In 1916, General John Pershing was sent to lead an expedition against Mexico in retaliation for Pancho Villa’s attacks on American border towns that year. One of his close aides was Captain Hugh Johnson, renowned for his intellectual prowess, and Pershing asked him to lead a study of a background issue that puzzled him. The Mexicans had taken the US Constitution as their model when they drafted their own, but it had not given them any of the strength and stability that the American Constitution had conferred. Mexican democracy was marked by turbulence and volatility, and could hardly be judged a success, and it was this that made the prospects of a lasting solution difficult.
Earlier, the great Latin liberator Simón Bolívar had been forced to admit the failure of Gran Colombia, his dream of a pan-Hispanic empire. All who supported his revolution had only “plowed the sea,” he declared. “There is no faith, no trust in [Spanish] America, neither in individuals nor in nations. The constitutions are books, the treaties are scraps of paper, the elections battles, liberty is anarchy, and life a torture.”1
After making a comparative study of the two constitutions and the two societies, Captain Johnson concluded that what the Americans could count on and the Mexicans lacked was simple: trust—trust between citizens, trust in leaders, and trust in institutions. When it came to the two governments, American citizens trusted their leaders and their institutions, whereas Mexicans had a residual mistrust of politicians and all who held political power. The two constitutions may have been similar, but the two societies were quite different. To express the reason for the difference in terms that Montesquieu and Tocqueville would have used, both the United States and Mexico had roughly the same structures of freedom in terms of the constitutions and the laws, but Mexico lacked what Montesquieu called the “spirit” of freedom, what Tocqueville called the “habits of the heart,” and what was the direct legacy of covenantalism to American freedom and trust.
A century later, it is clear that America has grown more like Mexico than Mexico had grown like America. Covenantalism, reciprocal responsibility, loyalty, and trust have all eroded across American life—in marriages, families, communities, businesses, and public life. Political scandals such as Watergate have triggered steadily declining trust across many American institutions, most notably trust in the Congress and the political class, and the 2016 US presidential campaign was distinguished not only for its relentless nastiness but for the record levels of distrust and the deeply negative attitudes to both candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And the aftermath of the election was even worse.
Yet individual Americans, even presidents, are not the only problem.2 They are significant only insofar as they demonstrate the condition of the American society and the political system itself. One undisputed exception in history was George Washington himself, as his character outweighed both his ideas and his actions, and created trust. Washington was truly “the indispensable man” of the American Revolution, as historian James Flexner described him, and he was so by force of his character rather than his ideas or his eloquence. In this and other similar examples he was a “one man check and balance” on the abuse of power, and decisively so, well before the Constitution framed the principle in law.
Earlier, Montesquieu had underscored the rarity and importance of such character-bred moderation in leaders. “Great men who are moderate are rare: & it is always easier to follow one’s impulse than to arrest it . . . it is a thousand times easier to do good than to do it well.”3 Jefferson wrote in the same vein, “The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this Revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that Liberty it was meant to establish.”4 Similarly, Abraham Lincoln wrote later, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man, give him power.”5
Even Washington’s adversary George III was impressed. When his royal portrait painter, Jonathan Trumbull, told the king that Washington intended to retire to his farm after the Revolutionary War was over, he was surprised. “If he does that,” the king remarked—and Washington went on to do it not once but twice—“he will be the greatest man in the world.”6
Such heroic character shone brighter still when Washington became the first president. Then when he retired and died soon after, the tributes soared higher and higher until he was first elevated into the Moses who had led his people out of bondage and then—in “the apotheosis of Washington”—divinized as the creator, savior, and father of his people. In the more straightforward words of Congressman Henry Lee at his memorial service, he was “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”7 Far more, John Adams added, “For his fellow citizens, if their prayers could have been answered, he would have been immortal.”8
Excessive adulation of this sort, and the impulses toward a powerful civil religion that lay behind it, are naturally suspect today. But those who are zealous in debunking them often go to the other extreme and miss their real significance. For the founders, Washington’s exemplary character was not just the happy fluke of an exceptional individual at an opportune moment, or even the social product of a young nation’s subconscious search for a center of national unity to replace an overthrown king. Its significance was at once simpler and more profound: character, virtue, and trust were a vital part of the founders’ notion of ordered liberty and sustainable freedom, and in a way that is sharply different from today.
Which raises the fifth question on the checklist: Are Americans prepared for the challenge of sustaining freedom?
In my years living in America, I have consistently noted two things to my surprise: The sole American answer to how freedom can be sustained is the Constitution and its separation of powers, and the rest of the founders’ solution is now almost completely ignored.
It was not always so. Historians point out that the modern elevation of the Constitution as the sole foundation and bulwark of American freedom reached its present height only in the 1930s. That was no accident. Significantly, it came right on the heels of a general secularization of American law that has led in turn to a general legislation of American life. The preceding decades were the time when legal contracts were strengthened and sharpened to replace the weakening moral considerations such as character and trust (the “My word is my bond” of an earlier time).
Significantly too, the elevation of the Constitution came after long periods of surprising earlier neglect. Michael Kammen has even written of the recent “cult of the Constitution” and of “the discovery of the Bill of Rights.” The motto of the American Liberty League in 1936 stated this elevated view beyond doubt—“The Constitution, Fortress of Liberty.” The timing and context of that tribute are revealing. The US Constitution and all legal contracts were elevated at the very moment when faith, character, virtue, and trust began to be denigrated and relegated to the private sphere. The framers’ famous separation of powers between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary is unquestionably distinctive and fundamental to the American vision of enduring freedom. But as an answer to how freedom must be sustained, it is neither an original solution nor was it the founders’ complete solution.
For one thing, even the separation of powers was once far stronger than it is today. It originally included a robust view of the rights and powers of local government to balance the power of the states, and of the rights and powers of the states to balance the rights and powers of the federal government—Tocqueville saw the first of these as the seedbed of American freedom, and Alexander Hamilton praised the second as “a double security to the people.”9 Needless to say, this entire dimension has been emasculated, starting with responses to the Civil War and accelerating through the deliberate centralization of government under the progressives and the Depression-era leaders—and climaxing in the last decade.
