"A republic, if you can keep it," was Benjamin Franklin's famous answer to Philadelphia socialite Elizabeth Willing Powel when asked if the Constitutional Convention had delivered a monarchy or a republic. Franklin's pessimism, if you want to call it that, was shared by other Founders. Popular self-rule had rarely endured in any state larger than the Greek city-states. And if their history was anything to go by — endless squabbling, followed by absorption into Rome — America's independence and our bold experiment in popular sovereignty might be short-lived, too.
The Roman Republic, though not a democracy, succumbed to the twin temptations of autocracy and empire almost as quickly as its expansion across the Mediterranean was complete.
But there's short-lived, and then there's short-lived. More than 400 years passed, from the birth of Sophocles (a vital Athenian name picked almost at random) to the fall of Athens to Roman forces at the conclusion of the Mithridatic War in 86 BC.
In between, Athens gave the world Socrates, Plato, Aristophanes, Aristotle, the Parthenon, and so much more. Of course, Athenian hubris also helped lead to the Peloponnesian War, from which classical Greece never recovered. Still, it would be more than three centuries before Athens lost its independence to Rome.
Surely, that's at least part of what Scottish economist Adam Smith meant when he wrote, "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." That famous phrase deserves some explanation, too, since so often it's dropped into a column or conversation, almost deus ex machina, to lend gravitas.
Following the surrender of British General John Burgoyne and his army to American General Horatio Gates after the Battles of Saratoga, a young Scottish nobleman named Sir John Sinclair wrote to his friend, Smith, in a near panic: "If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined." The older and wiser man wrote back, "Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation."
Surely, Smith was correct. Far from Britain's ruin, the Empire — minus the young United States — would expand for another 150 years.
And Another Thing: Sinclair is a fascinating character, too, if not so well known in this country as Smith. There's far too much to cover in a brief aside, so I asked ChatGPT for a summary and got this: "his baronetcy and contributions to society placed him among the influential nobility of his time. His work in statistics, agriculture, and economics left a lasting legacy in Scotland and beyond." Sinclair was also a combat officer who raised the Caithness Highlanders to help put down the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
On the other hand, a republic and its institutions — public and private — are comparatively fragile things in need of constant nurturing by its elites. When framing the Constitution, James Madison's primary concern was how to bring together 13 fractious new states under one federal government. The solution agreed to at the Constitutional Convention was novel.
The Roman Republic, ruled by an aristocratic senate, was unresponsive to the people's needs. Julius Caesar and particularly his adopted heir — and first Roman Emperor — Augustus, exploited that weakness. Greece's popular democracy was much more responsive but unsuited to any entity larger than a city-state.
So we got a bicameral legislature. The House, popularly elected in full every two years, was responsible for initiating all tax and spending bills. The Senate was more aristocratic, its members selected by the states for staggered six-year terms. Senators represented the states' interests, putting a powerful check on federal power. It's also no accident that the "advise and consent" power was vested in the aristocratic Senate (as a check on the executive) rather than in the populist House.
States as small and liberty-minded as New Hampshire were able to share a national government with states as large and aristocratic as slave-owning Virginia — aside, of course, from the late unpleasantness during 1861-1865. No system is perfect, sadly. Not even Madison's.
Even so, Revolutionary America and even Civil War-era America were far more homogenous than modern America is. That's fine because there's plenty of tolerance built into Madison's system. But that's only true if those entrusted to its governance respect and nurture its institutions. Populist demagoguery of the sort indulged in by presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden would have been impossible in the 19th century but became practically inevitable in the 21st due to events in the 20th.
There truly is a lot of ruin in a nation. Our constitutional institutions have withstood more than a century of abuses and usurpations (which I'll return to further down in this essay), and I honestly don't know how much more they can take. The result is a government unleashed, unlimited, and unrecognizable to the Founders.
And Another Thing: I can't even begin to describe the pride I feel for the pushback the Cultural Marxists are finally getting on everything from "toxic masculinity" to trans ideology to the damage they did to our universities. It isn't time to pat ourselves on the back just yet, but after decades of showing zero resistance, the overdue fight might be entering Winston Churchill's "end of the beginning."
This is the part in most essays where the author would go down the laundry list of problems with our federal government. But since all of your PJ Media writers cover those issues seven days a week, I'll give you (and me!) a break so we can get back to the meat of this column without further pause.
