Letters from an Ohio Farmer

Franklin's Fourth

To My Fellow Citizens:

Benjamin Franklin snatched lightning from the sky and scepters from the hands of tyrants, a contemporary once said of him.  The lightning snatching refers to Franklin's famous kite flying in a thunderstorm to prove the connection between electricity and lightning.  As for snatching scepters from tyrants, this might refer to a number of Franklin's activities.  The one most fitting to recall on July 4 is Franklin's connection to the Declaration of Independence.

The principal author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, sent Franklin the draft, asking for his opinion.  Franklin made several editorial suggestions, one of great importance.  Jefferson had written "We hold these truths to be sacred and inviolable; that all men are created equal…"  Franklin suggested instead, "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal…"

Some have seen Franklin's suggested change as an appeal to the scientific language of the day at the expense of the more religious sentiment present in the word "sacred."  Yet Franklin did not object to Jefferson's mention of Providence; nor did he object to the phrase "the laws of nature and of nature's God."  Neither was Franklin one to appeal to authority.  What was his intention, then, in suggesting the phrase "self-evident"?   

To understand this, we must recall the consequence of human equality.  If human beings are equal, it means that no one has a right to rule another.  Neither nature nor God has given to one individual, one family, one race, or one class, the right to rule others without their consent.  To be ruled justly, each individual must consent to be ruled.  Equality is the foundation of self-government, free government.

To call human equality sacred and inviolable establishes how important it is, but it does not tell us how we know it.  But if men are to enjoy free government, to never be ruled unless they consent to it, they must know that they are equal.  This must be the most unquestioned political knowledge a citizen possesses.  It must be an idea that carries its own evidence with it.  It must, in brief, be self-evident.  Franklin suggested inserting the phrase "self-evident" in the Declaration to make the foundation of self-government depend on nothing else but the understanding of self-governing men.

It may seem to us, indeed, that human equality is self-evident, heirs as we are to the revolutionary accomplishments of men like Franklin.  But is it really self-evident?  Reflect for a moment on the wonderful irony at the heart of the Declaration:  probably the two most intelligent and most variously and spectacularly talented of our statesmen joined in the founding of our nation by declaring themselves self-evidently equal to all others.  Do not the evident inequalities of men like Franklin and Jefferson call into question the supposed self-evident equality of men?

In fact, they do not.  What is self-evident when we consider Franklin is not that he was equal in intelligence or talents to other men.  This is most self-evidently not the case.  What is self-evident, however, is that no matter how superior Franklin was to others, he was still a human being.  Although surpassingly intelligent, he was not all-knowing.  Although exceedingly industrious, he was not all-powerful.  He did not possess the attributes of a deity.  He was human and self-evidently heir to human limitations and frailties.  Due to his evident abilities, Franklin led every enterprise he was associated with.  Due to his self-evident humanity, he did so only with the consent of those he led.

Franklin's insertion of the term "self-evident" into the Declaration was a critical improvement of the text.  Considering its meaning will always bring us to a better understanding of equality and self-government.  In offering this improvement, Franklin was continuing—when he was 70—his life-long activity as an improver, as a man who sought better ways to do things, from cleaning streets to testing the forces of nature.  This was in keeping with the argument of the Declaration.  If men were equal, then they were not to be judged by their family, religion, race, or class but by what they did.  Franklin discouraged would-be immigrants to the United States who had only their birth or family name to recommend them.  In America, he wrote, "people do not enquire of a stranger, what is he? but what can he do?"

Franklin's life, shaped by the knowledge that a man should be judged above all by what he does, embodied the principles of the Declaration before it was written.  This is why he is often called the first American.  By embodying these principles, Franklin was also manifesting most tangibly his equality with other men.  When he arrived in Philadelphia, Franklin was a nearly penniless 17-year-old.  He had only his talents and industry to rely on.  In this, he was like all men.  Nor could he predict, because it was not in his power, what would result from applying his talents industriously.  In this, he was also like all men.  He could not be assured of achievement, he could only work so as to deserve it. 

More than his editing of the text, Franklin's life was his greatest contribution to the Declaration.  He is the model of an American.  His life not only embodied the Declaration, it vindicated its principles and the hopes of those who drafted it and of those who then and ever after were inspired by it.  Franklin first and above all others showed the good that a free man, a self-governing man, could do.  And so in its own way does the life of any citizen who following Franklin strives to do the best no matter what he has.  Such a life may not snatch lightning from the skies but it will continue to snatch scepters from tyrants.

Happy Fourth,

Ohio Farmer

 

Equality and Race Continued

To My Fellow Citizens:

In a recent letter we discussed the challenge of making republican government succeed in a racially plural republic, a challenge most Americans before 1860 considered insurmountable. One of the long arcs of American history since then is the growing recognition that while sustaining such a nation was daunting, all the alternatives to it were impossible. Thus, America would have to find a way to make it work as well as it could be made to work.

The beginning of this arc can be seen in Abraham Lincoln’s experience. He had become a nationally prominent politician in the 1850s, by insisting that America’s founders had meant to place the institution of slavery in the “course of ultimate extinction,” a course from which the nation must not depart. “Ultimate,” however, is an elastic term. In his fourth debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln conceded, “I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at least….” 