All in all, this radical loss of local self-government and the unchecked growth of centralized federal government has been the result of three things: old evils such as slavery and new dangers such as terrorism that made it necessary, new technologies and procedures such as computerized bureaucracy that made it possible, and new ideologies such as progressivism that made it desirable. The Fourteenth Amendment and its nationalizing consequences, for example, were the steep but understandable price of rectifying the Constitution’s greatest flaw—the blind eye turned toward slavery. To be sure, the federalizing trend was therefore necessary and inevitable, but what is inexcusable is the lack of a careful, compensating devolution to restore the balance of individual self-reliance and local self-government. Face the facts: the full system of checks and balances that the founders designed has gone, and the shift to the centralized, the elitist, and the bureaucratic has only been reinforced by globalization.
For another thing, as I have repeated so often because it is even more often ignored, the great European commentators stressed that freedom in modern societies must be maintained and assessed at two levels, not just one: at the level of the Constitution and the structures of liberty, and also at the level of the citizens and the spirit of liberty. Focusing solely on the separation of powers at the level of the Constitution is sobering enough, but it misses an equally important slippage at the level of citizens.
For yet another thing, the framers held that, though the Constitution’s barriers against the abuse of power are indispensable, they were only “parchment barriers” and therefore could never be more than a part of the answer. And in some ways they were the secondary part at that. The US Constitution was never meant to be the sole bulwark of freedom, let alone a self-perpetuating “machine that would go by itself.” The American founders were not, in Joseph de Maistre’s words, “poor men who imagine that nations can be constituted with ink.”10 Without strong ethics to support them, the best laws and the strongest institutions would only be ropes of sand.
Jefferson even argued to Madison, who strongly disagreed with him, that because the earth belongs to the living, “no society can make a perpetual constitution. . . . Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”11
More importantly, as Judge Learned Hand declared to new American citizens in Central Park, New York City, in 1944: “The Spirit of Liberty” is not to be found in courts, laws, and constitutions alone. “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to save it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”12 The nation’s structures of liberty must always be balanced by the spirit of liberty, and the laws of the land by the habits of the heart.
All of which means there is a deep irony in play today. Many educated people who scorn religious fundamentalism are hard at work creating a constitutional fundamentalism, though with lawyers and judges instead of rabbis, priests, and pastors. Constitutional and unconstitutional have replaced the old language of orthodoxy and heresy. But unlike the better angels of religious fundamentalism, constitutional fundamentalism has no recourse to any divine spirit to rescue it from power games, casuistry, legalism, litigiousness—and eventually calcification and death.
So reliance on the Constitution alone, and on structures and laws alone, is foolish. But worse, the forgotten part of the framers’ answer is so central, clear, and powerful that to ignore it is either willful or negligent. What the framers believed should complement and reinforce the Constitution and its separation of powers is the distinctive moral ecology that is at the heart of ordered liberty. Tocqueville called it “the habits of the heart,” and I call it the golden triangle of liberty—the cultivation and transmission of the conviction that freedom requires virtue, which requires faith, which requires freedom, which in turn requires virtue, which requires faith, which requires freedom, and so on, like the recycling triangle, ad infinitum.
In short, sustainable freedom depends on the character of the rulers and the ruled alike, and on the vital trust between them—both of which are far more than a matter of law. The Constitution that is the foundational law of the land should be supported and sustained by the faith, character, and virtue of the entire citizenry, which comprises its moral constitution or habits of the heart. Together with the Constitution, these habits of the heart are the real, complete, and essential bulwark of American liberty. A contractual society grounded only in a consensus forged of calculation and competing self-interests can never last. It is as foolish for America to debase its moral currency as it is to debase the American dollar. Freedom requires limited government, but limited government requires unlimited character in the citizens, the habits of the heart.
Before we go a sentence farther, let me be absolutely plain. It would be a cardinal error not to recognize the originality of the modern liberal republicanism of the majority of the American founders and its crucial difference from two other positions: the classical republicanism of Greece and Rome, and the republicanism of the so-called devils party led by Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and others.
The founders’ position was a significant advance on the earlier conception of the relationship between freedom and virtue. In the opening sentence of his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli professed himself to be a revolutionary innovator, like Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, who had discovered new orders in the world. But it was the founders’ generation that gave the world the real “new order of the ages” (novus ordo seclorum), and their vision was in direct and deliberate contrast not only to the classical republicans of Greece and Rome but to Machiavelli and his disciples.
Ironically, the great Florentine used to harp on the purported realism of his insistence that he had found the effectual truth of the matter, in contrast with the utopianism of the republics of Plato and others. But in the name of realism, he was highly unrealistic, as are many contemporary American advocates of realpolitik who ignore the place of human fallibility and the limited but essential place of virtue.
Between the old orders of Athens, Sparta, and Rome, and the “new order of the ages” wrought in Philadelphia lay not only two millennia in time but a chasm in thinking led by such revolutionaries as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, and Hobbes. Among many differences, one is striking above all. Whereas liberty for the Greeks and the Romans was supremely a matter of political reason, virtue, and what they did in public life, for modern people it is also and even more a matter of what is done in private life too, while there is less place for public reason and the common good, and none at all for virtue.
To be sure, Jefferson argued strongly for classical republicanism. He believed, along with many classical, Renaissance, and some Enlightenment republicans, that the newborn American republic could and should be sustained by virtue alone, especially the virtue that was bred by farming and stewardship of the land. (Montesquieu: “The Greek political writers, who lived under popular government, acknowledged no other force able to sustain them except that of virtue.”)13
In strong contrast, the authors of The Federalist, along with other liberal republicans, were insistent that in a commercial, as opposed to a classical republic, virtue alone could never sustain freedom, and that commerce was as important as farming for cultivating virtue. There could be no simple-minded mimicking of the Greeks and Romans, Hamilton declared. “We may preach till we are tired of the theme, the necessity of disinterestedness in republics, without making a single proselyte . . . it is as ridiculous to seek for models in the simple ages of Greece and Rome, as it would be to go in quest of them among the Hottentots and Laplanders.”14
Yet many Americans today have gone to the opposite extreme from Jefferson’s, and one that the founders disapproved of equally. If reliance on “virtue alone” is an unrealistic way to sustain freedom, so also is reliance on a “constitutional separation of powers” alone. If liberty is to endure, the twin bulwarks of the Constitution and the golden triangle of liberty must both play their part. To replace “virtue alone” with “no virtue at all” is madness, and what the Wall Street crisis of 2008 showed about unfettered capitalism could soon be America’s crisis played out on an even more gigantic screen. Leadership without character, business without ethics, and science without human values—in short, freedom without virtue—will bring the republic to its knees.