The rot began in the Progressive Era, with the establishment of the income tax and the popular election of senators via the 16th and 17th Amendments, respectively. But another Progressive "reform" that deserves just as much scorn — but only rarely gets it — is the Apportionment Act of 1911. Congress fixed House membership at 435 members, and while that might have been a necessary change then, it ought to be revisited. Stick a pin in that thought.
I was struck by something Walter Russell Mead wrote in his latest for Tablet: "The openness of the American political system to populist revolt is a feature, not a bug. The country badly needed a reset."
The question is whether we will actually get one. We tried once in 2016 but were thoroughly thwarted by the Uniparty, the Deep State, the Establishment... by whatever name you call it, it still stinks.
If Nixon's rejection of the gold standard began our fiscal decline, the erosion of our fragile civic institutions probably began in earnest with the election of Bill Clinton and his Nixon-on-steroids wife, Hillary, in 1992. Nothing that followed — the bimbo eruptions, the open corruption — should have been tolerated by a free and sovereign people.
And Another Thing: Defenders of Nixon might argue that his predecessor's profligacy forced his hand. LBJ was reckless, indeed, sending half a million troops to Southeast Asia while also radically expanding the welfare state. But Nixon could have recalibrated the gold standard — say, pegging gold at $70 from $35 — instead of abandoning it completely. But that's an essay for another time.
To George W. Bush's credit, he did try to restore some of pre-Clinton dignity to the Oval Office. But his post-9/11 foreign adventures and embrace of Big Government via "compassionate conservatism" did perhaps even more than his father's failures did to hobble effective opposition to the Democrats. The election of a red-diaper baby like Obama in 2008 all but sealed our fates.
Obama was the radical who set us against one another while cooly attacking our traditions and norms — enabled by a leftwing media that largely shared his goals. Biden was the kind of grifter that naturally works its slimy way through the rubble left by someone like Obama. Rome's Nero would have recognized Biden immediately as a kindred spirit.
(Trump, a TV star and real estate mogul, was our unlikely and failed first attempt at course correction. Now we get a second chance.)
I believe it was my PJ colleague Jeff Reynolds who told me years ago that we weren't going to get out of the messes Obama made without bloodshed.
Let's hope it doesn't come to that. I'm open to suggestions on how to buttress our crumbling institutions and rebuild their constitutional foundations, but let me share an idea of my own. It's a reform that, unlike the Fair Tax or eliminating the popular election of senators, doesn't require a constitutional amendment or a convention of states.
It merely requires an act of Congress... a Congress with leadership and membership that is willing to dilute their power.
Yeah, we're gonna need a constitutional amendment, aren't we? Not even any theory is perfect — sigh.
Look at the House today and its terrible condition. Meant to rapidly meet the desires of the electorate — hence those two-year terms — today's House is unrepresentative, unresponsive, and unresponsible.
(If the Founders can make "unalienable" a word, then I can use "unresponsible" for writerly effect.)
How well can one member represent 765,000 people, which is the average population of a House district? At the time of our founding, the average was about 37,000.
Members complain that they have too many responsibilities and that they have to spend too much time fundraising for the next election. A typical congressional race in 2022 costs $1.8 million. Small membership and busy schedules put more power in the hands of the House leadership, the committee chairs, and — worst of all — unelected staffers and lobbyists.
So if I could snap my fingers and send one magical piece of legislation to President Trump's desk, it would be a repeal of the 1911 Apportionment Act that would also mandate two things. First, that congressional districts should be geographically compact. The second would fix districts' size at no more than 50,000 citizens and legal residents.
At the next apportionment, we'd be looking at a House with roughly 6,700 members. The logistics would be complex — and best left to an organizational genius like my wife, not me — but, unlike in 1911, technology makes those problems surmountable.
The House could have a lot more committees (a lot more) to carry on our business. Committee chairs would be more numerous and thus less influential. Instead of having portfolios too broad for any human being to handle without "help" from those staffers and lobbyists, congresscritters could focus on a smaller number of issues that matter most to their much smaller constituencies.
Just doing the math, a typical campaign today costs about $2.30 per constituent. A campaign in a much smaller district might cost as little as $120,000, making races not just cheaper but more competitive. We might even start to hear fewer complaints about how much time House members are forced to spend begging for donations.
Radical expansion, as messy and complex as the process would be with so many members, could give us a House of Representatives that represents us again.
House expansion is no cure-all, but shouldn't our representative republic be just that if we're going to keep it?
Recommended: Democrats in Denial and Other Failures to Cope in the Second Trump Era
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