American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

by Joseph J. Ellis

This is an inconvenient truth that most historians acknowledge under their breath, admitting that objectivity, in the sense that mathematicians or physicists use the term, is not a realistic goal for historians. The best they can strive for is some measure of detachment, which serves the useful purpose of stigmatizing the most flagrant forms of ideological prejudice (i.e., cherry-picking the evidence to claim that Thomas Jefferson was an evangelical Christian or Andrew Jackson a New Deal Democrat). But if you believe that the study of history is an ongoing conversation between past and present, detachment itself is delusional.

History is what we choose to remember, and we have no alternative but to do our choosing now.

Our creedal convictions as Americans, all of which have their origin in the founding era, are bumping up against four unforeseen and unprecedented obstacles: the emergence of a truly multiracial society; the inherent inequalities of a globalized economy; the sclerotic blockages of an aging political architecture; and the impossible obligations facing any world power once the moral certainties provided by the Cold War vanished.

The man soon to draft the most succinct statement about human equality in modern history dismounted from an ornate carriage accompanied by Jesse, Jupiter, and Richard, three formally attired slaves. If the central contradiction of American history is the coexistence of slavery and a creedal commitment to individual freedom, Jefferson lived both sides of that contradiction more conspicuously than any of America’s founders.

Instead of an upward arc, then, the dominant racial pattern since the end of slavery has been a cycle in which progress actually generates resistance to its continuation.

The net result was an outcome that few opponents of slavery before the war had anticipated, and for which even fewer white Americans in the South were prepared: the permanent presence of nearly 5 million third- or fourth-generation Americans of African descent in the United States, the vast majority located in a region dedicated to their enduring subordination.

But there was also a dark side to the Great Migration that became increasingly visible in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The inner cities of urban America became black ghettos after middle-class blacks and whites escaped to the suburbs, leaving a black underclass trapped within racially segregated spaces whose borders

Richard Russell, the segregationist senator from Georgia, warned President Lyndon Johnson that if he signed the Voting Rights Act, the Democratic Party would lose the South for the next thirty years, which turned out to be a conservative estimate. Johnson declared that the moral principle at stake was worth the political sacrifice, arguably an act of presidential leadership without parallel in the twentieth century. Most of the southern states soon made the transition from Democrat to Republican and from overt to covert forms of racial discrimination.

In Baldwin’s view, the belief in white supremacy was just as delusional as the belief in black separatism. “It is only now beginning to be borne in on us,” he wrote in Notes of a Native Son, “that this vision of the world [i.e., white supremacy] is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless.”

“Color is not a human or personal reality,” he wrote, “it is a political reality,” meaning a white invention designed to project their fears and insecurities onto fellow human beings with black skin. “White Americans do not believe in death,” he once speculated, “and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.” Racism, then, at bottom was the whites’ way of coping with their own human limitations, a resort to labeling that masked a fundamental failure of empathy. As Baldwin put it in “My Dungeon Shook,” the introductory section of The Fire Next Time (1963), all racial stereotypes demean their authors, not their victims. “The details and symbols of your life,” he told his black readers, “have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear….You can only be destroyed by believing that you are what the white world calls a nigger.”

We should expect a major backlash to wash over us as we approach the middle of this century. For a truly historic change is already baked into the demographic profile of the United States, a change that can be predicted with as much scientific certainty as warming in the atmosphere. In or about 2045, the white population will become a statistical minority. Because whites will continue to hold the balance of power politically and economically, ample opportunities will present themselves for demagogues to stoke fears of a looming apocalypse. Indeed, voices in this vein are already audible in such slogans as “Make America great again” and “Take our country back.”

Davila, Adams never used the word capitalism. (Nor, for that matter, did Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.) But he did describe the emerging American nation as a “commercial republic” in which the quest for material rewards in the marketplace would dominate and define what subsequent generations meant by “pursuit of happiness.” (Jefferson had intended something different.)

He is distinctive within the revolutionary generation for calling attention to the fault line that ran through the middle of the Jeffersonian creed, which presumed the compatibility and coexistence of equality and freedom. Adams insisted that the freedom to pursue one’s happiness in the marketplace essentially ensured the triumph of inequality in American society. And that argument, in retrospect, is the chief source of his relevance for our ongoing debate about economic inequality, since it exposes the illusion that equality is the natural order that can be recovered by a “reset” of the economy, or that the victims of income stratification have no one to blame but themselves.

