Letters from an Ohio Farmer

Security and Limited Government

To My French Friend:

In my previous letter, Jean-Luc, I promised I would write to you again about the necessity of limited government.  I thought I would do so not by reiterating my concerns about our budget deficits and national debt but by discussing security.  It may seem odd to do so, since even the most ardent advocates of limited government acknowledge that government must provide security for its citizens.  This is true but what this means now and in the future must change, I submit.  To persuade you of this, let me offer some history. 

Throughout America's history, concerns about security have varied.  After the war of 1812, except for the years around World War I and the period from 1941 to 1990, our principal security concerns were domestic, not foreign.  But whichever were most important at a given time—domestic or foreign threats—we have responded to them by increasing the power of the government. 

Consider our domestic security concerns.  In response to the rioting and disorder of the urbanizing United States, police forces replaced constables first in Boston and then in other cities, slowly but steadily, from 1838 onward.  In response to labor and other violence of the later 19th century, states organized national guard troops and then, beginning in 1905, state police.  Federal police began with the Secret Service in 1865, which fought counterfeiters and other violators of Federal law but also the violence of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War in states then under Federal control during Reconstruction. 

The Secret Service was joined about 40 years later by the FBI, which eventually took over the fight against the Klan and other disturbers of our domestic tranquility.  Since the establishment of the FBI in the Justice Department, a number of other Federal agencies have also gained police authority.  Not only did new law enforcement organizations come into existence but new laws did as well, to regulate the conduct of citizens and to authorize the activities of local, state, and federal police.  After the attacks on September 11, we did not create new police forces but we passed new laws increasing the power of the police that already existed.

Each of these increases in the police power created controversy.  Still, our history shows that our concern with security has steadily, if reluctantly, led us to increase the power of government.  I believe that we can no longer follow this path.  In the future, our security will require that we limit the power of government, not increase it. 

To see this, I think we need only consider how technology is developing.  I read not too long ago of someone experimenting with DNA in a home lab.  This was being done for reasons of personal curiosity and in the hope of curing disease.  But it could also be done with malicious intent, in hopes of inflicting grave harm.  Or think of all those who spend time online and the few who are led to violence or who lead others to violence through the internet.  In these cases, what must be the power of government, how intrusive must it be into the lives of citizens, to find the few who might do grave harm?  Given these threats can we continue to seek security by steadily increasing the power of government?

An alternative approach is present in our constitutional tradition.  The real issue of the Second Amendment is not whether the right to bear arms applies to all individuals or only those in the militia.  The Amendment is clear recognition that security should not be left only to professional soldiers (and we may now add professional police) but that it is the responsibility of every citizen.  We must encourage that spirit.  I believe that the American people still possess it.  We see it, for example, in the help they give each other in natural disasters. 

In encouraging that spirit, the objective is not to replace government and its police power with the activity of citizens.  It is rather to change our historical pattern as regards our security; to look first to increase as much as possible the scope of citizen action, in order to limit as much as possible the scope of government action.  Given the security threats we face, only such an approach will preserve both liberty and security.

No doubt, my friend, you are wondering what exactly are the people to do when they take responsibility for their security.  In truth, I would say that the full answer to that question remains to be discovered.   Vigilance will be important, as will be working with the police, an effort that to their credit many police forces are already encouraging.  This vigilance and cooperation is already occurring to some degree, for example, on the internet. 

You will also be worried that in encouraging vigilance, the approach I am offering will encourage vigilantism, or citizens taking the law into their own hands, often for unjust ends.  To this I must respond that vigilantism does not produce only injustice and the judicial system only justice.  But the American judicial system is both competent and just, and the police powers of government will remain significant.  Together they will limit the dangers of vigilantism.  And those limited dangers are worth the risk to give liberty its greatest scope.   

So, I hope you will agree that the people have a growing role to play in preserving their security. That is after all the simplest yet most profound lesson of 9-11.  The only attackers who were stopped that day were stopped by citizens who took their security and the security of their fellow-citizens into their own hands. 

Ohio Farmer

To Provide for the Common Defense

To My Fellow Citizens:

In a previous letter I commented on our self-regarding character as a people, arguing that this character was the only secure foundation for a constitutional government, a government of limited powers.  As we respect ourselves, we will take care of ourselves and those around us.  In doing that, we will have less need of the heavy hand of government.  We will more fully enjoy the blessings of liberty and the happiness that is their fruit.