This was a reflection, among other things, of Lincoln’s estimation of American public opinion. In a country founded on the consent of the governed, it is impossible for a democratic politician peacefully to do more than he can persuade his fellow citizens to join him in doing.  That Lincoln’s election was considered an intolerable provocation by the slave-holding states that seceded from the Union demonstrated just how far public opinion had to move in America before slavery could be extinguished “in the most peaceful way.”  As Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, who would become vice president of the Confederate States of America, said in 1861, “Our new government is founded upon … the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”

When war was forced upon him by the seceding slave-holding states, Lincoln took the occasion of the war to make the ultimate extinction of slavery much more immediate. As a measure of military necessity he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, less than two years into his first term of office, declaring that all slaves in states rebelling against the federal government were “forever free.” This was one step toward the ultimate extinction of slavery; the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting slavery throughout the nation, was the next.

Lincoln’s assassination, less than two months after the start of his second term, means that we can only speculate about the further steps he would have taken towards establishing a democracy that included freed slaves. In his last public speech, given four days before he was assassinated, Lincoln spoke favorably about readmitting Louisiana to the Union, based on its newly adopted state constitution, “giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white, and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man.” For Congress to reject Louisiana’s application, Lincoln argued, would be to say to that state’s blacks, “This cup of liberty … we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how.”

The previous month, at his second inaugural, Lincoln had urged Americans to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves.” It became apparent in the years after Lincoln’s death, however, that there was a profound antagonism between the goals of racial unity and sectional unity. Southern whites, defeated and humiliated, made clear that they were implacably opposed to federal policies that would guarantee blacks’ civil and voting rights. For the first years of Reconstruction the policy of the Republicans who controlled Congress was to confront and overcome this opposition. Federal troops remained stationed in the defeated states, protecting blacks’ rights and allowing legislatures with black representatives, sometimes comprising majorities, to convene.

Southern resistance, manifested in the rise of paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan, forced northerners to decide whether they were prepared to commit troops and resources, to the extent and for the duration required, until southerners finally accepted former slaves as equal citizens. In the aftermath of the election of 1876, a decade after the end of the Civil War, northerners threw in the towel: Reconstruction ended with the abolition of slavery, but also with the federal government acquiescing in white southerners deciding how and whether southern blacks’ rights would be recognized. The imperative of sectional reconciliation had triumphed over the imperative of enforcing the Constitution, explicitly color-blind after the ratification of the 14th and 15th amendments. As Lincoln had feared, blacks’ hopes for realizing liberty were postponed to some vague and undefined when, where, and how. It took most of the ensuing century before the Civil Rights movement impelled the nation to make its commitment to color-blind citizenship specific and immediate. A future letter will examine the democratic principle of equality in the wake of that historical watershed. 

Ohio Farmer

Equality and Race

To My Fellow Citizens:

Recent controversy over the killing of a black teenager in Florida reminds us that America’s racial dilemmas did not end with the election of our first black president; they evolved. The episode is the latest intersection of equality, the general principle of democratic politics everywhere, and race, the particular issue that has been the greatest political challenge throughout America’s history.

Abraham Lincoln, who thought more profoundly than any figure in our history about the intertwined questions of equality and race, took the questions up in 1857 in a speech criticizing the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. The Court, and politicians like Lincoln’s great opponent Senator Stephen Douglas, who defended the Court’s decision, argued that when the American revolutionaries famously wrote that “all men are created equal,” they did not mean to include black men (this is a view still widely insisted on by many academics and intellectuals who write on these subjects).  Lincoln denied this.  As he said:

Chief Justice Taney … and [Senator] Douglas argue that the authors of [the Declaration] did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did not at once, actually place them on an equality with the whites. Now this grave argument comes to just nothing at all, by the other fact, that they did not at once, or ever afterwards, actually place all white people on an equality with one or another.

It is worth quoting Lincoln at length explaining what the authors of the Declaration of Independence did mean:

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".… They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.

Establishing a true understanding of equal human rights in the public mind was—and is—a mountainous challenge in itself. Giving the best possible effect to that truth in the “circumstances” in which the country finds itself at any given time can be an even greater challenge. Lincoln wrote that the Founders intended the enforcement of Americans’ equal natural rights to “follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” As he said repeatedly throughout the 1850s, this meant, among other things, that the Founders intended to put slavery in the “course of ultimate extinction.”

In Lincoln’s time, he and Stephen Douglas were politicians competing at the highest levels of American politics for the same mid-19th century voters, who were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly opposed to sharing their political and social rights with blacks. To gain advantage with such an electorate, Douglas—in Lincoln’s words— sought to exploit the “natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.” He did this by saying of those who, like Lincoln, affirmed that the declaration’s “all men are created equal” meant all men, that they “do so only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes!”

Appealing to the same voters, Lincoln protested “against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.” The only “preventive”—if there was any preventive—for amalgamation of the white and black races, he said, was the “separation of the races.” The only way—if there was any way—to effect the separation of the races was “colonization,” transporting “the African to his native clime” or to some other foreign parts that he would consent to go to.

With such appeals, Lincoln got himself elected president.  Secession and Civil War followed. The circumstances of the war made it possible for Lincoln to promote the immediate abolition of slavery; this led, quickly, to the constitutional guarantee of black citizenship and voting rights and, slowly, to the federal enforcement of those guarantees. After a century of the uncertain and painful unfolding of circumstances, in1964 Congress outlawed the local ordinances and private practices that required blacks to eat in separate sections of restaurants and sleep in separate sections of hotels. Three years later the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that legal restrictions on marriage, if based on race, were unconstitutional.

