attack is intensifying. The climactic battle will be fought on November 3, 2020 when America goes to the polls to select the president. On that day will be decided not just which party will take the White House, but which vision of government will rule us: The Constitutional order of popular sovereignty, federalism, and divided powers; or a technocratic oligarchy of centralized and concentrated power.

Or to put it more starkly: Can we keep our nation of free citizens, or will we become one of managed clients?

This competition of political philosophies is not about Donald Trump’s alleged violations of mythic “democratic norms” or “presidential decorum.” In fact, the bipartisan evocation of such codes of political manners reflects the preference for the technocratic oligarchy that has ruled and misruled the country since the Second World War. Its roots go back even farther than that. The first progressives of the late 19th century were frankly technocratic, disdainful of separated and balanced powers, and advocates of the new “human sciences” that they claimed had made obsolete the wisdom of the Founders, the guidance of tradition, and the lessons of history.