The self-regard of the people is essential not just to their happiness, however.  It is also essential to their safety.  Consider our current situation.

Long before 9/11, we knew that in a free society such as ours, individuals and small groups who mean to do us harm could operate among us, protected by the same liberties that protect us.  As this danger has increased, the government has responded, as it has always, by increasing its power to gather information on citizens and by restricting their liberties.  How far can this go?  As technology puts more and more power into the hands of smaller groups and even individuals (think of the increasing power individuals now wield to manipulate disease-causing viruses), how much more intrusive will government have to be in order to protect us?  Is there an alternative?

If the threat we face comes from another state and its military forces, then our government and our military forces are the best response.  But if the threat is living among the people, then the people are themselves the best means to meet it.  Even if the government pursued security at the cost of all liberty, its agents would not be as well positioned to identify dangers as the people in their various neighborhoods, communities, and workplaces.  The people are already doing this, and should be encouraged to increase their efforts.  The more the people are actively involved in their own defense, the more likely it is that they will be safe, and the less necessary it will be for them to sacrifice their liberty.  The government cannot make the people defend themselves. Still, the self-regarding people I described in my earlier letter, who take care of themselves and others in crises, are the sort of people, we must hope, who will defend themselves, if not prohibited from doing so.

In speaking of a people active in their own defense, we touch on the hallowed American tradition of the militia, of citizen soldiers ready and willing to defend themselves.  But as always, we must not flatter ourselves.  Citizen vigilance has often led to abuses, to the destruction of the safety and freedom of innocent citizens.  Government vigilance has also led to abuses, however, and only citizen vigilance, constrained by the unbiased application of our laws, will increase the capacities and freedom of Americans.    

Increasing our safety by restricting the power of government is not what we have done in the past.  But as our circumstances are new, so should our thinking be new.  Consider another example.  Most of the infrastructure in our country—phone and electricity lines, gas pipelines, computer networks, railroads—is privately owned.  All of this infrastructure is now, as it has always been, a possible target of attack.  But because all this infrastructure was not centrally planned by the government, because it grew in response to individual initiative, it is redundant and complex.  No one kind of attack can imperil it.  Various utility companies, for example, use different kinds of software to run their networks.  Some have modified what they have bought for their own special circumstances.  No one computer virus or hacking exploit can compromise all these systems.  If the government, in the name of increasing security or efficiency, were to impose one kind of system on these utilities, this would in fact only decrease our security.  The uniformity of central control would make the job of attackers much simpler.

The preamble to the Constitution speaks of establishing the government to provide for the common defense.  For most of our history, increasing the power of government was essential to that defense.  Now, limiting that power is just as important.

Ohio Farmer

We the People

To My Fellow Citizens:

Our Constitution begins with the phrase "We the people."  The people precede the Constitution.  They, through their representatives, wrote it and then voted to adopt it.  Following generations amended it.  Since we can amend the Constitution, ultimately we cannot depend on it unless we ourselves are dependable.  The people are the foundation upon which the legal edifice of the Constitution rests.  No matter what the Constitution says, no matter how clever its provisions, it will never be sound and constitutional government secure, if the people are not sound.

We often hear another account of the relationship between the people and the Constitution.  This account presents the Constitution as a necessary constraint on the people.  The people are a collection of self-interested individuals, perhaps even self-indulgent.  If not for the rule of law, the authority and the procedures of the Constitution, who knows what they would do? This was a view held by some at the time of our Founding.  It is a view still held today.

This must disturb those who love liberty.  For if the people are weak, and divided by self-interest, then the government must be strong.  For what else could control such people and direct them to useful ends?  It is also a paradoxical view of the Constitution, since some of those who complain of the self-interestedness of the people also praise limited government.  But, again, if the people are weak and divided, does this not encourage their government to be strong and to take over responsibilities for which the people are supposedly unfit?

How we, the people, view ourselves, therefore, is critical to the kind of government we have.  How should we view ourselves?  One test we might apply is a now ancient one, offered by those who sought to revive republican self-government after centuries of rule by emperors and kings.  The test was simply this.  What are the people like when a crisis comes?  What do they discover in themselves?

We might think this a test we will fail.  Have we not heard stories of the horrors in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, for example?  Once government disappeared—the narrative goes—savagery returned.  The first reports did convey that sense, but the first reports were wrong or at least exaggerated.  Further research has revealed that violence was rare; people helped one another.  The people of New Orleans and surrounding areas, in the absence of government, organized on their own an evacuation that saved thousands from the flood waters. 