He correctly predicted that any effort to do away with private property would only create an impoverished society of paupers within an oppressive totalitarian state.

the entire democratic edifice rested atop a set of economic and demographic conditions almost designed to make a mockery of Marx’s looming prophecy of class warfare by empowering a middle class with a vested interest in sustaining the existent order.

middle-class majority. And therein lies the most unnerving implication of the recent increase in economic inequality. The incentive system of American democracy can survive the existence of a permanent underclass as long as it remains a statistical minority. But the erosion of the middle class is unacceptable and inexplicable because it destroys the functional faith that any hardworking citizen can expect to enjoy a fair share of the American pie. Larger pieces can go to a fortunate few, as long as the many get the bulk of the pie to slice up among themselves. Since 1980, this implicit bargain has broken down. As a result, American history has somehow veered off course in an un-American direction. Over two centuries ago John Adams predicted this would happen, and it did during the late-nineteenth-and-early-twentieth-century era called the Gilded Age.* Now it is happening again. Graphically, the American diamond is becoming the old European triangle.

In effect, the New Deal and Great Society programs ameliorated the unequal impact of industrial capitalism on the distribution of wealth.

While globalization has vastly expanded the size of the marketplace, thereby increasing potential customers exponentially, it has simultaneously expanded the labor pool, thereby allowing corporations to move labor-intensive jobs to low-wage markets in Asia and Latin America and to significantly reduce the leverage of labor in negotiating salaries and benefits.

The emergence of the financial sector tracks the increase in economic inequality almost perfectly, and the top 1 percent, even more the top .1 percent, is dominated by investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and private equity managers, joined by a sprinkling of CEOs who on average make three hundred times more than the workers they employ. (The top ten hedge fund managers make more than all the kindergarten teachers in the United States.)

Republican banner: first, southern whites opposed to the civil rights legislation that dismantled Jim Crow policies in the states of the former Confederacy; second, evangelical Christians disenchanted by the Roe v. Wade (1972) decision that legalized abortion rights for women; third, corporate executives opposed to the progressive tax structure and federal regulation of the industrial and financial economy.

Our modern-day political categories of liberal versus conservative do not translate neatly in the world of the American founding, but we are still living within an argumentative framework the founders established over the proper role of government. The American Dialogue is an ongoing conversation between the two sides in that argument. The passionate and at times vitriolic debate in the 1790s between Federalists and Republicans exposed the deep disagreements between the two sides of the revolutionary generation. Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and John Marshall led the Federalist pro-government side against Jefferson and the recently converted Madison for the Republican opposition.

Until some semblance of balance is restored, there is no realistic hope for reducing our unacceptable levels of economic inequality, which are certain to increase as technology makes most forms of manual labor anachronistic and globalization deepens the divide between winners and losers in the global marketplace. Nothing less is at stake than the survival of the American Dream as embodied in a robust middle class that becomes the beneficiary, not the victim, of the new global economy. Without a role for government, the American Dream becomes a realistic prospect only for the favored few.

For Madison discovered that Washington had already made the transition from Virginian to American that he was still negotiating. Washington’s conversion had occurred during the eight years he had served as commander in chief of the Continental Army, when he developed a caustic and critical attitude toward Congress and state legislatures for failing to provide money and men for the war effort, then sending his soldiers home as beggars without pensions rather than as heroes. Moreover, his criticism of the state-based government under the Articles continued after the war. “I do not conceive we can long exist as a nation,” he warned, “without having lodged some power which will pervade the whole Union in as energetic a manner as the authority of the different state Governments extends over the several States.” Washington did not need to be persuaded that the Articles must be revised; he was already convinced that they should be altogether replaced.

As Madison worked through the possible candidates for inclusion, he tended to prefer the standard set of rights already enshrined in the state constitutions. The major ones included the right of free speech, a free press, freedom of religion, freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures, the right to a jury trial within a reasonable period of time, and the explicit presumption—declared in the Articles—that powers not delegated to the federal government were reserved for the states. As a result, the Madison list represented a codification of rights based on the previous thirty years of American history, most especially the lessons learned in opposing the policies of the British ministry in the run-up to the Declaration of Independence. What has come to be regarded as a set of timeless truths was, in fact, a distillation of the political experience of the revolutionary generation.

In 1792, soon after the first ten amendments were ratified, Congress passed the Militia Act. It required every able-bodied white male citizen between the age of eighteen and forty-five to enroll in a state militia. It also required them to purchase a gun as well as a complete outfit of equipment essential to perform their military duties, thereby making gun ownership not an individual right but a legal obligation. For those disposed to unpack the Second Amendment for the original meaning of “bear arms,” it has collective implications that lead not toward the right to own a gun, but toward mandatory national service. In that sense, both Madison and the critics he sought to appease were living in a world forever lost to us.50

