At the most basic level, Big Government Socialism and its historic predecessors do not account for human nature. Importantly, they reject human nature for an idealized version of the people their government is trying to create. This is the opposite of the historic American system—and even the classically liberal representative republic.
President Ronald Reagan observed, “The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” He was speaking to a fundamental issue at the heart of left-wing doctrine that prevents its adherents from bringing to fruition their ideal utopian concepts. In part, they fail because their ideas are based on a pattern of thought that is ideologically appealing, but realistically impossible. Simply put: The utopia can’t work because it’s not made for free, thinking human beings.
The left’s idealized utopia is made for imaginary beings who have no self-interest, ambition, sense of fairness, or qualms with perpetually being exploited by their government—and the elites who run it. Because of this, the utopia is designed to have a government that perpetually grows in power (at the expense of its citizens) and follows a different set of rules.
There are patterns of human behavior that have been around for all recorded time. That is why the stories of Homer, the plays of Aeschylus, the lessons of the Bible, and the tragedies, dramas, and comedies of Shakespeare all resonate within us today. West Side Story as a modern musical revisioning of Romeo and Juliet is a great example of the enduring human story. Big Government Socialism, with its roots in the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions and its outlook in woke theology, believes humans are plastic, malleable, and easily reshaped. Just as the “New Soviet Man” collapsed in the Soviet Union, and Mao Zedong’s efforts to create a permanent cultural revolution in China collapsed, the woke revolution will also collapse. Creating a better future and solving problems must be based on human nature to succeed.
The Founding Fathers were an amazing collection of men who lived practical lives. They were farmers, merchants, lawyers, and investors. They were also experienced in politics and the legislative process. They studied widely and thought deeply. Their lifetimes of experience collectively led them to a tough-minded view of human nature. The Founders all understood that centralized power leads to tyranny. And they would have thought it naive and silly to attempt to design a centralized system for some perfect model of humankind.
Indeed James Madison, in Federalist 51, makes the case for the inevitability of human nature and therefore human weakness:
But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.1
The great danger from the Big Government Socialists has been the stripping away of these auxiliary precautions—and a belief that people can be trusted even if they repeatedly prove to be untrustworthy. When someone has been arrested eleven times before killing a twenty-four-year-old woman as she worked in a furniture store, it is a consequence of the utopian rejection of evil and the need to guard against bad, destructive people.2
The rule of law is vital precisely because of the inherent weaknesses that exist at the center of human nature. That is the warning of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, that if you knock down every law in pursuit of the devil, then the laws are gone when the devil turns on you. Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria’s pledge to Joseph Stalin, “show me the man, and I will show you the crime,” is a powerful example of the evil and danger inherent in a world in which the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of man.
So the U.S. Constitution was designed by people who expected normal humans to end up running the government. They assumed the structure had to be designed to preserve freedom by separating powers and pitting egos and interests against one another. In effect, rather than rely on goodwill and purity of intent, the Founding Fathers assumed everyone was self-interested and would seek power. Their goal was to construct a system that balanced different powers against each other. They did not naively think they could tame human nature. They thought they could channel the human pursuit of power in such a way that it would not threaten the survival of a free society. They followed the writings of the French political philosopher Montesquieu, who in his classic, The Spirit of the Laws, had advocated dividing up power between different institutions so they would balance each other, and freedom would survive in the balance.
The American model has three divisions in the federal government—legislative, executive, and judicial. They are all bounded by the Bill of Rights, the states, and by the provision that all other powers reside with the citizens. This was all designed to protect individuals, limit government powers, and minimize the risk of dictatorship.
This sense that human nature inevitably led to corruption and coercion was reinforced by the American perception of the British government. In the American view (which reflected the Whig view in Britain), the king and his ministers had corrupted British politics and government by giving away money and status to sustain their political machine at the expense of the public good. Corruption in this model was not merely limited to illegal bribery for specific acts. It referred to any allocation of resources or position for private rather than public ends.
