A Federalist Paper: What the Founders Knew
TPP Editor’s Notes
- America has an authority crisis because it was founded as an abstract “experiment” without real, concrete traditional authority.
- The constitutional system of checks and balances is just an external regulatory system lacking deep authority. Instead, it is a highly realistic mechanism based on human nature: it acts as a set of chains on rulers to prevent them from using the “scepter of the state” to tyrannize the governed.
- American authority was never meant to be a cold, robotic system. Instead, it was deeply rooted in a Christian “spirituality of authority”—the idea that rulers should be servants of the people rather than lords.
- The Founders did not risk their lives for a mere abstract “idea” or whim. They fought because they loved an existing way of life that was being threatened.
A Federalist Paper
There is a multitude of opinions surrounding the turmoil in American society. The Lord unmercifully gave each of us a mouth, but not always, it seems, a brain.
Theories abound: perhaps, in the end, we have simply fallen under the sway of a brute fascist, strangely colored and strongly willed.
Perhaps, as I like to suppose, there are too many libertarians and feminists.
I am intrigued by those who perceive in our crisis one of authority. There was something rotten at the American Founding, they say. The wild and new “experimental nation” affirmed and incorporated the best parts of the “old traditions” but only on its own authority . . . “But this is a contradictions in terms.. . America is an experiment in the political organization of existence without traditional authority.”
Mr. DC Schindler, professor and philosopher, continues: “Because authority is the effective communication, the making present, of a principle of order, it can exist only in the concrete. . . . A formal process or an impersonal regulatory system, for example, might work to impose and protect a certain way of directing external behavior, but it cannot exercise authority in the deep sense. It cannot communicate growth in reality.” One must assume he refers to “the system of checks and balances” established by our Constitution.
For those who care deeply about the renovation of our civic life, it matters whether or not the models and offices of authority granted us by our founders were, from the beginning, inadequate or somehow merely “extrinsic”—incapable of ordering a political society in the best and most substantive way.
I think here of Jesus’ words to His disciples: “The kings of the gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves benefactors. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.”
It was this spirituality of authority which animated the ideas and made lively the principles of the founders; the representatives of the people would exercise the genuine authority of any king or ruler—making laws, appointing tribunals, receiving and sending ambassadors, regulating commerce, declaring war and provisioning peace, encouraging public religion, publicly calling upon God, disseminating knowledge and useful arts—but now as servants of the people, both by title and function, rather than as lords.
Again, one is reminded of St. Paul’s letter to the Hebrews: “For every high priest chosen from among the people is appointed to act on their behalf in relation to God. . . He can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness.”
A more precise description of a representative has rarely been written, for all representatives of the people are taken from among them and appointed to intercede on their behalf, not on this score with God, but with their fellows in society. These representatives are, or ought to be, returned to the people after a period of service, as Tom Paine argued, for in being returned again to a “private station”, they are once again beset by the common hardships and struggles of the people they purport to represent.
The checks-and-balances system previously mentioned is not a mere imposition to regulate external behavior. It was an instance of the belief that should a man or group of men be handed the scepter of the state, they ought to have their ankles chained and wrists tied together also, to prevent the temptation—so potent—to swing that scepter heavily down upon the heads of those they govern.
It is easy to see in all the actions of men the ghosts of their ideas haunting them, but the depredations in contemporary civic life are quite plainly rampant on the continent too—despite its ancient pedigree of Catholicism, kings, and parliamentary government. It seems impossible that the crisis of American identity is due to the failure of the American founding to perpetuate a true order, the mediation of a transcendent principle of order between ruler and ruled.
Nor, as DC Schindler suggests, is it true that “Americans have always been in a uniquely precarious position with respect . . . to authority, because the nation was established arguably as an effort to start an order of existence as much as possible ‘from scratch’, based on the best ideas received from previous civilizations but in relative freedom from the natural bonds that accompany them.”
Men do not risk their liberty, lives, property, families against the most powerful empire on earth—as the founders did—because of an “idea” or a whim; they risked the whole of their existences because they loved the tradition which enabled them to live as free men and they thought, quite rightly in my opinion, that a way-of-life was being denigrated as respected the inhabitants of the 13 colonies.
It wasn’t merely the cause of freedom which posed as the “ordering principle”— the unity—for the founding generation. It was a freedom which begot a way of life.
Every culture, each social “manner-of-being” is eccentric to the extent it consists of habits, routines, customs and tendencies which are peculiar to it and no other culture, or at least not in those special ways.
The eccentricities of colonial life were the eccentricities of a particular reformed Christianity, the legal tradition of Blackstone, an understanding of virtue and natural law thoroughly Ciceronian, and a natural rights practice which proceeded from the stoics through Montesquieu towards Locke.
The pedigree of the founders’ political impressions is too disparate to trace here. The writings of Aristotle exerted their influence, as did Seneca, Vergil, Shakespeare, Pufendorf, or any number of their tradition.
Even such descriptions as these remain vague and abstract; how can we trace, in just a few paragraphs, the history which accompanied the establishment of the colonies? How illustrate the unique ways in which the Western patrimony was appropriated, cherished, and improvised?
A society is a memory of stone and ceremony through which its members wander daily, being reminded of what makes them human, what brought them to the moment, what they are capable of enduring and perpetrating.
All of this to say, simply: America was not founded from “scratch as much as possible”. Indeed, it was not founded at all, but rather—like all things already rich and worth preserving—“found to be”, and in being “found to be”, it was “found worthy to be defended.”
A single man may be a way of life and be a hermit. This is the individual.
A group of men may live similar lives, their fortunes and properties mutually dependent: this similarity-in-being-in-the-world forms a communion among them which answers perfectly the notion of “community.”
American society is facing a crisis totally alien to its founding; it is antagonized by the same pathologies rampaging through the continent, through England, or our neighbor to the north.
If virtue is moderation, and public virtue is the sine qua non of a republic, it remains to be seen whether modern life is capable of supporting either a republican mode of government or the necessary largesse of public virtue which forbids tyranny and invites liberty and which might very soundly and swiftly resolve our terrible “crisis of identity.”
Publius Minor