Nothing changes circumstances like war. By the time the Civil War ended it became clear that all the options Americans had been exploring were dead ends. We were not going (though the rebelling states tried) to split into two countries, one free and one slave. We were not going to exist in perpetuity as one country in which we agreed to disagree about slavery. A house divided against itself, half-slave and half-free, could not stand, as Lincoln had predicted. And we were not going to end slavery only to send the descendants of Africans who had been brought here against their will throughout the 17th and 18th centuries back to Africa or on to some other part of the world. The only option left was the one that most white Americans before the Civil War considered morally intolerable and practically impossible: find a way to make American democracy work in a nation where different ethnic and racial groups formed one people. Some thoughts on the course of that endeavor will be the subject of a future letter.

Ohio Farmer

 

The Shades at Osawatomie

To My Fellow Citizens:

On August 31, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt gave a revolutionary speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, and a couple of weeks ago President Barack Obama visited Osawatomie and wrapped himself in the mantle of Roosevelt's revolutionary progressivism. Thomas Jefferson saw it coming. 

Jefferson did not predict that Roosevelt would make a speech at Osawatomie. He merely predicted the subject of Roosevelt's speech. Jefferson feared that at some point social and economic change would call into question the character of the American republic, portending a revolution that would change it fundamentally. He feared this because he talked to a French peasant woman. 

Jefferson was then Ambassador to the Court of Louis XVI. Representing a poor government, Jefferson was not able to afford the display thought necessary for the French Court’s most elaborate ceremonies. So, one day, instead of attending such a ceremony, Jefferson took a walk in the countryside near Versailles. He happened upon an old peasant woman. Falling into conversation with her, he listened as she spoke of her difficulties. As Jefferson later wrote to a friend, he learned that she had no land and was not allowed onto the vast lands held by the nobility who used them only for sport, riding at their pleasure and hunting wild game. She was entirely dependent on the hand-outs and odd jobs the aristocrats deigned to give her. Her children, she told Jefferson, often went to bed hungry. 

Jefferson was appalled by the destitution of the woman. He told his friend that the critical difference between France—indeed the rest of the world—and America was that in America land was available to all who wished to work it. The land gave opportunity—equality and liberty—to all and secured to Americans the blessings of republican government. And so it would be, Jefferson wrote, until the land was used up. 

As it turned out, industrialization, not population growth, used up the land, so to speak. As America industrialized, people left their farms. As they did so, the wealth generated by industrialization spread to all but unequally. Individuals and corporations amassed great sums. Theodore Roosevelt and people like him, who called themselves Progressives, believed that the old limited national government championed by Jefferson was no longer adequate to these new circumstances. At Osawatomie, as the shade of Jefferson hovered over him, Roosevelt announced the New Nationalism. 

By the New Nationalism, Roosevelt meant a powerful president acting in the name and on the behalf of the people who would control the "special interests" (Roosevelt's term) to ensure equality of opportunity. At Osawatomie, in the spirit of Jefferson, Roosevelt spoke of "the triumph of a real democracy, . . . of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him." Roosevelt understood, as Jefferson did, that opportunity so understood satisfied the age-old longing for justice and at the same time encouraged our virtue—the best there is in us.

The revolution in our government foreseen by Jefferson and announced by Roosevelt did not concern its goal—equality of opportunity—but the means to achieve that goal. Jefferson as much as Roosevelt thought government should prevent monopolies. But beyond this Jefferson believed that liberty itself was equality of opportunity and limiting the power of government would maximize liberty. Roosevelt believed that the great wealth and power of individuals and corporations required a powerful central government to ensure equality of opportunity for everyone else. 

But the progressive revolution did not stop with the means our government used. Over time, gradually but inevitably, it sought to change its goal. How do we know that there is equality of opportunity? Is it enough to pass laws and impose regulations? If we do so, and inequalities persist or reappear, then perhaps government must do more. It must not simply ensure an equal playing field but a more equal score at the end of the game. 

This is the view President Obama expressed in his speech at Osawatomie. With the shades of Jefferson and Roosevelt hovering over him, he said that the fundamental issue was that inequality of outcome meant there could be no equality of opportunity.  "Gaping inequality," he announced, "gives lie to the promise that's at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try." 

Like Jefferson and Roosevelt, Obama sees equality of opportunity ("you can make it if you try") as the heart of America. Unlike his predecessors, however, he believes that inequality of outcome or wealth denies equality of opportunity. If it does, then to save the heart of America, the government must work to prevent inequality of outcome.

Let us note immediately that the President made no argument to prove that inequality in wealth, "gaping" or otherwise, reduces opportunity. He merely asserted what has become a Progressive dogma, one that revolutionizes the goal of our government as much as Roosevelt revolutionized the means.

What are we to make of these revolutions? Let us acknowledge that governmental action was and is necessary to ensure that none has unfair advantage. All agree on this. But let us also acknowledge the contradiction at the core of Roosevelt's revolution: restricting liberty cannot create opportunity. The power of government, therefore, should be as limited as possible, so the heart of America, opportunity for all, beats as strongly as possible. Let us acknowledge, finally, that a government that works to equalize outcomes, the hope of Obama's revolution, will need to exercise such power that it will imperil opportunity and thus both justice and virtue even more than Roosevelt's revolution did. This above all was the revolution Jefferson feared as he walked with the peasant woman and looked to the future.

