Keeping a republic: a 250th birthday meditation
- George Weigel
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
As we mark the national semiquincentennial on July 4, we might well reflect on Benjamin Franklin’s answer to Elizabeth Willing Powel, when the elderly sage left the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the Philadelphia matron demanded, “Well, Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a republic, or a monarchy?” To which Franklin famously responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.” That brief riposte underscores a basic fact about these United States: that we are a democratic experiment in republican self-governance, the testing of which is ongoing. And within that fact is embedded a truth that is implied, if not explicitly stated, by the Declaration of Independence: it takes a critical mass of people, living certain virtues, to keep the experiment on track — to make the political machinery of a democratic republic facilitate individual human flourishing and social solidarity.
Taking our republic for granted is a sure prescription for losing it to some species of authoritarianism. If we want to keep it, we must work at it. And that requires sacrifice. Thus the brief motto at the Korean War Veterans Memorial on the National Mall — “Freedom Is Not Free” — speaks not only to the debt we owe those who made the ultimate sacrifice, from Lexington to the Normandy beaches and the Chosin Reservoir to the present. That “Freedom Is Not Free” reminds us that every citizen is challenged to live freedom nobly, for the common good, if the American experiment is to prosper, indeed survive.
Sixty-six years after its publication, John Courtney Murray’s book, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, remains a profound analysis, based on classic Catholic political theory, of what made the United States possible. In that meaty volume, Father Murray did a deep dive into the subsoil of the American Founding, the tilling of which he did not ascribe solely to 17th-century Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (unlike Patrick Deneen and others). In doing so, Murray excavated the deepest conceptual roots, the foundational ideas, that would eventually undergird the Declaration of Independence.
The first of those ideas is that God’s rule extends over nations as well as individuals. When the Lord Jesus distinguished the things of God from the things of Caesar, he was teaching that Caesar’s writ is limited. The deepest, sturdiest taproot of American convictions about limited government and religious freedom, then, is Matthew 22:21, not Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government. Catholic integralists, post-liberals, and progressive secularists, please take note.
The second foundational idea crucial to the Declaration whose quincentenary we celebrate is that we are creations — neither congealed stardust nor walking algorithms — whose creator endowed us with the intellectual, spiritual, and moral capacities to govern ourselves. Listen to the stirring first movement of Randall Thompson’s “Testament of Freedom,” ponder its Jeffersonian text (“The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy them but cannot disjoin them.”), and spend a few moments on the Glorious Fourth reflecting on whether other “hands of force” are at work within our nation today, threatening destruction. (I, for one, think of the vulgar falsehoods of social media blatherskites and antisemitic podcasters in precisely those terms).
Because we have the God-given capacity to be self-governing, just governance is by the consent of the governed: “we the people” have a right to be heard by the governors in matters touching the common good. Moreover, “the people” have within them an instinct for justice that must be nurtured by a vibrant public moral culture: the cultural air we breathe should reflect the built-in truths about the human person we can know by reason (and, Catholics would insist, by revelation). Those are the third and fourth foundational ideas that form the roots of the American liberty tree.
Taken together, the truths explicitly claimed or implied by the Declaration of Independence are summed up in this master truth: only a virtuous people can live freedom so that individuals flourish in a society of solidarity. Only a virtuous people can live freedom such that liberty, decayed into license, does not corrupt the institutions of freedom so that those institutions collapse into tyranny.
The claim the American Founders made two hundred fifty years ago was not that free government was inevitable. The claim was that free government was possible. And as Dr. Franklin reminded Mrs. Powel, that possibility would be tested, time and again. It is surely being tested today. So as we thank God for the gift of the United States, let us remind ourselves and each other that freedom is not license and that freedom is never free.