Something similar but on a larger scale happened in New York City on September 11.  When the twin towers fell, thousands were trapped in lower Manhattan.  They moved to the tip of the island.   There they stood, growing numbers pressed against the water's edge.  Some of those who worked the waters around Manhattan started to take people aboard.  Other boats joined them, starting an evacuation that lasted almost nine hours and brought more than 300,000, perhaps nearly 500,000, to safety.  The evacuation took place without panic.  No one was injured or killed during it.

This evacuation was the spontaneous response of people to a crisis.  As such, it reveals something about the people.  One observer saw businessmen, no doubt from the financial district in lower Manhattan, those we might think of as the very paragons of conniving self-interest, carrying the old and disabled to boats, setting them down and then returning into the dust and crowds looking for others they could help.  Such actions occur not just in great crises like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. They occur when a tornado rips apart a town and people from surrounding communities come to help or when an ice storm takes out the electricity and neighbors share firewood or check on an elderly couple.

It is important, of course, not to flatter ourselves.  A small number of the people do take advantage of a crisis for their own ends.  The people did get some assistance from the government on 9/11.  Seeing the evacuation starting, the Coast Guard issued a call for all available boats and announced that the normal safety rules about how many passengers a boat might carry would not be enforced.  Above all, we should not take our bearings solely by what people do in a time of crisis.  We live mostly in more normal times, when complacency has a more marked effect and where the law as constraint and guide is helpful. 

Still, we should not accept the idea that the people are above all self-interested, especially if it suggests that the government, therefore, needs a heavy hand.  Or, perhaps, we should take from the example of how the people act in a crisis a better understanding of self-interest.  What we see in a crisis, we might say, is people who think enough of themselves, and what they can do, to think of others as well.  We see that self-interest in this sense derives from self-respect.  If you think well of yourself, you will take an interest in yourself.  Taking an interest in yourself, you will take an interest in and help those who are important to you, your family, friends, neighbors, and fellow-citizens.  The circle of regard spreads, in due proportion, outward from the self-regarding individual.  That is the true foundation upon which the Constitution and our hopes for limited government rest.

Ohio Farmer

Regime of Liberty

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

9-11 changed everything:  so many have said.  But as we reflect on that day, it is good to recall what has not changed in the ten intervening years. 

Seasons have come and gone.  Leaves have turned color in New England's fall; flowers bloomed in the desert southwest with the spring rain.  Snow has piled high in the western mountains and filled rivers and reservoirs.  Drought has beset new areas, as it ended in others.  Torrential rains have brought flood waters; hurricanes have wreaked havoc; earthquakes shaken the West, the East, and points in between.  And the land has brought forth harvest after harvest.

Couples have fallen in love; babies have been born; the young have aged; some of the old, the famous and the unknown alike, have passed away, disease and time taking their toll.  But as always, the population of the United States has increased steadily, by more than 30 million.   Over 11 million people not born citizens became citizens.  All of them, like the millions who have come to us one way or another throughout our history, were drawn by the hope of a better life.

We have held two Presidential elections; over 130 elections to the Senate; over 1700 elections to the House of Representatives; and almost countless elections of Governors, state legislatures, judges, district attorneys, sheriffs, school boards, municipal commissions, and numerous other offices of public trust.  Some of these elections were barely contested, others bitterly fought, all part of the oldest continuing tradition of democratic politics known to history.

All of these events and many others have unfolded since 9-11, following a pattern unbroken since our Republic came into existence.  They manifest the unending concerns of the American people and of the republican government of, for, and by the people that has been ours for over 200 years.

Like floods, hurricanes and droughts, enemies remain part of our life as a people.  Among our current foes are those who oppose us because they do not accept the idea of the sovereignty of the people.  Only God, they believe, can be sovereign or all-powerful.  God must rule, therefore, not the will of the people.  Calling the people sovereign is blasphemous, and blasphemers must be punished or destroyed. 

Americans know that on this earth the rule of God always means only the rule of men, who claim to act in God's name and with his unlimited power and act merely in their own self-interest.  Americans reject such tyranny.  They long ago concluded that an all-powerful God may be disappointed in what His creatures do but could not be threatened by their exercise of his gift of freedom.  We suspect that those who kill and destroy in the name of a supposedly threatened God actually kill and destroy to defend their own privileges or their fragile sense of self-righteousness. 