Ohio Farmer

 

Equality and Opportunity

To My French Friend:

Yes, Jean-Luc, I did read the President's recent speech.  And I did notice that he referred to the same statistics from the Congressional Budget Office that I did in my last letter to you.  But did you notice the sleight of hand?  The President said that "over the last few decades, the average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent," as the report indeed notes.  But then the President said "over the last decade, the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about 6 percent."  In other words, the President used two different standards to compare income (income over several decades and income over one decade) and presented them as if they were the same.  

As I noted in my letter to you, what the budget office found was that over the last few decades, the income of the poorest Americans increased by 18 percent and American households experienced an average increase of 62 percent in their wealth.   As for the time period that the President refers to, a Federal Reserve study found that the poorest Americans actually lost less in the recent recession than did the wealthiest and that income in the United States has actually become more equal over the past few years.  This should not surprise us.  If you owned a house, you lost a lot when the housing market collapsed.   If you didn't own a home, you lost much less. 

I will leave it to more subtle continental minds like yours to figure out how such manipulation can be a basis for bringing us together, a major theme of the President's speech, or how condemning morally those who disagree with you, as the President also did, contributes to that end.  For my part, I would rather consider a point that the President and I agree on, the importance of opportunity.   This consideration allows me as well to address your concern that what once made America great may be slipping away.

I did indeed consult the World Bank report you mentioned.  And it does indeed show that in the last four years we have fallen among countries in the ranking of ease of starting a business from third to thirteenth.  I was also surprised to confirm, as you noted, that the report shows that the tax burden on businesses in the United States, while lower than it is in France, is higher than it is in the United Kingdom, Uruguay, and even Romania, among other countries. 

This is important because, as the report points out, as taxes go up, the number of new businesses go down because it becomes too costly to start a business.  Not only does that make it hard for entrepreneurs (a fine French word!) like you to start businesses; it makes it harder for those out of work to find jobs, because no one is creating them.  

But there is more at stake than just new businesses and jobs, as important as those are.  What we are talking about—opportunity—is at the heart of our republican governments and way of life.  What good does it do to declare all created equal, if all do not have the opportunity to earn their daily bread and improve themselves through their own effort?  Without opportunity, our principles would have no practical effect. 

The President is right, therefore, to say that creating opportunity is critical to the success of our republican experiment.  How then do we create opportunity? 

The President wants to tax and then have the government spend on education, infrastructure, and research.  He wants more laws and regulations to prevent those he calls greedy from taking advantage of the rest of us.  Such increases in the power of government will create opportunities, he insists in his speech.  All of this is necessary, he tells us, because the old way does not work.  His proof, it seems, is his claim that while a few got richer, most got poorer. 

But as we have seen, he can make this claim only because he manipulated the statistics.  In fact, without the new taxing and laws and regulations that the President wants, American households got richer over the last few decades—on average 62 percent richer.  Moreover, the American economy that produced this wealth was not built on the Federal government’s spending on education, infrastructure, and research.  The Federal government historically has had little to do with education, and most infrastructure and research has been funded by the private sector. 

Through your frustrated efforts to start a business in a country with higher taxes and more regulations than America (and more unemployment!), I am sure, my friend, that you appreciate what will be the result of the President's plans.  We are already starting to see their bad effects.  The increased regulation already imposed on the financial industry has contributed to less financial support for new companies, the companies that create the most jobs. 

Why does the President not see this?  I cannot say for sure.  But he does seem more interested in making sure that no one has too much than in making sure that everyone has a chance to get more.  This means the President wants to limit opportunity to create more equality of outcome.  In doing so, he will only make more poverty for all. And by limiting opportunity, he will enfeeble our republican way of life. 

If I lack the skills of entrepreneurs like you, Jean-Luc, I share their hope and optimism, believing that my fellow citizens will not go where their President is trying to lead them.

Ohio Farmer

The American Mind

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

We saw in the last letter that the revolutionary principles Americans declared to the world on July 4, 1776—the principles that gave rise to a New Order of the Ages when, in support of them, the American people pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor—were not "new principles . . . never before thought of." They were principles already well understood by the American people, who were in the midst of a historic conversation about the principles of political freedom, a conversation that gave birth to what Jefferson called "the American mind."  The Declaration of Independence expressed in bold American terms the logic of political freedom that had become the common sense of the American people.

One essential ingredient of this logic of freedom, which is still very much part of American common sense, was the idea that, because human beings are equal and free by nature, legitimate government can only arise from the consent of the governed. A nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal will—if circumstances permit—be under a "government of the people, by the people, for the people." In other words, the principle of equality gives rise most naturally to a democratic or republican form of government. James Madison expressed this idea in Federalist 39, where he considered whether the government proposed under the new constitution would be "strictly republican." "It is evident," he wrote, "that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America . . . [or] with the fundamental principles of the Revolution."

Because of our conviction that consent is the foundation of legitimate government, we are concerned in every election that the election be fairly conducted, truly expressing the choice or consent of the people. But although consent is the only foundation of legitimate government, it does not follow that all governments founded on consent deserve the respect of freedom’s partisans. The Founders did not suppose that a tyranny must be submitted to by a minority just because a majority elected it. That would mean asking those who are to be oppressed by a majority to accept their oppression with equanimity—as the rightful expression of the noble principles of democracy.  It would be to tell oppressed peoples everywhere to cease their struggles for their natural rights as soon as they learn they are outnumbered. What could be more slavish?