Furthermore, the American colonists’ experience of judges was that they were agents of the king and would pervert the law to implement the king’s edicts. The result was that reforming the judges was the second most frequent demand of the colonists (after no taxation without representation). It was this fear of loyalist judges that led to the constitutional protections against judicial tyranny. Similarly, it was the general fear of government that led to the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Contrary to the modern left’s interpretation, the Founding Fathers were not protecting the right to bear arms so Americans could go deer hunting. Madison, in Federalist 46, argues for the maintenance of militias for citizens to protect themselves. Madison wrote that state militias “would be able to repel the danger” of tyranny:
Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.3
Madison further contrasted a free government’s comfort with an armed citizenry with European kings who were “afraid to trust the people with arms.”
The American belief in the right to bear arms went back to Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. As David Hackett Fischer notes in his book Paul Revere’s Ride, the British Army had routinely overwhelmed peasant rebellions in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. They marched out of Boston that day confident that this would be another mopping-up expedition against an unarmed rabble. However, the British encountered an armed militia that had been training. The militia decisively defeated the British column and sent it reeling back to Boston, leaving a trail of blood. That memory of the power of armed citizens was still vivid fifteen years later as the Bill of Rights was written.
The American left has routinely found it impossible to believe that the Founding Fathers were as suspicious of their own government as of foreign powers. However, their deep belief in the dangers inherent in human nature led them to a series of efforts to safeguard the citizenry from their own government. Those same tensions still exist more than two centuries later.
We learn from the Founders that human nature must be the bedrock on which any policy is built. When we design policies based on theories that do not fit human nature, we inevitably set ourselves up for failure. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was pro-work because Roosevelt believed work was central to a healthy life and a healthy society. By contrast, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society embraced radical ideas that assumed the poor were helpless and hopeless—and that government had to intervene to make their dependency more comfortable. Roosevelt understood human nature and built policies to reinforce it. Johnson had been talked into a philosophy that rejected the core principles of thousands of years of experience. Whether it is crime, welfare, education, or a host of other challenges, if the policy does not accept and reinforce human nature, it will fail.
The same governmental strength that is necessary to survive in a dangerous world is also a threat to liberty. If freedom is to survive while also being kept safe, it is vital to create a system in which the structure of government, and the rules it must follow, limit its ability to dominate and dictate to its own people.
Again, recall Madison’s core argument in Federalist 51. If men were perfect, we wouldn’t need government, and so long as government is made up of men, we need to limit it. The depth of the Founders’ commitment to freedom from the seduction of power was illustrated by General Washington’s determination to return his sword and commission to the Continental Congress when the war ended. The scene is captured in the Maryland state capitol, in Annapolis. Its unique symbolism of voluntarily giving up power was so powerful that King George III, on being told about Washington’s relinquishment of power, said, “if he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
The Founding Fathers knew that over time, power would be acquired by people who lacked Washington’s honor, integrity, and passionate commitment to freedom. They knew that eventually normal people—and even scoundrels—would acquire power. The challenge to the Founders was to design a system that would limit the ability of unscrupulous power seekers to undermine liberty in favor of corruption. Their goal was to design a government structure that would block the acquisition of unchecked power by any agency of government.
Their first step was to adopt the insights of Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws that a division of power would maximize freedom and minimize the danger of tyranny. As I mentioned, each branch of government would jealously guard its prerogatives and power against the other two. Within the legislative branch, the U.S. Constitution further divides the power between a popularly elected House directly representing the people (and being renewed every two years) and a Senate representing the states, only one-third of which would be elected every two years. The Founders were trying to replicate the division between the House of Commons and House of Lords in London. In the first six years, the effort to make the Senate different went so far as to have the sessions secret, with no recorded votes. Prior to the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, senators were elected by state legislatures. It was only after that amendment that senators were also chosen by popular vote. Specific powers of raising taxes, spending money, and approving presidential appointments were divided between the House and Senate to create two competitive institutions, further dividing power.
Thomas Jefferson felt that the rights of individuals were not sufficiently protected from government in the Constitution and insisted on the adoption of a Bill of Rights, which became the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Despite the gradual erosion of those rights in favor of government power, it is vital to remember that the Bill of Rights was designed to protect the individual against government. Furthermore, the Founders wisely reserved all power to the states and the citizens thereof that were not expressly granted to the federal government by the U.S. Constitution.
