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February 17 - March 21, 2021
Did the founders anticipate a Donald Trump? I would say yes. As James Madison wrote in the most prominent of his contributions to the Federalist Papers, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”2 Just after Aaron Burr nearly became president, Jefferson wrote that “bad men will sometimes get in, & with such an immense patronage, may make great progress in corrupting the public mind & principles. This is a subject with which wisdom & patriotism should be occupied.”
Relax …occupies
Madison’s checks and balances operate robustly.
it is instructive to be reminded that Jefferson held similar beliefs about his own era. He wrote that there were “three epochs in history signalized by the total extinction of national morality.”
Indeed, corporations possess greater rights than do people, as they cannot be jailed or executed, while citizens can and do suffer those fates.
The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 reminded America of a lesson it had forgotten about the public good—a phrase that occurs over 1,300 times in Founders Online.
The idea has its roots in an assertion by Cicero that “salus populi suprema lex esto”—that is, “Welfare of the public is the supreme law.”9 Salus was the Roman goddess of “health, prosperity, and the public welfare.”
John Adams wrote in 1766, “The public Good, the salus Populi is the professed End of all Government.”11 With that in mind, Americans need to put less emphasis on the property rights of the individual and more on the rights of the people as a whole.
The market should not always be the ultimate determinant of how we live, or always allowed to shape our society. As the social philosopher Michael Sandel puts it, “to be free is more than a matter of pursuing my interests unimpeded, or satisfying my desires, whatever they happen to be. It is to share in self-government, to deliberate about the common good, to have a meaningful voice in shaping the forces that govern our lives.”
As part of that dialogue, when members of your own side violate America’s fundamental principles, speak out against them.
we should assign more moral value to the donation of time, such as volunteering for a rural ambulance squad, than to the donation of money.
Even at their most bitter moments, the founders all believed that government had a central role to play in American life, even if they disagreed how that should be manifested. By 1800, almost all had rallied to a set of common notions about the country.
These attitudes were at the heart of the Enlightenment, and they still have a place in the United States today, even as we live under a president who is anti-Enlightenment, even though he would not know what that means.
We should question the view that the government is almost always the problem. Sometimes it is the solution, especially when it serves the common good.
it is worth remembering that in the early nineteenth century, much of the original opposition to “big government” in America—in this case, federal action in support of building roads and canals—came from slaveholders who feared what might follow. “If Congress can make canals, they can with more propriety emancipate,” Nathaniel Macon...
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These were men who, one modern historian notes, were “willing to block the modernization of the whole country’s economy in order to preserve their section’s system of racial exploitation.”
One of the hallmarks of oligarchy is a legislature that is elected but tame, just active enough to divide and weaken the democratic spirit.
We need more new, loud, and unpolished voices.
They devised ways to speak about independence and equality, but struggled to develop a political vocabulary that addressed the persistence of partisanship.
the fourth of the Epicurean ideals he listed was “justice.”
10. Know your history Remember the founders made huge errors and decisions, most notably by writing slavery into the basic law of the land, with catastrophic consequences.
slavery was not a stain on the country, it was woven into the original fabric.
solecisms.
let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