These days this point has particular relevance to the various uprisings—some apparently supported by majorities—across the Arab world. These uprisings and rebellions are typically against various forms of tyranny, but they often seem to possess the potential to replace one tyranny with another. How would Jefferson’s “American mind” think about such human events?  It would begin, I think, by acknowledging that majority rule is the natural authoritative expression of the consent of the governed; in the same breath, it would observe that free government is instituted to secure the rights of all the people, not just the majority.  The very purpose of free government thus sets limits to what even a majority may rightly do.

Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, expressed this idea with characteristic felicity when he urged his countrymen to "bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possesses their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression." The will of the majority must be exercised within the bounds of that moral order which legitimates majority rule itself.  A thousand tyrants are no more palatable than one.  Majority rule and minority rights are therefore inseparable principles of free government. Being bound to respect minority rights does not detract from the majority’s right to rule; it dignifies it. Americans are partisans of free government, but this does not make them partisans of elective despotism, at home or abroad. Oppressive majorities deserve no more respect from us than any other oppressors.

This leads to another ingredient of the logic of political freedom or of American common sense—the idea of "equal law," which Jefferson mentioned in his first inaugural. As we have noted, the idea of human equality and freedom carries with it the recognition of human rationality; it also contains within it recognition of the limits of human rationality.  Because human beings are by nature rational beings, one man may not rightly rule over another as he may rightly rule over a non-rational being (a dog or a horse, for example).  But also, because no man is all-knowing or all-good—that is, because human reason is limited and fallible and subject to human passions—one human being may never rightly subject himself to the unrestrained will or unlimited power of another. This is what Madison meant when he wrote that "government... [is] the greatest of all reflections on human nature."

If men were angels [he wrote], no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

Human nature or human equality—the fact that human beings are neither angels nor mindless brutes—gives rise to the idea of constitutional or limited government. This is a political constitution that conforms to the natural constitution of man. Because human beings possess reason, their consent can give rise to legitimate government; because human reason is fallible and subject sometimes to unreasonable passions, human government must be subject to law.

It required much experience, reflection, and study for the American revolutionaries and founders to equip the American mind so that its common sense might establish free government that would be good government. Their exertions have left a rich legacy to us, making it easier—though never easy!—for us to ensure that America will continue to be what the revolutionaries and founders rightly thought it was at its inception—"the world’s best hope."

Ohio Farmer

Novus Ordo Seclorum

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

America will always have the honor of being the first nation on earth to dedicate itself to the self evident truth that all men are created equal, as it did in declaring independence on July 4, 1776. In that dedication truly was created a New Order of the Ages—a Novus Ordo Seclorum as we say on the Great Seal of the United States. Let us take the occasion of this Independence Day to continue our reflections on what this means. What does it tell us about the foundations, forms, and purposes of American politics? What does it require of us—deserve from us?

Lincoln called the idea of equality the central idea of the American political experiment, from which all its other ideas radiate. It is, he wrote, “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times”; it is a philosophical idea about human nature and the just relations of each human being to all others. The revolutionary and founding generation of Americans expressed this idea of human equality in a variety of ways. The familiar language of the Declaration of Independence is "that all men are created equal." To express the same idea, the Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 12, 1776) stated that "all men are by nature equally free and independent." The Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (March 2, 1780) stated that "All men are born free and equal."

To say that all men are by nature equal is to say that human beings are not naturally subordinated one to another: Whatever the many differences may be among human beings, no man is by nature a master; no man is by nature a slave. This is what Jefferson’s vivid metaphor meant, which we quoted in the last letter: "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." Of this revolutionary idea, at the heart of the Declaration and at the heart of the American experiment in self-government, Lincoln wrote on the eve of Civil War, “that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” And so it has proven to be: a powerful rebuke and a stumbling block to every form of tyranny and oppression—whether of race, class, or religion, whether home grown or foreign born—that has raised its head over the past two centuries.

Human beings, then, are naturally free as they are naturally equal. It is from this human equality and freedom that the founders derived the idea that government could only be justly founded on consent. Because human beings are not by nature subordinated to one another—that is, because they are equal and free—their consent must be obtained before any human being may rightfully exercise authority over them. It is the voluntary consent of the people that gives authority to government. Only a being possessing reason—a being who can distinguish right from wrong—is capable of voluntary consent. This is why the deepest root of American politics is in the fact, as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, “that Almighty God hath created the mind free.”

Government among free and equal men is formed, the American Founders would say, by social contract or social compact. In the words of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780: "The body-politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people." The American body-politic is a voluntary association begun when, in the last words of the Declaration of Independence, "for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge[d] to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." This is the political community that new citizens enter into when they become citizens. To take on the responsibilities of such citizenship, it is necessary—for citizens old and new—to understand the principles on which this citizenship is based. So it is a useful tradition, as the Fourth of July comes around each year, to reflect again—and again—on the American political principles famously declared to the world on the original Independence Day.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote late in life, in drafting the Declaration of Independence he had not meant to proclaim any "new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of," but merely to express "the American mind." The Declaration contains a stunning summation of the principles of free government; but it was only because the American people already understood these principles that it was possible to establish a government based upon them. Similarly, only if we are capable of understanding these principles will we be able to preserve and perpetuate, maybe even to strengthen and improve, the free institutions—the Novus Ordo Seclorum—that began to arise from them in 1776.  For our own sake and for the sake of the cause to which our country was dedicated on that original Fourth of July, let us take this occasion to renew our dedication to that cause and its noble principles. No one else can do it for us. It will do a world of good. And it is a cause worthy of the last full measure of devotion.
Happy Fourth.

