Our Founders' Warning - Strobe Talbott

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the nation’s founders.

      Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were present at the creation of the United States. They were, in fact, among the primary creators. The sixth president, John Quincy Adams, had been at his father’s side in Europe during the American Revolution. As a young man, he served as an envoy in his own right and as secretary of state before assuming the presidency.

      Those six presidents, along with America’s man for all seasons, Benjamin Franklin, are the protagonists of this book. Their joint legacy has been important in every stage of American history, but it is especially relevant in the current one. The founders put their individual and shared morals to work in the public arena, establishing the foundation of the freedom that is our national birthright.

      The Founding Fathers of the American republic valued their own heritage as children of the European Enlightenment.18 The movement emphasized the sovereignty of human beings, the capacity of individuals to reason, to seek knowledge, and to live by ethics based on honesty, tolerance, and empathy.

      They forged these high-minded abstractions into tools for liberating their lands and liberalizing their governance. As a prominent American historian, Henry Steele Commager, put it, “The Old World imagined, invented, and formulated the Enlightenment; the New World—certainly the Anglo-American part of it—realized it and fulfilled it.”19

      The founders were men of affairs: landed farmers, lawyers, journalists, publishers, preachers, educators, scientists, physicians, and a retired soldier who had looked forward to a pastoral life on the banks of the Potomac River. When they renounced their allegiance to the British Crown, they designed an architecture of governance that the world had never seen.

      The founders were not just lighting lamps: they were playing with fire, and they knew it. They were cautious optimists, not utopians. Nor were they saints or angels (most did not believe in such beings). Some of their failures cast dark clouds onto our day and as far as the eye can see into our own future. Race was the most intractable. Four centuries after the first slaves were forcibly brought to British America as chattel, their descendants have had to endure President Trump’s dog whistles, watch him repress their right to vote, and hear him condone homegrown Nazis and other white supremacists.

      The founders were not determinists, expecting that the arc of history, by itself, would bend toward equality, justice, liberty, and peace. Realization of those ideals required constant, judicious, and ethical human agency. Progress was fragile, susceptible to human weakness or malevolent strength.

      The founders were acutely aware that their unique construct and valiant determination would be sorely tested. They knew that the customary instrument for maintaining order and exercising magisterial power was tyranny. Republics of the past had been fleeting anomalies, favored by idealists but not by most rulers who relied on the state’s monopoly of violence to ensure their subjects’ submission.

      In the sweep of history, most of the leaders of tribes or nations or empires were ruled by the grizzly bear’s instincts. Modern dictatorship is not a new normal: it is an ancient system making a comeback.20

      John Adams was a fervent student of history and the founder most inclined to prophecy and mood swings. When gloomy, he feared that the republic would last only a few decades. He had trepidations that future Americans would not be up to the job—or, worse, that they might tack toward autocracy. He worried that a full-blooded demagogue could undermine the American experiment.21

      A hoary adage defines journalism as the first draft of history. But those who have made history often have had their own drafts. First come the ideas; then comes the debates, often blood-spilled; then the words, first chiseled in stone, later handwritten on parchment; then, finally, the laws and institutions are created. Only when those rules and their means of enforcement have been established does the intended nation become a reality, with a government that begins to function.

      The Declaration of Independence was a calculated act of hubris. The founders proceeded as if the United States of America were up and running. But the independence they sought was not yet theirs; it was left to their ragtag Continental Army to defeat the mightiest military in the world.

      The signers were determined to wrest their homeland from Britain, but it would take seven bloody, crisis-ridden years to accomplish that goal. The self-evident principles they were fighting for might have been crushed. The founders were trying to do something almost unimaginable, something that would take a long, long time. Their bold, hazardous, and speculative venture needed fervent goals to match the bold chances they were taking.

      The Declaration of Independence was meant to sing, to lift Americans’ resolve and courage for what was to come. Moreover, the founders were taking personal responsibility for what they had already done and what they would do if they won the war. Had the revolution failed, they would have signed their death sentences. That gave their moral weight to the responsibilities they passed to their descendants.

      The framers of the Constitution, however, had a different purpose. Whereas the Declaration of Independence was a secular psalm heralding timeless truths, the Constitution set perimeters for the inevitable, ongoing arguments about what those truths meant and how to turn them into laws.

      The law of laws—the preeminent commandment—held that no one was above the law. The revolutionary generation maintained a crucial consistency through six administrations—spanning forty years, from 1789 to 1829—to solidify and extend that secular commandment into the twenty-first century. Now, under Trump, we can hear the tablets cracking.

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      Heaven, Earth, and the Mind

      Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man.

      —Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

      When Donald Trump accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in Cleveland, Ohio, in July 2016, his peroration brought down the house. It consisted of four one-syllable words, starting with his favorite: “I am your voice!” At a minimum, the punch line rang of hubris.

      The founders would have gone further: they would have sensed the acrid odor of tyranny. In a republic, citizens must retain their voices and exercise their right to think for themselves. That principle was at the core of the founders’ philosophy, and had been inculcated in many of them from their youth. They guarded it like a shield to the end of their days.

      When Thomas Jefferson retired to his beloved Monticello overlooking Charlottesville, Virginia, he had a large collection of busts and paintings of his heroes in history. The English Enlightenment was well represented. High on the parlor wall, near the entrance, were three portraits: Francis Bacon, the father of empiricism; Isaac Newton, the father of modern science; and John Locke, the father of liberalism. Jefferson called them “my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced.”1

      By dubbing these eminences a trinity, Jefferson might have been taking a sly jab at religion in general and Christianity in particular. After all, he was one of the more forthright figures of the time and took a dim view of spiritual dogma.

      Jefferson was a latter-day proponent of a radical movement at the end of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth whose adherents came to be called freethinkers. They trusted reason and logic, questioned conventional wisdom, and resisted conformity, especially religious doctrine.2

      Over the decades, British philosophers, scientists, and political activists claimed mastery over their minds. By the eighteenth century, that ethos had permeated the intellectual climate of the British colonies in America. Thomas Paine, the English-born political theorist and pamphleteer for the Revolution, put the matter succinctly: “My own mind is my own church.”3

      The personalization of

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