To put the point more broadly, in human affairs there will always be a limit to “the plannable, the legislatable, and regulatable,” and only the fool or a utopian will try to leap over this built-in boundary. Or as T. S. Eliot wrote famously in The Rock, it is folly to dream of “systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”15 Down that way, and at the point where our brave new realists are foolishly unrealistic, lies disaster for America.
There is still more to be said about the proper place of virtue in guarding freedom. First, some virtue (rather than virtue alone), along with checks and balances, will always be needed because humans play what Aristotle called a “double game.” According to the Bible, we humans are “flawed.” We represent Kant’s “crooked timber of humanity” (“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made,” which itself comes from the Bible: “That which is crooked cannot be made straight” [Eccles 1:15 KJV]). We humans act politically, inspired not only by faith, virtue, courage, honor, excellence, justice, prudence, generosity, and compassion, but also by self-interest, self-preservation, power, greed, vanity, revenge, and convenience—and wise governance must take both sides into account.
In Rome, there was a divided consulship to keep power from falling into the hands of a single dictator, though the clearer Jewish and American separation of powers is required to offset the foolish idealism of trusting in virtue alone. But substantive virtue—and not only a separation of powers—is required to offset the dangerous realities of the negative side of the human double game. Checks and balances by themselves will never be enough.
Second, this urgent and practical need for substantive virtue calls into question two strategies that some Americans count on to fill in for the loss of the founders’ virtue. Both have worked in the past, but neither will work today if there is no place given to virtue at all.
One strategy is to rely on the faux virtue that in a democracy can parallel the faux honor that Montesquieu described in a monarchy. (“In well- regulated monarchies, everyone will be something like a good citizen while one will rarely find someone who is a good man.”)16 Where there is at least lip service paid to virtue, as Rochefoucauld observed famously, “hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue,” so that hypocrisy may sustain a semblance of virtue even where there is no real virtue. People “proud of hiding their pride” can parade their faux virtue of humility, and so on. Bernard Mandeville made the same point in The Fable of the Bees: “The nearer we search into human Nature, the more we shall be convinced that the Moral Virtues are the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride.”17
Unquestionably, that possibility worked well in the past when a broad Christian consensus was in place. There were publicly accepted standards people were supposed to live by and were supposedly living by. Machiavelli’s originality was simply to turn the age-old practice of hypocrites into the newfangled philosophy of statesmen, and so to make “the appearance of virtue” operational rather than virtue itself. This, of course, was a pretend virtue that had no link to genuine virtue at all. Needless to say, this had always been played on skillfully by hypocrites, demagogues, and cynics alike.
But the pretense of virtue requires an essential condition: faux virtue, or hypocrisy, works when real virtue is honored, and there is enough of it to imitate in flattery. For that reason, it will not work as well today because of a double handicap. On the one hand, much of the United States has reached the point where virtue is hardly esteemed at all, or at least not welcomed in the public square, and where vice is often flaunted—“Greed is good,” and the like. Where this is the case, there is no need for hypocrisy to flatter anything but itself, and faux virtue is redundant. On the other hand, under postmodern conditions where knowledge really is power and everything is other than it appears, there is no point even to appearing virtuous, for any true and straightforward virtue is impossible and not worth the imitating.
The second possible form of substitute virtue is the sturdier pragmatic virtue that is driven solely by the requirements of commerce, a functional virtue parallel to the real virtues that Max Weber described as “the Protestant ethic.” Such a virtue, or more properly virtues, was once real and powerful in America, and it provided the thrust that propelled America toward the heights of its economic prosperity. But they too have lost their strength in the contemporary world.
The empire of consumerism has undermined the Protestant ethic, and virtues such as “delayed gratification” have been shouldered aside by the clamor for “instant gratification.” And a prominent and almost comic feature of the American business world are the recurring spasms of concern about “corporate ethics,” though when the spasms have passed, what seems to have been remedied is ever-tightening legal and regulatory compliance rather than character.
But who today acknowledges the gorilla in the room? Read the speeches and the writings of the American founders on freedom, virtue, and faith, and it is impossible not to notice a body of teaching that is clear, strong, and central—themes that, as historian Bernard Bailyn observes, are “discussed endlessly, almost obsessively, in their political writings.”18 Yet somehow these themes are ignored today in the terms in which they were written. For needless to say, the framers’ position raises hackles in many circles, as will the present argument unless considered without prejudice.
For a start, the golden triangle links freedom directly to virtue. In a society as diverse as today’s, that raises the question, Whose virtue? and in an age that prizes toleration it raises the specter of “virtuecrats” itching to impose their values on others. Worse still, the golden triangle links freedom indirectly to faith. I would soften that to a “faith of some sort” and broaden it to include naturalistic faiths too, but it still prompts a barrage of instant dismissals that blows dust in the eyes of anyone trying to take freedom and the founders seriously.
One common line of dismissal is to say that the founders need not be taken seriously. They were only indulging in civic rhetoric for occasions such as July 4. Another approach is to say that the founders referred to religion and republicanism so often because they were children of their times, and their times were much more religious than today’s. Yet another is to argue that while the founders counted on faith to help sustain freedom, two hundred years on Americans have other points of reliance, so that freedom today no longer requires virtue, or virtue faith. Yet another line of dismissal is to say that, as over the contradiction between freedom and slavery, the founders were quite simply hypocrites.
All such objections are important and must be answered, but they are moot if Americans today do not understand the framers’ golden triangle and its importance to sustainable liberty. Unquestionably the framers knew from history and their own experience that the wrong relationship of faith and virtue to freedom had been and would always be disastrous for both freedom and faith.