Ohio Farmer

A City Upon a Hill

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

 Is America exceptional? Is it unique among the nations? If so, what makes it so? And what are the implications of the fact? These are not policy questions, but questions about ideas and historical circumstances that are at the foundation of policies. They are the kinds of questions, it seems, that you and other elected and appointed public officials are often compelled for no particularly good reason to answer, as was the president a short time ago. Perhaps this may sometimes seem a tedious requirement of your job, especially when journalists asking the questions have no interest other than ginning up a headline. And so it is understandable if on occasion you reach for plausible sounding formulas in the hope that they will not cause a headline of an undesirable sort. But your answers can matter a great deal. They can be an opportunity to shape the public’s sentiments and opinions in a way that helps free government remain good government.  Answering such questions—even when they haven’t been asked—has in the course of our history given an opportunity for America’s greatest statesmen in small or large ways to strengthen the capacity of their fellow citizens to govern themselves. On the other hand, there is hardly a greater mischief that can be done to the people than to give them bad answers to such questions.

In my last letter I took the liberty of questioning the notion, recently espoused by some leading public officials, that America is exceptional because its principles give it a special right and responsibility to lead. This is a confusion, I argued, if an understandable confusion, of a genuine American exceptionalism that is older than America itself—namely, the idea of America as an example to the world—“a city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop said to the future Massachusetts Bay colonists.  By 1776, when the thirteen colonies assumed their separate and equal station among the powers of the earth as the United States of America, they did so proclaiming principles that made America truly exceptional.  “We hold these truths to be self evident,” they declared, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights,” including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No people on earth had ever based the authority of their laws on such an assertion. So the historic effort to establish government upon this principle was in truth an unprecedented and exceptional—a then unique—experiment in self government.

As Thomas Jefferson put it in his last surviving letter, written just before he died fifty years to the day after July 4, 1776, the American idea of equality meant “that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” America was exceptional in founding our politics on what is least exceptional about us, on what we share with all other human beings at all times and in all places, rather than on any accidents of birth or circumstance that separate us.  For this reason, Jefferson thought that the principles proclaimed in the Declaration not only gave hope to all Americans but were “grounds of hope for others,” everywhere and always.

The experiment of living up to these principles is the American experiment—the effort generation after generation to rise to equality, as Lincoln put it. So long as America remains America, it will be the country first dedicated to this proposition that all men are created equal, and ever aspiring to rise to its demands. Lincoln, echoing Jefferson, called the American idea the “principle of ‘Liberty to all’—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprise, and industry to all.”

The American experiment claimed to be an exceptional experiment not only because of its principles, but because conditions here in America were more favorable to the experiment in self-government than anywhere else in the world. The Founders’ America really was a land of opportunity as had never been known in the world before. The United States, as the saying then had it, became “the best poor man’s country on earth.”  Ordinary people, secure in their equal liberty and therefore full of hope and enterprise, could farm their own land and enjoy in peace the bread of their labor; and for the first time in human history, they or their children could aspire without limit to great things—even to the Presidency of the United States. If the experiment in self government fails here, our Founders thought, that failure might be taken as a strong proof that, contrary to American assertions, human beings are not made to govern themselves.

Just as Jefferson and Lincoln hoped, the example of America has helped spread the blessings of liberty to other peoples. Many countries now claim equality as the principle of their politics.  May they live up to those principles, as we hope to do ourselves!

Here in America, when we succeed in living up to our principles, we do something more important than establishing our right to lead.  We establish our worthiness to lead, whenever our interest guided by our justice should require. To rise to these principles, we must understand them. And since we are not born understanding them, we arrange as best we can to learn them from one another—sometimes by listening to our politicians talk about our country—and to hand them down to our children. Can there be a more propitious occasion to refresh our understanding than the annual approach of the Fourth of July?  Let us return to these themes next week.

Ohio Farmer

A Decent Respect

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

Following the killing of Osama bin Laden on the orders of the President of the United States, some prominent European politicians, clerics, and journalists condemned the act. Americans, many of whom continue publicly to applaud bin Laden’s death, were likened to “Muslims celebrating in the Gaza Strip” following the attacks on America on September 11, 2001. What should Americans think of such criticisms? How, more generally, should we regard the opinions of the peoples and governments of other nations?

To take the second question first, the natural American place to begin a response seems to be with the Declaration that announced our independence to the world in 1776, a declaration that was offered out of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” which “requires that [Americans] should declare the causes which impel them to the separation [from Great Britain].” Declaring the causes of our actions—giving reasons for them—was an act of respect for the opinions of mankind because it treated mankind as if their opinions could respond to reasons. This was a hopeful view of the human condition. It did honor to human nature and imposed expectations on human capacities.

The central idea proclaimed in the declaration—the main reason for our action—was the self evident truth that “all men are created equal,” that is, that all men everywhere and at all times possess by nature equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, this was an idea that seemed self-evidently untrue to the hereditary monarchs and nobility of Europe. So America showed its first respect for the opinions of mankind by disagreeing with most of them!—and in the same breath telling the peoples of the world how they might show greater respect for themselves, by recognizing and asserting the rights of their own humanity. 

Americans were keenly aware how difficult it would be to live up to the principle they were proclaiming—how heroic and continuous an effort would be required of themselves or any people that aspired to rise to equality. This very difficulty is partly what makes it such an “honorable determination  . . . to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”  As I have written in an earlier letter, “Any people that wished to be free, including the Americans, would have to demonstrate this capacity for themselves, and continue to demonstrate it each generation.”  What could be more honorable to human nature? What could show greater respect to mankind and their opinions?

