American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

by Joseph J. Ellis

The study of history is an ongoing conversation between past and present from which we all have much to learn.

I was not completely fooling myself in believing that history has something to teach us all, even though it is impossible to know at the moment of learning just what that something might be.

By definition, all efforts to harvest the accumulated wisdom of the past must begin from a location in the present, so the questions posed of the past are inevitably shaped either consciously or unconsciously by the historical context in which they are asked.

Unlike my former students, who discovered relevant historical insights later in life, almost accidentally, the Adams and Lincoln examples were self-conscious attempts to generate historical evidence in support of preferred outcomes. When it comes to the writing of relevant history, there are no immaculate conceptions.

In fact, the past is not history, but a much vaster region of the dead, gone, unknowable, or forgotten. History is what we choose to remember,

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.

Martin Luther King, Jr., liked to buoy the spirits of his supporters by observing that “the arc of the moral universe bends upward toward justice,” a thought he borrowed from Theodore Parker, the nineteenth-century antislavery theologian. But nearly a century and a half after slavery was ended, the dark side of the Jeffersonian legacy continues to cast a shadow over King’s hopeful words, reminding us that Jefferson never intended his lyrical version of the American promise to include blacks, and the very belief that it should was a recent, mid-twentieth-century idea. Each lurch forward along the arc of racial equality, in fact, has generated a backward surge that exposes residual prejudices called to the surface of American life from some deep pool of racial resentment that was always there and, if Jefferson was right, always will be. 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.

One final forecast. 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.

“Now, my Friend, who are the aristoi? Philosophy may Answer ‘The Wise and the Good.’ But the World, Mankind, have by their practice always preferred ‘the rich and beautiful and well born.’ ” Even philosophers, he chided, when marrying their children, “prefer the rich and handsome and the well descended to the wise and the good.” There were “five Pillars of Aristocracy,” he concluded, “Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius, and Virtues. Any one of the three first can, at any time, overbear any one or both of the two last.”

Both Adams and Taylor, then, viewed banks as worrisome new features on the economic landscape of the early republic. For Taylor they were “our new aristocracy of paper and patronage,” while Adams regarded them as “an Aristocracy as fatal as the Feudal barons, too impregnable a Phalanx to be attacked by anything less than disciplined Roman Legions.”

The great insight he took from Smith’s treatise was that while the new aristocracy of the modern world would be based on wealth rather than inherited bloodlines, the psychological imperatives of commercial societies would be driven by the same passions for distinction that animated the aristocracies of old, and would benefit from the same emotional urge for conspicuous displays of extravagance that royal families had enjoyed in the medieval world. The crucial Adams contribution was to recognize that Smith’s analysis of the irrational urges driving the new commercial aristocracy would prove even more pronounced in the United States, where there were no vestiges of the old-style aristocracy to offset wealth as the primary measure of elite status.

As silly as it seemed, his underlying motives represented his effort to enhance the honorific status of prominent public offices in order to provide incentives for an honorable form of public service that would help offset a purely plutocratic oligarchy.

His own generation, on the other hand, had sought distinction by pursuing fame rather than fortune, which was a higher standard in the Adams pecking order, though he was quick to insist that the quest for fame was just as irrational and ungovernable as the other emotions. “We must still remember,” he cautioned, “that this passion, although refined by the purest moral sentiments and intended to be governed by the best principles, is a passion still, and therefore like all other human desires, unlimited and insatiable.”

Once you realize that equality is the exception, not the rule, in a capitalistic society, the question changes. It is not “How can we free the marketplace from government regulations to increase productivity?” It is instead “How can we free ourselves from illusions about the free market in order to assume a more equitable distribution of wealth?”

(The top ten hedge fund managers make more than all the kindergarten teachers in the United States.)

The industrial moguls of old made steel, ships, and railroads. The super-rich in the second Gilded Age mostly manage and make only money, and this is happening throughout the developed world.

forging the link between an economic oligarchy and a political plutocracy.

Reagan broke with two Republican predecessors, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, both of whom tacitly endorsed the fiscal policy of FDR as a necessary and permanent presence on the American political landscape.

From either a historical or a philosophical perspective, the emergence in the 1980s of a New Right movement based on a demonic view of government seems strange. For it required a massive dose of amnesia to blot out the considerable benefits that had accrued to two generations of the American population over the preceding half century, and it required a radically revisionist view of American history to depict the Federal Reserve Board, Social Security, and Medicare as illegitimate aberrations that must somehow, like most of the twentieth century, be revoked.

It makes more sense to explain Reagan-era conservatism not as a coherent political philosophy, but more pragmatically as a successful effort to dismember the New Deal coalition by deploying the antigovernment message to attract three otherwise disparate constituencies to the 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.

Politically, the Gilded Age is a strange candidate for paradise, burdened as it is with images of Robber Barons feasting at Delmonico’s in self-indulged splendor, the millionaires’ club of wholly bought-and-sold congressmen, and a reigning ideology called Social Darwinism that depicted entrenched poverty and permanent economic inequality as conditions sanctioned by some combination of God’s will and Nature’s laws.

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.

Despite its conspicuous location at the end, the first ten amendments did not receive a separate title as the “Bill of Rights” until Franklin Roosevelt popularized the term in the 1930s.47