In addition, political philosophers earlier and elsewhere—most vociferously in France—had linked republicanism strongly with irreligion, along the lines we see today in France, Turkey, and secularist totalitarian countries. An oppressive monarchy and a corrupt state church were seen as one and the same, and republicans longed to be rid of both.
Thus, beyond any question, the way the American founders consistently linked faith and freedom, republicanism and religion, was not only deliberate and thoughtful, it was surprising and anything but routine. In this view, the self-government of a free republic had to rest on the self-government of free citizens, for only those who can govern themselves as individuals can govern themselves as a people. As for an athlete or a dancer, freedom for a citizen is the gift of self-control, training, and discipline, not self-indulgence.
The laws of the land may provide external restraints on behavior, but the secret of freedom is Lord Moulton’s “obedience to the unenforceable,” which is a matter of virtue, which in turn is a matter of faith. Faith and virtue are therefore indispensable to freedom—both to liberty itself and to the civic vitality and social harmony that go hand in hand with freedom.
Burke wrote in full agreement, “Manners [or moral standards] are of more importance than laws.”19 Rousseau had written similarly that mores, customs, and traditions, which are “engraved neither in marble nor in bronze but in the hearts of the citizens” form “the true Constitution of the State” and the “Keystone” of a republic.20
Tocqueville emphatically agreed. His objective in writing Democracy in America was not to turn the French into Americans, for liberty should take many forms. “My purpose has rather been to demonstrate, using the American example, that their laws and, above all, their manners can permit a democratic people to remain free.”21
People today who tout the superiority of their “realism,” who espouse the Machiavellian view, and who reject any place for virtue in favor of self- interest and self-preservation should ponder the logic and lesson of the Civil War. As John Quincy Adams lamented before the war, high ideals and cool judgment were on the side of freedom in the North, whereas passion and eloquence were on the side of oppression in the South. Why? The contrast demonstrated “how much more keen and powerful the impulse is of personal interest than is that of any general consideration of benevolence or humanity.”22 Neither the Civil War nor the civil rights movement could have been won on the basis of the philosophy of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke—or of today’s postmodern thinkers.
But that said, the golden triangle of liberty must be stated with great care. For a start, the word requires in “freedom requires virtue, which requires faith” does not mean a legal or constitutional requirement. The First Amendment flatly and finally prohibits the federal government from requiring faith in any established way. But a proper and positive understanding of disestablishment leads directly to the heart of the framers’ audacity: The American republic simultaneously rests on ultimate beliefs, for otherwise Americans have no right to the rights by which they thrive, yet rejects any official, orthodox formulation of what those beliefs should be. The republic will always remain an undecided experiment that stands or falls by the dynamism of its entirely voluntary, nonestablished faiths.
Also the framers did not believe that the golden triangle was sufficient by itself to sustain freedom without the complementary safeguard of the constitutional separation of powers. That fallacy dogged many classical republics—they trusted too naively in virtue. As Madison warned, faith, character, and virtue were necessary but not sufficient in themselves to restrain a majority from overriding the rights of a minority.
What motives are to restrain them? A prudent regard to the maxim, that honesty is the best policy, is found by experience to be as little regarded by bodies of men as by individuals. Respect for character is always diminished in proportion to the number among whom the blame or praise is to be divided. Conscience, the only remaining tie, is known to be inadequate in individuals; in large numbers little is to be expected of it.23
Faith, character, and virtue were necessary and decisive, but never sufficient by themselves. They must be balanced by the immovable bulwark of constitutional rights, especially for those in the minority.
Above all, the point must be guarded from a simple misunderstanding. The framers’ near unanimity about the golden triangle of liberty did not mean they were all people of faith or they all agreed about the best way to relate religion and public life, or they were individually paragons of whatever faith and virtue they did espouse. In the language of Madison’s Federalist 51, they were “men rather than angels.”
For a start, the framers demonstrated a wide spectrum of personal beliefs. Most were regular churchgoers, for whatever motive, but they ranged from orthodox Christians, such as John Jay and George Mason, to deists, such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, to free thinkers, such as Benjamin Franklin. In addition, the framers argued for different views of religion and public life, ranging from Patrick Henry’s bill to support all churches to Jefferson’s restatement of Roger Williams’s “wall of separation.” And as I stressed earlier, it is beyond question that several of them were distinguished for their vices and hypocrisies as well as for their virtues.
Yet for all these differences, inconsistencies, and hypocrisies, the framers consistently taught the importance of virtue for sustaining freedom, which is the first leg of the golden triangle: freedom requires virtue. As Benjamin Franklin tersely stated, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”24 Or as he stated it negatively in his famous maxims: “No longer virtuous, no longer free; is a maxim as true with regard to a private person as a Commonwealth.”25
“Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty,” John Adams wrote to his cousin Zabdiel in 1776. “The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater Measure than they have it now, they may exchange their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty.”26 Or as he wrote to Mercy Otis Warren the same year, “Public virtue cannot exist without private, and Public Virtue is the only foundation of Republics.” If the success of the Revolution were to be called into question, it was “not for Want of Power or of Wisdom, but of Virtue.”27
A key article in the influential Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776 explicitly denies that “free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue.” New Hampshire went further, substituting for “virtue” “all the social virtues.”28
As these quotations show, evidence for the first leg of the golden triangle is profuse—so much so that it is tempting to reach for one of the multitude of “quote books” that form part of the arsenals on either side of the culture wars. In contrast, works such as Edwin Gaustad’s Faith of the Founders or James Hutson’s The Founders on Religion establish the claim beyond argument, but with the solid reliability of distinguished historians.29
Let me underscore four points that deserve deeper thought because they stand out so sharply from much opinion today.
