Progress and the American Founding

By Bradley C. S. Watson

The American Founders didn't much believe in "progress" if it meant movement away from the timeless principles they enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

They didn't want us to have the courage to change so much as the courage to live up to our principles. The change they wanted us to believe in was the gradual realization of these principles through generations of courage and sacrifice. For the Founders, there was always the danger that change could be in negative as well as positive directions.

As James Madison reminded Americans in the 49th of the Federalist Papers, constant appeals to the people that imply some defect in government would deprive the Constitution of that "veneration which time bestows on everything." Change or "progress" in politics is not always desirable because settled habits -- including love for one's country -- need to be inculcated if any regime is to survive the passions of the moment.

Nowadays, change and progress have become synonymous, and they almost always signify movement away from the Founders' Constitution.

The mantra of change is linked with the belief that the federal government exists to solve all our social problems and provide for all our needs, from health care to making our mortgage payments less burdensome. This linkage between change and national power was firmly established in the public mind during the Clinton years, but its origins go back to the late 19th century, when "Progressive" political thought came into its own. It reached its apotheosis in presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who reconfigured the Founders' political categories to suit their purposes of expanding national power. But it continues on in Supreme Court decisions that insist on understanding the Constitution as a "living" document that lives primarily in the minds of judges, and changes according to the elite preferences of the day.

For our Founders, the government created by the Constitution was designed for the far more limited purpose of protecting our natural rights as proclaimed in the Declaration. These rights are natural in the sense they predate all government. They are the gifts of nature and nature's God. Because they predate government, government must be carefully structured and limited in its powers in order that they cannot readily be taken away.

Our natural rights are based on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Human equality in this limited political sense means that government must be by the informed consent of the governed. Because citizens are equal beings with their fellow citizens, they recognize that duties go along with rights, including especially the duty to preserve fellow citizens in their lives, liberty, and property.

As we "progress" toward ever more labyrinthine government policies and programs, informed consent gives way to the ever increasing demand to take from Peter to pay Paul, and manly assertiveness in protecting natural rights gives way to a culture of complaint and entitlement. No one in the Founding generation understood our natural equality to be a license to redistribute resources on the grand scale that so many candidates for public office now take for granted.

The greatest subsequent interpreter of America's founding principles, Abraham Lincoln, reminded us that as the Founding generation passed, we would be in constant danger of forgetting their accomplishments and sacrifices, and, with this forgetting, drift dangerously from our constitutional moorings. As he wrote in his 1838 Lyceum Address, "They were a fortress of strength; but, what invading foemen could never do, the silent artillery of time has done."

Calvin Coolidge, one of the last presidents to have a deep appreciation for the Founders, remarked in Philadelphia in 1926, "If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final."

Martin Luther King, Jr. also recognized the timelessness of America's Founding principles when he famously proclaimed in his "I Have a Dream" speech that "the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence" as a "promissory note to which every American was to fall heir."

At his best, Ronald Reagan also exemplified an appreciation for the Founders as he struggled mightily to spread the principles of America's Founding to peoples across the world. He did this as he also struggled to return the national government at home to something the Founders' might have recognized. He sought to build a bridge to the 18th century as a means of securing the 20th and 21st.

In the hurly burly of political campaigning, as candidates from both major parties now stumble over each other in the race to see who most embraces change, we are prone to forget, as Lincoln warned, the glory of what has been bequeathed us. We should perhaps take a moment to reflect on how much more salutary it would be for American voters if the candidates sought to remind them of the accomplishments of their Founders, rather than attempting to lead them pell-mell into an undefined future. As Lincoln said on the 110th anniversary of Washington's birth, "To add brightness to the sun, or glory to the name of Washington, is alike impossible. Let none attempt it."

Bradley C. S. Watson is the Philip M. McKenna Professor of American and Western Political Thought and Fellow in Politics and Culture at the Center for Political and Economic Thought, Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, PA. His next book is Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence (American Ideals & Institutions).

 

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