The American experiment claims to be a glorious experiment because it aims, for the first time in human history, to make actual the potential for self government that we Americans insist human beings have by nature. This is what the founders meant when they soberly—and by no means arrogantly—reflected on the fact that it seems to have been reserved to “the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice.”

The greatest respect Americans can show for the opinions of mankind is to take responsibility for being the kind of self governing people we invite all people to be. Taking such responsibility may require, in the sometimes hard course of human events, the killing of the bin Ladens of this world. As I said in my last letter, our men who killed bin Laden were “armed above all with the authority of the people of the United States.  That is what dignified their violence and distinguished it from the brutality authored by their target.” How can the “authority of the people”—us—dignify such an act, raise it above the barbarism and savagery of bin Laden and all who support him and cheer him on? Only, I think, if “we the people” are the people we claimed to be, insisted on being, at our beginning—a people claiming the right to govern ourselves, as we proclaim and respect the same right for all other human beings; a people doing everything in our power to cultivate in ourselves the capacities necessary to vindicate this natural human right.  

Such a people will conduct themselves so that an attack upon them could never in truth be said to be a blessing to mankind; so that if they are compelled to some harsh measure like the killing of bin Laden, the world may truly be said to be better off because of it.  Such a people will arrange the political affairs of their land so that no one could with justice wish for the displacement of their rule by that of an enemy.  They will be neither self-aggrandizing nor self-sacrificing.  They will approach the world, in Washington’s words, as their "interest, guided by justice, shall counsel."

Such a people will understand that politics, though it must sometimes resort to harsh necessities like the killing of bin Ladens, is in the final analysis not reducible to such necessities.  Even Sun Tzu, that great teacher of the art of war, understood that "[t]hose who excel in war [must] first cultivate their own humanity and justice," that war is conducted ultimately for the sake of peace.  Closer to home, our own John Adams offered his American version of that human wisdom, when he reflected , “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy.” The successful practice of the arts of necessity—which are forced upon us by the needs of mere life—seems to be a necessary condition for the flourishing of the arts of freedom—which we pursue because they prepare us to deserve, by using well, "the blessings of liberty."

What about the more particular question, about American rejoicings at the killing of bin Laden? Of course, no self-respecting, self-governing people will condone dancing in the street to celebrate cruel necessities. Nor would it be a proud moment for such a people to make these cruel necessities applause lines in campaign rallies. But only a good people—a people able to take responsibility for choosing right over wrong—can be a self-governing people, and the world will be a sad place when good people can no longer rejoice at the triumph, however small and incomplete, of good over evil.

Ohio Farmer

America and the World

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

America, on the president’s orders, has intervened militarily in Libya; the president has given a speech explaining the intervention and the manner of it; the country and the world debate the matter as events unfold; the outcome remains uncertain.  In his speech, the president insisted that, because the Libyan people faced "the prospect of violence on a horrific scale," America had a responsibility to act. "To brush aside...our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are.” 

These letters are particularly concerned with “who we are” as a people and what this requires of our politics, domestic and foreign. So I leave aside for now the many other interesting and important questions swirling around the president’s words and deeds, including his deference to the United Nations and his neglect of the United States Congress. 

What does “who we are” tell us about how we should act toward the rest of the world? The president doesn’t say much about what it is that makes us who we are, though he seems now to be affirming, on behalf of our fellow human beings, a kind of American exceptionalism, about which he had been studiously ambiguous in the past. We might begin to think about who we are by considering the two most important ideas in American political life.  The first is found in the Declaration of Independence, which was cited in the last letter and will surely be cited often in future letters—the idea that “all men are created equal.” The second is derived from this idea and is found in the opening phrase of the Constitution: it is the idea of consent expressed in the familiar words, “We the People of the United States.”  These are words and ideas, not to conjure with, but to consider carefully as events demand our attention and action at home and abroad. As long as Americans are Americans, these ideas will certainly continue to be essential ingredients of who we are. So what do they tell us about us? 

The immediate practical purpose of the Declaration was to establish the right of the colonists to separate from the British Empire and its hereditary monarchy.  In this case, declaring all men equal meant that God did not give one man or his family a divine right to rule other men.  Human equality meant that government derived its powers justly only from “the consent of the governed.”  The claim that men were equal meant that not the accident of birth but the deliberate consent of men—“We the People”— was the only rightful basis for government. 

The Declaration had a larger purpose, a broader reach, than the dispute between Great Britain and the United States of America.  Its declaration of human equality denied not only a right to rule based on birth but a right to rule based on race or religion.  Declaring all men equal meant that a common humanity was more fundamental than the accidents of race or religion that separated human beings.  

The universality of this founding principle explains something of the claim the world has on American sympathies.  Having based our national life on the equality of all men, we recognize that in principle any human being is a potential citizen of the United States. We feel an affinity with people around the world, especially those struggling for freedom or stricken by natural or manmade disasters.  In our common humanity, we believe somehow that our hopes and fortunes are tied to theirs.  These feelings can give rise to a sense of obligation that seems to be what President Obama has in mind—our “responsibilities to our fellow human beings,” which he invokes when he says it would be a betrayal of who we are if we didn’t intervene in the way he chose to do in Libya. 