First, the reason for the need for virtue is simple and incontrovertible. Only virtue can supply the self-restraint that is the indispensable requirement for liberty. Unrestrained freedom undermines freedom, but any other form of restraint on freedom eventually becomes a contradiction of freedom. For Burke, this was the dangerous irresponsibility of the French freethinkers: “They explode or render odious or contemptible that class of virtues which restrain the appetites.”30
Second, the founders went beyond broad general statements on the importance of virtue to quite specific applications, such as the need to integrate virtue in both private and public life. “The foundations of our National policy,” George Washington wrote in 1783, “will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality” (a phrase repeated word for word in his First Inaugural Address in 1789).31 “The foundation of national morality,” John Adams wrote similarly, “must be laid in private families.”32
This tirelessly repeated conviction lay behind the framers’ insistence on the importance of character in leadership. The golden triangle challenges the rulers as much as the ruled. In his “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” John Adams directly addressed the issue of preserving liberty. He concluded that the people “have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge—I mean of the characters and conduct of their leaders.”33 Note the astonishing string of words that today would be naturally associated with terms such as freedom and rights, but which Adams applies to the citizens’ right to know the character of their leaders.
Were the framers correct that character counts in leadership? Many in today’s debate would dismiss their concern summarily. In a day when followers are obsessed with rights and leaders with powers and privileges, mention of virtues is irksome. And with religion widely privatized and the public square increasingly considered the realm of processes and procedures rather than principles, character and virtue are often dismissed as private issues. In the run-up to President Clinton’s impeachment, for example, educated opinion was vociferous that the character of the president was irrelevant as a public issue. For all that many scholars cared, the president might have had the morals of an alley cat, but however shameless he was, his character was a purely private issue. What mattered in public was competence, not character.
But there is another party in the debate, one taught by history and experience to prize the place of character in leadership. Montesquieu even claimed that “Bad examples can be worse than crimes,” for “more states have perished because of a violation of their mores than because of a violation of the Laws.”34
The story of the American presidency, and more recently of presidential candidates, could teach this lesson by itself. “The destruction of a city comes from great men,” Solon warned the Greeks. “It’s not easy for one who flies too high to control himself.”35 “The passions of princes are restrained only by exhaustion,” Frederick the Great remarked cynically about absolute monarchs. “Integrity has no need of rules,” Albert Camus wrote more positively, and its converse is that no amount of laws and regulations can make up for lack of integrity in a leader.36
George Reedy, press secretary to Lyndon Johnson, looked back on his experience close to the Oval Office: “In the White House, character and personality are extremely important because there are no other limitations. . . . Restraint must come from within the presidential soul and prudence from within the presidential mind. The adversary forces which temper the actions of others do not come into play until it is too late to change course.”37
One of the strongest but strangest endorsements of the importance of character comes from Richard Nixon himself. “C.Q.” (character quotient), he claimed, was just as important as IQ in political leadership and in choosing personnel.38 Ironically, no one need look further than his own administration for graphic illustrations of his point. Led by Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, not to mention the president himself, the towering egos, prickly vanities, bitter jealousies, chronic insecurities, and poisonous backbiting of his White House virtuosi were a major factor in the tragedy of his own undoing.
According to this party in the debate, character is far from a cliché or a matter of hollow civic piety. Nor is it a purely private matter, as many claimed in the scandal over Clinton’s affair with a White House intern. History shows that character in leaders is crucially important. Externally, character is the bridge that provides the point of trust that links leaders with followers. Internally, character is the part gyroscope, part brake that provides the leader’s deepest source of bearings and strongest source of restraint when the dizzy heights of leadership mean that there are no other limitations. Watching and emulating the character of leaders is a vital classroom in the schooling of citizens. “In the long run,” James Q. Wilson concluded, “the public interest depends on private virtue.”39
Whatever position one takes on the issue, it would be rash to dismiss the framers’ position as empty rhetoric—not least because the framers expressly denied that it was. “This is not Cant,” John Adams wrote to the same cousin, commending his teaching of virtue, “but the real sentiment of my heart.”40 That freedom required virtue, they believed, was a matter of political realism and a serious part of the new science of politics.
Third, the framers’ conviction about freedom’s need for virtue is part of their engagement with the great conversation that runs down the centuries from the Bible and the classical writers of Greece and Rome. To dismiss their point without realizing why and how they entered the conversation would be presumptuous, and to pretend today that we have no need for the wisdom of the great conversation would be foolish. For example, in May 1776 when John Witherspoon, president of Princeton and the “great teacher of the revolution,” preached his landmark sermon on the eve of the Revolution, he openly addresses the classical concern about the corruption of customs and the passing of time—both of which for him are the product of sin and the corruption of human nature.
In his support of the coming revolution Witherspoon was bold and unequivocal—“I willingly embrace the opportunity of declaring my opinion without any hesitation, that the cause in which America is now in arms, is the cause of justice, of liberty, and of human nature.”41
But as the only minister who was to sign the Declaration of Independence, Witherspoon was no jingoistic cleric indiscriminately sprinkling holy water on the muskets on the eve of battle. Instead, he looked ahead to the moment after the euphoria of victory when citizens should appreciate the need for “national character and manners.” Nothing is more certain, he warned, than that a corruption of manners would make a people ripe for destruction, and laws alone would not hold things together for long. “A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for some time, but beyond a certain pitch, even the best constitution will be ineffectual, and slavery will ensue.”42 The golden triangle was not sufficient, but it was necessary.
George Washington’s Farewell Address in 1796 engages the same conversation. Whether original to him or the work of Alexander Hamilton, his point is unmistakable: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens.”43
Supports, pillars, props, foundations, wellsprings—Washington’s choice of words tells the story by itself of how freedom requires virtue. But he too was aware of the classical understanding of decline and fall, and he addressed it directly even at that dawn-fresh moment in the new republic. “Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue?” he asked rhetorically. To achieve such “permanent felicity,” or Adams’s “lasting liberty,” he counseled them as “an old and affectionate friend” that they would need virtue to “control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our Nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the Destiny of Nations.”44
If being a “nation of nations” means that Americans should have a wiser perspective on the wider world, then being the latest in the grand succession of superpowers means that Americans should also have a “history of histories” to offer a wiser perspective on the long reaches of time.