Jane Mayer has chronicled that campaign in Dark Money (2016), which identifies Lewis Powell, a Richmond attorney and soon-to-be Supreme Court justice, as the unlikely architect of the conservative strategy that would enjoy such resounding success over the ensuing decades. In a long memorandum entitled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System” (1971), Powell laid out his blueprint for “guerrilla war” to capture the citadels of liberal influence in academia, the media, and the courts. It began with a steady flow of money from the wealthiest members of the corporate elite, which would then be funneled through philanthropic foundations—thus “dark money”—to newly created think tanks explicitly committed to conservative or libertarian principles. Over the next decade, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute became the institutional embodiments of Powell’s strategy. In 1982 a $5 million start-up grant from the Olin Foundation created the Federalist Society at Yale as a network for conservative law students, lawyers, and judges. The legal principle binding its members together was originalism.*

there is a fundamental difference between the two sides of this judicial debate. The liberal devotees of a “Living Constitution” are transparent about their political agenda, but the conservative originalists are not. While the judicial doctrine of the originalists was explicitly designed as a weapon to overturn liberal precedents, its core claim is its assiduous political detachment. At least on the face of it, that claim is incompatible with the series of one-sided decisions made by the conservative majority in the twenty-first century. This was the reason why the usually understated Justice William Brennan described originalism as “arrogance cloaked as humility.”

Heller was not some surprising airburst in the night but the culmination of a decades-long campaign orchestrated and funded by the National Rifle Association (NRA) to make gun ownership a right of citizenship. In that sense, Heller was to the conservative cause what Brown was to the liberal cause. Just as the NAACP waged a long legal and political battle against racial segregation that culminated in the Supreme Court decision that ended segregation by race in public schools, the NRA waged a similar and more heavily funded campaign to remove all legal restrictions on the right to purchase, own, and carry guns. Both Heller and Brown represented the final triumph in a long-standing, well-disciplined, highly organized struggle that both the NAACP and NRA knew could end only at the Supreme Court.

A slightly less cavalier attitude emerged when Scalia confronted the precedents that Heller was overturning. These were four previous Supreme Court rulings on the Second Amendment. The most recent, U.S. v. Miller (1939), reaffirmed the conclusion reached in the three earlier cases, that the right to bear arms was not an individual right but rather a right dependent on service in the militia. Although Scalia’s argument in Heller was a direct refutation of what had previously been considered “settled law,” he devoted seven pages to a review of his Supreme Court predecessors before reaching the extraordinary conclusion that “none of the Court’s precedents forecloses the Court’s interpretation.” Scalia clearly needed to believe that he was operating within the bounds of stare decisis, even though he clearly was not.

At a time when America’s infrastructure is aging badly, when whole regions of rural America are unprepared to compete in a globalized economy, when both the middle class and the coral reefs are eroding, a national response to those challenges will prove extremely difficult to orchestrate because a tiny group of judges will say the federal government cannot perform that role. They will express regret at the unfortunate implications of their decisions but claim that their hands are tied. The fate of 320 million Americans will be decided by five judges who, citing nineteenth-century dictionaries to translate words from an eighteenth-century document, misguidedly claim they are only channeling the wisdom of the founders.

Whether the Native Americans fit in the republican vision of westward expansion was clear from the start—they did not. White settlers in the new territories knew that they would eventually become full-fledged American citizens, not colonists or subjects, but most of them also assumed that Indian land was theirs for the taking. And Indian removal east of the Mississippi was the unspoken assumption for most delegates to the Confederation Congress, the only question being how it should happen.

In effect, every Indian treaty was intended as a temporary agreement, destined to be discarded once the edge of new settlements reached Indian borders. The great advantage of this approach was that it averted Indian wars because demography would do the work of armies. It was really a recipe for genocide in slow motion, and for a more gradual and palatable version of Indian removal east of the Mississippi. By the latter half of the 1780s, then, American policy toward the Native Americans had evolved from an overt to a covert kind of imperialism.

“Indians being the prior occupants possess the right of the soil,” Knox insisted, “so to dispossess them would be a gross violation of the fundamental Laws of Nature and the distributive justice which is the glory of our nation.” Unless Washington found a way to effect a change in the shape and direction of foreign policy toward the Native American tribes, Knox warned that “in a short period the Idea of an Indian on this side of the Mississippi will only be found in the pages of the historians.”17 Since Indian removal was, in truth, the unspoken goal of current American policy, albeit achieved in a way conveniently designed to obscure the imperialistic character of the enterprise, Knox was calling not only for a change in the ultimate outcome but also for a more candid acknowledgment that what they were doing to the Native Americans was just as arbitrary and morally wrong as what Great Britain had done, or tried to do, to them as American colonists. Persisting on the current course, then, “would stain the character of the nation” and, not so incidentally, become a permanent blot on Washington’s revolutionary reputation that would forever diminish his historic legacy. At last, and for the first time, Washington was being asked to confront one of the central contradictions of the American Revolution, and to face rather than finesse its discomforting implications.