As an ultimate protection against tyranny, Jefferson often said every generation needed a revolution and the Founding Fathers insisted on the Second Amendment, so the armed citizenry would make a dictatorship impossible. These men were serious about applying the rules of history to sustaining and protecting the freedoms they had won through a generation of struggle and conflict.
The Founding Fathers worked overtime to create a system of limited government and personal liberty. While that system has been eroded by a century of intellectual elites who thought the American people were incorrigible or ignorant, the core of it is still designed to limit government and liberate the American people. It is essential for our long-term freedom that we reestablish the principles of limited power and the rule of law. Every warning the Founding Fathers felt about concentrating power and gradually losing our freedoms applies to our generation.
Again, power tends to corrupt today just as much as in Lord Acton’s time. Absolute power still corrupts absolutely. Watch Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has been establishing a dictatorship in the U.S. House while protecting and promoting members who clearly, blatantly lie even on national security matters.
Read Peter Schweizer’s Red-Handed: How America’s Elites Get Rich Helping China Win and reflect on all the warnings in the Federalist Papers. We need a generation of leaders and determined citizens dedicated to reestablishing the principles of freedom at every level—from Washington, to state capitols, to city and county governments, to school boards, to the activity of individual citizens, including the billionaire oligarchs, many of whom today routinely place profit above patriotism.
The rule of law is the heart of protecting the weak from the strong. It creates safe conditions for investing and saving and ensures the continued liberty of the people against the inevitable encroachments of bureaucratic government and self-serving politicians. It also blocks the wealthy and powerful from gaining unfair advantages.
The legislative process is a key building block of engaging the society’s consent and making “the consent of the governed” real. It is also through the legislative process that a community educates itself and finds agreements that the entire community is prepared to sustain. The Founding Fathers were deeply immersed in the law. Many of them were lawyers. All of them understood the importance of the law and had participated in writing laws in colonial legislatures before the revolution.
Their entire approach to key decisions revolved around a legislative process. They used that process for fact finding, discussions about possible solutions, building a consensus so that everyone would feel comfortable that the rules and decisions had been reasonably made (even if on occasion people might disagree with one conclusion or another). It is a process-oriented approach to self-government.
The recent breakdown of that legislative process in Washington has been antithetical to this approach. Power has centralized in a small number of people who draft laws in secret and ram them through without amendment or hearings. It is a real threat to the rule of law and the consent of the governed. It also guarantees that laws will be written with too little input and too little critical thinking. No one knows as much as some of the current congressional leaders seem to think. They routinely decide about issues in virtually total lack of knowledge. The results reflect that overly restricted, limited-input system.
The Founding Fathers had a practical reverence for the law. One of their greatest complaints about the British Empire was the replacement of independent judges with servants of the Crown who would distort and prostitute the law to do the king’s bidding. All of the Founders understood that undermining the rule of law and replacing independent judges with lackeys to the Crown meant that no one and nothing was safe from the depredations of a tyrannical government.
When in Henry VI, Part Two, Shakespeare has a criminal and genuinely bad man say, “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” he is pointing out the degree to which the lawyers and the law deter criminals and crime. As we are discovering in many of our major cities, when the law is suspended by ideological district attorneys, evil men and women prey upon the innocent. The perversion of the law by George Soros–supported district attorneys has led to death, injury, loss of property, and a dramatic decay of decent society.
It would have been good for the members of the House select committee on the January 6 attacks to have thought deeply on maintaining the rule of law before they began trampling on the Constitution and the principles of liberty in the pursuit of their self-defined crusade. Instead, members of the committee have been spying on Americans without warrant or judicial oversight, using the power of Congress to attack political enemies, serving as a propaganda operation for Big Government Socialism, and operating without due process or any restraint.
The Founding Fathers’ faith in the rule of law draws much of its strength from the writing of John Locke. Locke was a late-seventeenth-century philosopher and physician whose thinking and writing was a forerunner for pragmatism and a law-based society.