When Tocqueville came to write about America, he knew it would be difficult to rally his fellow Frenchmen to such an idea, but he would try nonetheless. As he wrote to Eugene Stoffels, a friend, “To persuade men that respect for the laws of God and man is the best means of remaining free . . . you say, cannot be done. I too am tempted to think so. But the thing is true all the same, and I will try to say so at all costs.”45
By design or by neglect, Americans continue that great conversation today, and it would be the height of folly to pretend otherwise—which is precisely why it is easy for a visitor to enter these debates today, for they are not unique to Americans.
Fourth, the framers’ insistence on the importance of virtue for freedom puts them squarely against much modern thinking in the debate between negative freedom, or freedom from interference, and positive freedom, or freedom for excellence. The American Revolution was unashamedly in favor of negative freedom. Quite simply, the Declaration of Independence is the grandest and most influential statement of freedom from interference in history. But unlike many modern citizens, the founders did not stop there. They were equally committed to the complementary importance of freedom for excellence. Their aim, as we saw, was liberty and not just liberation and independence.
In other words, the founders held that not just individuals but the republic itself had an ongoing interest in the virtue of the citizenry. Private virtue was a public interest not only for the character of leaders but for everyone, and this was a prime motive in the rise of the common schools and the place of public education. Article three of the Northwest Ordinance, passed by the Confederation Congress and affirmed by the First Congress under the Constitution, stated plainly at the outset: “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall for ever be encouraged.”
Does this mean, as some charge, that the framers were smuggling an aristocracy of virtue back into the republic and were therefore undemocratic and fall foul of Tocqueville’s accusation that Athens was an “aristocracy of masters”?46 In a sense the answer is yes. The republic clearly required leaders and citizens who took virtue seriously, especially at the level of the highest national affairs. In the picture that Cicero used before the Roman Senate, citizens whose character and virtue can be “weighed” are worth more to the republic than citizens who could only be “counted.”
But the accusation of an American aristocracy of virtue is miscast. In a democratic republic the size of the United States, the choice is not between an aristocracy and no aristocracy, or between aristocracy and pure democracy. Representative democracy is inevitably aristocratic in one sense, for it chooses the few to represent the many.
Thus as soon as the choice is made for representative rather than the direct or complete democracy of Athens, there will have to be explicit or implicit criteria for the way citizens choose who will represent them. Rule out virtue as a criterion and something else will take its place—most probably money or fame. Benjamin Rush lamented long ago that America was becoming a “bedollared nation.”47 As contemporary American politics illustrates all too clearly, the founders’ aristocracy of virtue has been well and truly replaced by what the English writer William Cobbett called the worst of all aristocracies—“moneyed aristocracy.”48 Money rather than monarchy and plutocracy rather than theocracy are the chief threats to republicanism today.
Some Americans, such as Ross Perot, Mitt Romney, Michael Bloomberg, and Donald Trump, can use their wealth to pursue the presidency. Others, such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, use the presidency to pursue wealth. But either way the rule of money in American public life expands in leaps and bounds, so that like Athens, the United States is becoming an “aristocratic commonwealth,” and even worse, a full-blooded plutocracy that is increasingly shut off to the moderately wealthy and the poor.
Without virtue, there would be no freedom. Indeed, without virtue there would be no citizens at all, for it takes a certain virtue to transform the private concerns of individuals into the public concerns of citizens willing and able to participate in the common discussion of the common good. In the language of the Athenian democrats, it takes virtue to transform the “idiot” (the purely private person) and the “tribesperson” (the member of a group) into the “citizen.” For all these reasons, the framers were as committed to positive freedom as to negative freedom. They were convinced that personal virtue was a public matter for the republic, whatever the private concern for virtue that the individual, the family, and the faith community might also have. That freedom requires virtue, then, is the first leg of the golden triangle.
If the framers’ position on virtue is suspect today and needs to pass through stringent intellectual security checks, how much more so their views on religion. Indeed, they are an open battleground, and all the earlier qualifications about virtue need to be underscored once again, and others added. (The founders were not all people of faith, and had different views of the relationship of religion and public life, and so on.) Yet the overall evidence for what they argued is again massive and unambiguous, even from some of the more unlikely sources such as Jefferson and Paine: the founders believed that if freedom requires virtue, virtue in turn requires faith (of some sort).
“If Men are so wicked as we now see them with Religion,” Benjamin Franklin said, “what would they be without it?”49
“It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being,” George Washington wrote, “and it is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being.”50
“We have no government armed with powers capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion,” John Adams wrote. “Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”51
“Should our Republic ever forget this fundamental precept of governance,” John Jay wrote about the importance of faith for virtue, “men are certain to shed their responsibilities for licentiousness and this great experiment will surely be doomed.”52
“The only surety for a permanent foundation of virtue is religion,” Abigail Adams wrote. “Let this important truth be engraved upon your heart.”53
“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people, that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are violated but with his wrath? I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep for ever.”54
“Is there no virtue among us?” James Madison asked. “If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government can secure liberty or happiness without virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”55
“The wise politician,” Alexander Hamilton wrote, “knows that morality overthrown (and morality must fall with religion), the terrors of despotism can alone cure the impetuous passions of man, and confine him within the bounds of social duty.”56
Did this emphasis on religion mean that the framers were arguing for an official “Christian America”? Not at all. Unquestionably most Americans at the time of the Revolution were either Christians or from a Christian background, and most American ideas were directly or indirectly rooted in the Jewish and Christian faiths. Thus even Franklin as a free thinker, writing to Ezra Stiles in 1790, made clear that he would never become a Christian, yet stated as his opinion: “As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see.”57
But the historical and statistical importance of the Christian faith in 1776 did not for a moment translate into any official position for the Christian faith or for any formal notion of a Christian nation. Joel Barlow, who negotiated the Treaty of Tripoli with the Pasha in 1796, may have been a deist with little sympathy for the Christian faith, but his famous clause to the treaty caused little stir at the time: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion . . .”58
Beyond that untypically bald statement, the First Amendment, on the one hand, barred any official national establishment of religion, and over the next decades the states came slowly into line until the last establishment had gone. On the other hand, many of the framers, and later President Eisenhower in the 1950s, spoke of religion in generic rather than specific terms, and they advocated religion only for secular or utilitarian reasons that the Romans understood well and on which Edward Gibbon commented famously. Religion, at the very least, was the sole force capable of fostering the virtue and restraining the vice necessary for the health of the republic.