In attacking the rule of the people, our current enemies are like those we have confronted and defeated before.  Nazis and Marxists similarly disparaged the sovereignty of the people, in favor of rule by a supposed master race or master class.  Not only did these former enemies disparage American principles, they disdained the American people.  They thought us cowards or too soft and divided to defend ourselves.  Our current foes made the same mistake.

It is understandable that our enemies underestimate the resolve and power of the people.  We do on occasion ourselves.  But when we do, we should recall what Thomas Jefferson understood, something else that has not changed.  A regime resting on the sovereignty of the people, a regime of liberty, will release immense energy and creative force.  More important, only such a regime can satisfy the age-old longing for justice—a human longing that will not be denied.  That is the true source of our power and our resilience.  It is in the light of this fact that we should contemplate the demands of peoples across the Middle East, especially the young, for governments based on the sovereignty of the people.  A sign of the weakness of our current enemies, of their impending defeat, is not their death but the rejection of their ideas by their own children.

As for ourselves, we should remember that government of, for, and by the people has never been easy, but it is best.  And it will endure and prosper, as will the people it serves.

Ohio Farmer

War and the American Character

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

Can a free, democratic people possess the martial virtues needed to defend their interests in the hard world?  Early observers of the American republic doubted it. Some believed that a commercial people like the Americans were not cut out for war. Some thought that the American Constitution and federalism further disabled the country from waging war successfully.

That great student of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, thought that "The most important of all the actions that can mark the life of a people is war." (We are inclined to think that the most important of a people's actions necessarily take place in the peace achieved by war, but let’s set that aside for another letter.) Tocqueville's famous study of America had led him in the 1830s to the conclusion that "in the midst of a great war," confusions in America's Federal and state constitutions would cause either liberty or the American Union to crumble. American republicanism, he thought, would be saved only by geography: far from the rest of the dangerous world, it was the "great good fortune of the United States…not to have hit upon a federal constitution that enables it to endure a great war, but rather to be so situated that it need not fear such a war."

The many failures of American arms during the War of 1812 seemed to have validated Tocqueville's view, but only a decade after he wrote, American success during the war against Mexico suggested that there may be more to be said on the question. Americans are, indeed, a people who prefer peace and the prosperity that comes with it, but if our history so far is any indication, we seem to be a people who are not necessarily spoiled by those conditions. When aroused to action, Americans have traditionally responded with alacrity and courage, as they did after Pearl Harbor and again after 9/11. And contrary to Tocqueville’s expectations, the Federal Constitution has enabled the United States to wage war successfully without destroying liberty at home.

We approach the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  America has been waging war for a decade. Our experience in this war confirms a long-standing conviction of the American people.  From the time of the American Revolution, Americans have acted on the fundamental belief that the virtues needed for war are not the exclusive property of a professional military establishment—a "standing army"—but can be found in the citizens of the republic at large. Today’s American military is clearly “professional” in the sense that service members are long-term volunteers, but those who serve understand themselves to be every bit the citizen soldiers their forebears were during World War II. This is a force of republican citizens motivated by a deep sense of duty and loyalty to their fellow citizens.

After 9/11, many Americans who could have avoided military service chose to enlist in the military and to fight the wars on which the United States has embarked over the past ten years. It is a tribute to the character of Americans—citizens of all backgrounds—that many chose to forego comfort, safety, and livelihood to engage America's enemies.

The cost has been high. Nearly 4500 Americans have died in Iraq and another nearly 1200 have given the last full measure of devotion in Afghanistan. In the most recent war news, details continue to emerge of the loss of 30 Americans, including 17 Navy SEALs, in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.  Many thousands more have been wounded. Yet even as casualties were rising during the darkest days in Iraq before the "surge" took effect, the services—including those whose members routinely face the greatest danger in the kind of war we are now fighting, the Army and Marines—were meeting their recruiting requirements while retaining large numbers of those eligible to leave the service. These numbers speak eloquently to the martial character of the American people.

The United States is fortunate to be defended by such men as the SEALs who gave their lives in Afghanistan. The quality of today's American military as a whole is extraordinary, and these SEALs and the other "special operators" like them are by consensus the very "best of the best." We mourn their deaths—and the deaths of all who serve the good cause of our country. In honor to this cause, let us mourn them as the heroes they are, and not treat them as some in the country once treated those who served in Vietnam: as "victims."