But the ink was hardly dry on the Treaty of New York before settlers on the Georgia frontier poured across the newly established borders by the thousands, blissfully oblivious of any geographic line drawn on a map by some faraway government. The Georgia legislature brazenly defied federal jurisdiction over its western borders, claiming that all of Creek country and beyond to the Mississippi belonged to Georgia based on its colonial charter. Washington was infuriated but also helpless to stop the demographic wave. “Until we can restrain the turbulence and disorderly conduct of our own borders,” he lamented, “it will be in vain I fear to expect peace with the Indians—or that they will govern their own people better than we do ours.”

As one historian so nicely put it, the Constitution was “a roof without walls,” meaning a political structure designed to facilitate a national ethos that did not exist. Washington’s plea for all citizens to regard themselves as Americans united under a single government can be comprehended only within that prenational context. His thinking at the time was more distinctive than it appears now, because he was arguing that America’s revolutionary energies should be harnessed to the larger purposes of nation-building, while others, most prominently Jefferson, regarded that argument as a betrayal of the revolution itself.

Washington was insisting that the relationship between individuals, which could often be conducted on the basis of mutual trust, did not apply to nations. All nations, including the United States, could never depend upon trust but must behave solely on the basis of interest.47 In the context of his own time, this was a defense of the Jay Treaty, which repudiated the Franco-American alliance and aligned America’s commercial interests with British markets as well as with the protection of the all-powerful British fleet. It was also a repudiation of Jefferson’s love affair with the French Revolution as a sentimental attachment rooted in some combination of nostalgia and seductive ideals (i.e., Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity) that floated dreamily in Jefferson’s fertile imagination. For Jefferson, such ideals were the supreme reality. Washington regarded them as dangerous illusions that deflected attention from the long-term interests of the American people.

we step aside to scan the historical landscape during the quarter century after the Cold War, the most distinctive feature is nearly perpetual war, and the most distressing fact is that the overwhelming military superiority of the United States did not produce successful outcomes. Quite the opposite. In the most significant theater of American intervention, the Middle East, the strategic consequences have proven worse than disappointing, indeed counterproductive, by driving Iraq into the orbit of Iran and radicalizing Iraq’s Sunni population, which became the nucleus for ISIS. Beyond the Middle East—in Somalia, Kosovo, and Libya—developments have also failed to follow the script that liberal prophets predicted. The American political recipe for success has proven unpalatable for people and places with different histories, religions, and political traditions.

Nor was any public sacrifice required. Since President Richard Nixon ended the draft in 1973, the burden of military service has fallen on a small minority of working-class men and women. Nothing like the mass protests against the Vietnam War occurred in the post–Cold War era, for the simple reason that two generations of middle-class, college-age citizens have never had to factor military service into their personal agendas. A serious but unspoken moral dilemma lurks beneath this convenient arrangement, when the chief beneficiaries of America’s status as the dominant world power are immunized from obligations that come with those benefits. An analogous disconnect has also been institutionalized by concealing the costs of war. The budget for the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, was kept on a separate ledger, as if on a credit card. Instead of a tax increase to cover a portion of the costs, President Bush pushed through a major reduction in taxes, thereby passing the bill (or buck) to posterity. Such financial and accounting chicanery reinforced the larger pattern of deception in the post–Cold War era, making war almost painless: it is not declared, few have to fight, and no one has to pay. Only a small group of veterans, who are currently committing suicide in record numbers, experience firsthand that the United States is engaged in a perpetual war.

Adams’s son, John Quincy Adams, the most prominent and influential foreign policy thinker of the antebellum era, also agreed that the United States could serve as a role model for republican institutions but must never attempt to become a messianic missionary or, even worse, an imperious intruder in the British mode. As he put it in a Fourth of July speech (1821) that George Kennan loved to quote, “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

Throughout history, then, the fate of nations with political frameworks based on public opinion has always been haunted by the specter of charismatic charlatans with a knack for exploiting popular fears. In that sense, the Trump presidency, while wholly unexpected, was eminently predictable, almost overdue.

But whatever his duration, Trump has exposed the deep pools of isolationist sentiment that always lurked beneath the surface in the rural regions of the American heartland, now raised to relief by residents who see themselves as victims rather than beneficiaries of the globalized marketplace America is defending. Moreover, the very fact that a person with Trump’s obvious mental, emotional, and moral limitations could be chosen to lead the free world casts a dark shadow of doubt over the credibility and reliability of the United States as the first democratic superpower.

the founders insisted on a complete separation of church and state at the national level, thereby overturning the long-standing presumption that only shared religious convictions could hold a nation together.