But in fact, of course, only Americans are American citizens.  Our revolution began with a universal claim about human equality, but it culminated necessarily in the establishment of a particular nation.  “We the People of the United States” are distinct from the other peoples of the world not by birth, race, or religion, but by the deliberate act of establishing ourselves as a different people.  By this act of consent, the people of the United States committed themselves to each other, as distinct from all the others who live outside the bond of citizenship.  In a world where freedom was scarce and tyranny commonplace (a world, in this respect, very like the one in which we continue to abide), we committed ourselves to establishing our own freedom and preserving the blessings of liberty in the United States, not to assisting the democratic aspirations of others or their recovery from disaster, however sympathetic we may be to the plight of our fellow men and however eager we may be to help them. 

No model or mathematical formula can help us strike the proper balance between what we owe to our fellow men and what we owe to ourselves.  Such balance is a matter for judgment and deliberation, as circumstances arise.  This judgment will take into account the diverging claims of equality and consent, the former what Americans share with other peoples, the latter how we distinguished ourselves from them.  These two American principles temper each other as we deliberate about how we as a people should act in a dangerous world of potential fellow citizens. 

Our deliberations will be well served by reflecting that the American founders thought the best thing Americans could do for the rest of the world was to succeed in our own experiment in freedom. As the founders thought of it, the American cause—the cause of liberty— is the cause of mankind.  If we could show by the success of our experiment that free government could be good government, this would be the greatest gift Americans could give to their fellow human beings—our own political well being would be a constant act of philanthropy.  America’s success would be cause for all men to rejoice. By the same token, failure of the American experiment in freedom would “deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.”  

From this point of view, Americans should want to know how our intervention in Libya enhances the prospects of the American experiment. If it does, the world will be a better place. If it doesn’t, it betrays America’s primary responsibility to our fellow human beings.

Ohio Farmer

Capacities of Mankind

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

In recent weeks, the course of human events—from Tunisia, to Libya, to Egypt, to Syria—reminds Americans once again that tyranny is common in the world, that it is hard to remove, and that it is even harder to replace it with freedom and good government. We Americans, of every political stripe, generally like to consider ourselves enemies of tyranny and friends of freedom in the world. Of course, we have lots of debates among ourselves (and with others) about what this means and what this requires of American foreign policy. These debates have been rekindled lately, and I take this occasion to recollect that America came into existence by overthrowing a tyranny and that we have had our own struggles replacing it with freedom and good government.

Our success in these struggles—to the extent that we have met with success—is due to moral and political habits and dispositions that arise from principles that must be learned. These principles and dispositions are the most essential conditions of freedom. Everything else is secondary. Without them, you might exchange an unpopular for a popular tyranny, an incompetent and destitute tyranny for a competent and wealthy one. But you will never have free government.

America began its experiment in freedom with what has become and will forever remain the most characteristic and defining American affirmation:  “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”  The truth of human equality and liberty was asserted against all tyrannies—whether of race, class, or religion, one, few, or many.

That men throughout history tyrannized one another in an infinite variety of ways was not proof to the American founders that human beings do not possess equal rights by nature—rather it was proof of how rare and difficult a thing it is to secure them.  It is proof of the philosophic rigor, the moral discipline, the political sagacity, and the beneficence of opportunity that are required for reflection and free choice to prevail over ignorance, prejudice, accident, and force.

Proclaiming that all men everywhere and at all times possess by nature equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the American founders undertook the historic effort to secure these rights, so far as they thought they could then be secured, to a small people at a particular place and time.  They were acutely conscious of the limits of their ability to secure these rights.  When they were able to establish a “more perfect union” they understood full well how far from perfection they remained.  It was all the new republic could do in the first century of its existence to keep the American experiment in freedom from failing miserably at home while other less fortunate experiments struggled to give birth to  freedom in other parts of the world.

In the course of its history, the American people have many times fallen beneath the high standards they set for themselves at the beginning.  They have strayed from those principles, and they have forgotten them, and become confused about them, and allowed misunderstood self-interest to obscure them.  Our own experience has confirmed for us that democracy requires more of its citizens than any other form of government and that it is no accident that history provides so few examples of successful and enduring democracies.  We count our blessings—the blessings of liberty—when we reflect with John Adams, "how few of the human race have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children," and how few have chosen well.

The “genius” of the American people at the time of the American revolution and founding made it both possible and necessary to establish a country based on the republican principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.  As Jefferson said in explaining the genesis of the Declaration, the ideas expressed in it were “the common sense of the subject” in America.  He was merely expressing “the American mind.”  It was only because the American people had learned to embrace republican principles that it was possible to establish an American republic.  I mentioned in an earlier letter the American founders’ “honorable determination  . . . to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” This was a determination, James Madison affirmed, “which animates every votary of freedom.”  But the founders understood that any people that wished to be free, including the Americans, would have to demonstrate this capacity for themselves, and continue to demonstrate it each generation.  

As the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, the just powers of government are derived from "the consent of the governed."  Only a people prepared to consent to a free government are capable of establishing one; and once they have established it, as Ben Franklin never ceases to remind us, they will need to have what it takes to “keep it.”  At the least, this means a people must be prepared to recognize their own humanity and that of their fellow citizens; they will neither aspire to be masters nor submit to be slaves; they must be prepared to rule and be ruled in turn and to abide by the laws they claim the right to make for themselves.

We know from our own American case, even with all the natural and historical advantages we have had, that it is not easy to achieve or to keep and pass on these capacities for self government. Experience and common sense tell us that these capacities are going to be even harder to achieve without the great advantages we have had. So let us be patient and moderate in our expectations from those who may face great disadvantages.

Ohio Farmer