Our warriors, brought to manhood in the bosom of the American Republic, understand—as we their fellow citizens sometimes forget—that war will always be with us. Civilized peoples will need to be prepared for war so long as savagery and barbarism exist in the world. We can defeat the barbarians and savages when they threaten, but, human nature being what it is, they will always arise among us again in one form or another.

So long as there are people who will kill for gain and power, America will need soldiers who will kill to stop them. But this requires honesty about war and its costs. When we send our fellow citizens into war we must have a clear idea of what we are asking them to do, and must do all in our power to equip them to succeed. Above all, we must do our part to keep the country they serve worthy of their sacrifices.

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

The Course of Human Events

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

How endlessly interesting and full of surprises is the course of human events. For the past two weeks, in hundreds of Congressional districts throughout the 50 states, we citizens witnessed lawmakers of both parties, on recess, engaging their constituents in conversations about the nation’s business in town hall meetings and other forums. The President was hosting his own town hall meetings, from Virginia to Facebook headquarters in California, and conducting interviews with local television stations in cities across the country. The central issue was the budget of the United States Government for the fiscal year 2012, and the conversation was shaped primarily by two competing proposals for that budget, the one put forward by President Obama on February 14, the other put forward in early April by the House Budget Committee chaired by Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and approved by the House on April 15. In light of the country’s debt and deficit crises, barring surprises in the course of human events, this looked likely to be the big issue of the coming months, leading up to the 2012 elections.

The issue is urgent and complicated (to say the least!) and the conversations were lively. For the most part, they seemed like a healthy spectacle of James Madison’s extended republic at work: a wide variety of contending interests and opinions jostling with one another in a robust American way, from which one might reasonably hope that eventually the “cool and deliberate sense” of the community would make some progress toward the public good.  Certainly—you not being angels, and this being free, democratic politics—one could witness displays among the lawmakers of what Publius called “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity.” I needn’t name names here, and can put it down to an excess of zeal to please us, the people. And as for us citizens, in more than one instance, unfortunately, some of us became so animated that we had to be removed from the premises by the police.  In fairness to the parties involved in these cases, those who had to be removed seemed to be on one side of the issue. But similar behavior, certainly, could be attributed to those on the other side on other occasions. We are, after all, “the people,” and no more angelic than our elected representatives, and sometimes our democratic behavior does not reflect very well on our human nature.

One of the hopes of these letters is to connect our contemporary political conversation with the tradition of American political discourse that has enriched our politics for over two centuries. In this instance, it may be helpful to observe that, by our less than angelic behavior, we merely confirm Publius’s observation, that in “cases of great national discussion” we should not be surprised if a “torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose,” or that the opposing parties “mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives.”  

Maybe our political passions will be calmed somewhat by the wise and beautiful lessons of moderation offered by Alexander Hamilton (a man himself perhaps not always moderate) in Federalist 1: 

So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists.

James Madison adds his own moderating wisdom in Federalist 37:

It is a misfortune, inseparable from human affairs, that public measures are rarely investigated with that spirit of moderation which is essential to a just estimate of their real tendency to advance or obstruct the public good; and that this spirit is more apt to be diminished than promoted, by those occasions which require an unusual exercise of it.

Our civic moderation might be further strengthened by the reminder we received on Sunday night that, whatever the lively differences among ourselves in our pursuit of happiness, we are at war—and have been ever since that surprising turn in the course of human events on September 11, 2001.  Whatever our differences, we join past generations of Americans, going back to the Revolutionary generation, in mutually pledging to one another "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." The sacrifices of many patriots teach us constantly that this is no vagrant commitment, that there is some enduring thing in our country for the sake of which Americans make such a pledge, generation after generation, each to all and all to each. They teach us to summon the better angels of our nature to our national conversations as we pursue our happiness in freedom.

A young Abraham Lincoln instructed a group of high school students over 170 years ago that "[w]e find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us." Like Lincoln, our generation of Americans inherited these blessings of liberty. There is no greater earthly bequest we can have received. It is our greatest duty and our highest honor as Americans to pass on this inheritance unimpaired—indeed, strengthened and improved in every way possible, to our children. This seems to me to be what our great national conversation is about.  Let’s rise to the seriousness of the question. 

Ohio Farmer