Significantly, Franklin, for example, went on from the earlier quotation to underscore that he was interested in “the fundamental Principles of all sound Religion,” which he found in many sects and faiths. And what concerned Washington in his Farewell Address was not religious orthodoxy itself but the eminently practical point that “true religion and good morals are the only solid foundations of public liberty and happiness.”59 For his part, Jefferson greatly preferred Unitarianism to the Christian faith, and eagerly looked forward to its expected triumph over traditional faith, but his interest was not in polemical issues. “Both religions,” he wrote, “make honest men, and that is the only point society has any authority to look to.”60
Did this emphasis on religion mean that the framers did not grant freedom of conscience to atheists, or that they thought atheists would not be good citizens? Again, emphatically not. In addition to the First Amendment, the Constitution itself required that there be no religious test for office in the United States. Properly speaking, atheism (or secularism as a practical form of atheism) is itself a worldview or form of faith, though expressly naturalistic and nonsupernatural. But regardless of philosophical niceties, the framers were emphatic that the right of freedom of conscience, or religious liberty, was absolute, unconditional, and a matter of equality for all.
As early as 1644, Roger Williams had staked out the radical position in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution that freedom of conscience or “soul freedom” meant “a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries.”61A century and a half later the same note of universality and equality rings out clearly in 1785 in Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance”: “Above all are they to be considered as retaining an ‘equal to the free exercise of Religion according to the dictates of conscience.’”62 John Adams wrote unequivocally to his son, “Government has no Right to hurt a hair of the head of an Atheist for his Opinions.”63
It must be added, however, that like Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers who disdained religion, the founders were less sanguine about the consequences of a government of atheists or a society of atheists—“It would be better far,” John Adams wrote, “to turn back to the gods of the Greeks than to endure a government of atheists.”64
Secularists, of course, are free to counter the founders’ misgivings by demonstrating their capacity to build an enduring nationwide foundation for the virtues needed for the American republic on entirely secular grounds, grounds that need no place at all for religious beliefs. Thoughtful atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, stated this claim boldly in theory, but its challenge remains to be picked up in practice. The plain fact is that no free and lasting civilization anywhere in history has so far been built on atheist foundations. At the very least, it would be a welcome change for secularists to shift from their strident attacks on religiously based virtues to building their own replacements and attempting to persuade a majority of their fellow citizens of their merits.
What are we to make of the founders’ misgivings about a society of atheists? Is it an inconsistency, or a form of hypocrisy, perhaps even an egregious contradiction like their views of slavery? Were they simply reacting to the excesses of the French Revolution? There was certainly an element of the latter. Washington referred delicately in his Farewell Address to the malign influence of “refined education on minds of peculiar structure,” and Hamilton blasted the French radicals more openly. “The attempt by the rulers of a nation to destroy all religious opinion, and pervert a whole people to Atheism,” he wrote, “is a phenomenon of profligacy reserved to consummate the infamy of the unbridled reformers of France!”65
But the founders’ position was far more thoughtful than just a reaction. They were convinced that only faiths that (in modern parlance) were thick rather than thin would have the power to promote and protect virtue. After all, raise such questions as, Why be virtuous? What is virtue? and What happens if someone is not virtuous? and anyone can see the faiths have more to say about the inspiration, content, and sanctions for virtue than any other form of human thought—and certainly so for the overwhelming majority of people outside university circles.
Needless to say, individual atheists and secularists can be virtuous too, far more so in some cases than many religious believers. But the political question is whether atheism and secularism can provide a sufficient foundation to foster the needed virtues of the wider citizenry over the course of the running generations. This task waits to be demonstrated.
The founders’ stress on the need for faith can be expressed cynically, and Gibbon is often quoted for his famous comment on the Roman attitude toward religion. Voltaire scornfully dismissed religion for “respectable people” like himself and his friends, though he advocated it for the rest: “I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often.”66 But the evidence from the American founders suggests that they were utilitarian rather than cynical. They sincerely believed that, even if they themselves did not share the faith, it would take faith to do the job of shaping the virtue needed to promote and protect republican freedom.
For some of the framers, though, such a view was unquestionably utilitarian and somewhat cynical. But it was not necessarily hypocritical. And it was this functional appreciation of faith that lay behind several incidents for which the framers have been charged with hypocrisy—for instance, the story Ethan Allen told of a friend meeting President Jefferson on his way to church one Sunday “with his large red prayer book under his arm,” and exchanging greetings.
“Which way are you walking, Mr Jefferson?” the friend asked.
“To church, Sir,” the president replied.
“You going to church, Mr J. You do not believe a word in it.”
“Sir,” said Mr Jefferson, “No nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has ever been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning, Sir.”67
Jefferson’s example is instructive. In two important areas there was a striking gap between his private and public views—over slavery, and over religion in public life. In the case of slavery, it is hard not to conclude that the writer of the Declaration of the Independence was hypocritical. He owned more than three hundred slaves in his lifetime, he had more when he died than when he wrote the Declaration, and he imported slaves into France, where he knew slavery was illegal and not customary, as it was in Virginia. But beyond his vested interest in his own slaves, there was always his anguish over the unavoidable dilemma he saw: the slaves’ freedom would endanger America’s freedom. In his own words, he was caught as he admitted between “Justice in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”68
In the case of religion in public life, Jefferson was probably not so much hypocritical or anguished as utilitarian and savvy. He was a deist who undoubtedly loathed organized religion and serious theology of all kinds—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. He believed the Christian faith had been seriously corrupted and would soon be replaced by Unitarianism, and he was a church-state separationist who fiercely defended his “wall of separation.” Yet as the conversation with Ethan Allen shows, whether Jefferson was two-faced or simply utilitarian, there is no question that he also believed that freedom requires virtue, and virtue faith, and that he as chief magistrate must support certain public expressions of faith.