Locke was wrestling with the complex challenges of the English Civil War. The king was beheaded despite his presumably divine right to the throne. The republican commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell then arose. King Charles II was conditionally restored. Then there was the tumultuous reign of the Catholic King James II and his ousting in 1688 by the “Glorious Revolution,” which brought the Protestants William and Mary to the throne. Since William came from the Dutch tradition of representative government, with limited power to the leaders, he had a different approach from the absolute monarchy in which James had believed. The Bill of Rights of 1689 was a parliamentary declaration of limits on the power of the monarchy and a key part of the pact that made William and Mary the rulers of the country with significant limits on their power.
As a champion of the new restoration of a limited monarchy with strong parliamentary power, Locke became the best-known early theorist of representative government under the rule of law. He wrote, “the difference betwixt a king and a tyrant to consist only in this, that one makes the laws the bounds of his power, and the good of the public, the end of government; the other makes all give way to his own will and appetite. Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins.”4 Remember that phrase as you watch the current out-of-control White House, House, and bureaucracy—“where-ever law ends, tyranny begins.”
Jefferson studied Locke extensively and can be considered his successor in defending the rule of law. The Founding Fathers’ insistence on the rule of law really stands out in the Declaration of Independence. Normally we only read the preamble and stop after we have been reassured that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
However, if you take a moment to look at the claims against King George III, you will see how much the Founding generation was offended by what they saw as a tyrannical effort to violate their legal rights as Englishmen. The claims criticized the king for barring the colonists from governing themselves—while also largely neglecting them and their needs. Through this neglect, the colonists saw constant obstacles to maintaining orderly, safe society. However, many of their grievances against King George III in the Declaration of Independence asserted violations of the rule of law and tyranny:
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
These grievances were seen as so deeply threatening that they led formerly loyal colonists to wage an eight-year war for independence against the most powerful empire in the world. John Adams explained why Americans rejected government by a dictatorial regime and what Americans expected:
Fear is the foundation of most governments; but is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men, in whose breasts it predominates, so stupid, and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.… so the very definition of a Republic, is “an Empire of Laws, and not of men.” That, as a Republic is the best of governments, so that particular arrangement of the powers of society, or in other words that form of government, which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the laws, is the best of Republics.5
Our current generation of politicians and news media would do well to think about Adams’s later assertion that “the great political virtues of humility, patience, and moderation, without which every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey.” His cousin Samuel Adams summarized the positive goal as “There should be one rule of justice for rich and poor, for the favorite at court, and the countryman at the plough.”6 That was the rule of law the Founding Fathers held as an ideal and were trying to build in America. Two generations later, in 1838, in a speech to the Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln reaffirmed the importance of the rule of law.
Lincoln called for “a reverence for the constitution and laws.” He said:
Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor;—let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children’s liberty. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap—let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;—let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.
While ever a state of feeling, such as this, shall universally, or even, very generally prevail throughout the nation, vain will be every effort, and fruitless every attempt, to subvert our national freedom.7
A quarter century later, on the site of the bloodiest battle of our bloodiest war, in his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln captured this sense of the subservience of all of us to the rule of law when he said: “This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
As we watch the bureaucrats grow more arrogant, the lobbyists grow more corrupt, the politicians grow more lawless, and the news media grow more dishonest, we must come once again to Lincoln’s understanding that without the rule of law there is no government by the people. That is how important the rule of law is to our freedom and our country. If America is to remain free, we must return to a much more serious enforcement of the rule of law—and a more open legislative process, in which every member has a fair opportunity to participate.
The excessive centralization of power in the presidency is a grave threat to freedom. Presidents are in effect elected kings, and any threat from a king can be replicated in the White House. Centralizing power in a handful of congressmen and senators violates the principle of legislating in a free society. Bureaucracies that can make up their own rules and impose their power on citizens are replicating exactly what the Founding Fathers accused the British monarchy of doing.
It will be a difficult, conflict-ridden, and controversial process to get back to the rule of law at every level of government—local, state, and federal—but it must be done if freedom is to survive.