Needless to say, the third leg of the golden triangle is the most radical, and if the first two legs challenge the unexamined assumptions of many liberals today, the third does the same for many conservatives: faith requires freedom.
Nothing, absolutely nothing in the American experiment is more revolutionary, unique, and decisive than the first sixteen words of the First Amendment that are the religious liberty clauses. At one stroke, what Marx called “the flowers on the chains” and Lord Acton the “gilded crutch of absolutism” was stripped away.69 The persecution that Roger Williams called “spiritual rape” and a “soul yoke,” and Lord Acton called “spiritual murder,” was prohibited.70 The burden of centuries of oppression was lifted, what Williams lamented as “the rivers of civil blood” spilled by faulty relations between religion and government were stanched, and faith was put on its free and fundamental human footing as “soul freedom,” Williams’s term for what was a matter of individual conscience and uncoerced freedom. The Williamsburg Charter, a celebration of the genius of the First Amendment on the occasion of its two hundredth anniversary, summarized the public aspect of this stunning achievement:
No longer can sword, purse, and sacred mantle be equated. Now, the government is barred from using religion’s mantle to become a confessional State, and from allowing religion to use the government’s sword and purse to become a coercing Church. In this new order, the freedom of the government from religious control and the freedom of religion from government control are a double guarantee of the protection of rights. No faith is preferred or prohibited, for where there is no state-definable orthodoxy, there can be no state-definable heresy.71
The First Amendment was of course no bolt out of the blue. It was the crowning achievement of the long, slow, tortuous path to religious liberty that grew out of the horrors of the Wars of Religion and the daring bravery of thinkers such as Roger Williams, William Penn, John Leland, Isaac Backus, George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, the Culpeper Baptists, and many others.
Many of the great peaks of this story and many of the greatest protagonists of religious liberty lie in the terrain of American history. In the “argument between friends,” for example, the maverick dissenter Roger Williams clashed with the orthodox John Cotton of Boston in challenging the notion of the uniformity of religion in a civil state and the doctrine of persecution that inevitably accompanied it. This pernicious doctrine, he said, “is proved guilty of all the blood of the souls crying for vengeance under the altar.” In its place, he asserted, “it is the will and command of God that . . . a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all countries: and that they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God’s spirit, the Word of God.”72
Almost like an echo, Madison rang out the same themes in his “Memorial and Remonstrance” protesting against Patrick Henry’s proposal to levy a religion tax that everybody could earmark for the church of their choice. No, the little man with the quiet voice protested, hammering home point after point with precision as well as force, this was absolutely wrong, and there was a better way. All Madison’s principles are as fresh today as when he wrote them. Freedom of conscience, for example, is the single best antidote to the radical extremism of the Islamists, as it is to the state-favored secularism of the European Union, and as it is to the illiberalism of American legal secularism. Coercion and compulsion, from one side, and exclusion from the public square, from the other, all contradict conscience, and therefore freedom, at its core.
Without coming to grips with freedom of conscience in every generation, Islam cannot modernize peacefully, Europe cannot advance freely, and America will never fulfill the promise of its great experiment in freedom. The present liberal reliance on such purely negative notions as hate speech and hate crimes is both inadequate and foolish, and can even be dangerous. Without acknowledging the cornerstone place of religious liberty, Europe will not be able to accommodate both liberty and cultural diversity, Muslims will not be able to maintain the integrity of their own faith under the conditions of modernity—let alone learn to live peacefully with others—and America will never create the truly civil and cosmopolitan public square that the world requires today.
In 1792, Madison captured the originality of what they had attempted in creating the Constitution. “In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example and France has followed it, of charters of power granted by liberty.”73 His point remains, along with its challenge. The liberty of the American republic is not self-sustaining, and it needs a safeguard beyond that of the Constitution and its separation of powers. But what does it take to turn parchment barriers into living bulwarks? What is the catalyst that can bond together the external laws of the Constitution with the internal commitments and duties of citizens—rulers no less than ruled? The framers’ answer was to understand, cultivate, and transmit the golden triangle of liberty, and thus the habits of the heart that sustained the citizens and the republic alike.
The founders’ solution was an attempt at true liberal education or paideia. There is simply no schooling and no apprenticeship that is more challenging yet more fruitful than that of the politics of freedom. Freedom requires virtue, which in turn requires faith of some sort, which in turn requires freedom. Only so can a free people hope to remain “free always.” Once again, it is imperative to appreciate how this indispensable cultivation and passing on the “spirit of freedom” and the “habits of the heart” goes all the way back not simply to Tocqueville, Montesquieu, and Burke, but to Judaism and the Sinai covenant. This fundamental Jewish difference from the superpowers of the ancient world is stunning, and no one has expressed the point better than Rabbi Sacks:
What endures and what wanes? What survives and what is eclipsed? Ancient Egypt and ancient Israel were two nations that posed the great question of time: how in a world of flux and change, do we create something that defeats mortality? The Egyptians gave one answer, a response that has long appealed to emperors and kings. We defeat time by creating monuments that will outlive the winds and sands of time. Ancient Israel gave a different and altogether counter-intuitive reply. . . . You achieve immortality not by building pyramids or statues—but by engraving your values on the hearts of your children, and they on theirs, so that our ancestors live on in us, and we in our children, and so on until the end of time.74
Again, will it be said that freedom was too hard a challenge for Americans to overcome? Here, then, is the fifth question on the checklist that Americans must answer constructively: Are you prepared for the challenge of sustaining freedom?
What is the link between freedom and virtue? What would be the objection to restoring the golden triangle of freedom today? What do those who reject the founders’ system for sustaining freedom propose to put in its place? Is American civic education what it should be? The fact is that freedom is the greatest enemy of freedom, and it never lasts forever, so the task of sustaining freedom is the greatest challenge that faces a free society. The founders’ answer is unquestionably the most ingenious solution ever proposed in history of freedom, but for various reasons most Americans now reject it or have largely forgotten what it is. But that raises a further question: If Americans do not agree with the founders’ solution, do they have in mind a better way to sustain freedom? Or are they courting the inevitable outcome of failing to do so? Only history will tell, and history’s options for the outcome are strictly limited.