By Stephen Smoot
The assemblage of men who gathered first to create a nation, then to give it a resilient structure, America calls its Founding Fathers. Americans struggled first to have their rights as citizens of the British Empire recognized and respected then, when that effort failed, gained their independence and created a system of law and government unique at that time in the history of the world.
It often gets lost in the memory of their greatness that the majority of the Founding Fathers gained much of their worldview as farmers, fighters, or both.
John Adams and John Marshall, for example, were two of the greatest legal minds from anywhere in their time and certainly the top two in American history. Yet Adams loved nothing more than putting his hands in the manure and soil of his Massachusetts farm. Marshall gained valuable experience as an officer in the Third and 11th Virginia Regiments during the War of Independence.
Farmers and soldiers share an important aspect in their worldview. Practicality and problem-solving must always remain their guide stars. This separates them from those in other fields, especially the humanities.
Farmers cannot debate the weather. Soldiers cannot argue against ammunition fired at them by the enemy. They must take an Aristotlean mindset to confront the sometimes ugly, sometimes unfair, sometimes difficult world and find solutions to their problems, as opposed to arguing it away or railing against the unfairness of whatever adverse situation they must confront.
Success means that they get to continue. Failure means ruin or even death.
Problem solvers in this vein prepare for the worst during the times that seem the best. They know that lean years always follow the fat and act accordingly. In their world, one cannot always count on being saved from one’s own poor or unlucky decisions.
When the august body that comprised the Philadelphia Convention formed to create the Constitution, they did not gather to form an ideal society. They did not desire to improve mankind, but were instead driven by a realistic view of human nature. Yet they also learned lessons from what they saw as historical failures, mainly the Roman Republic and the British Empire’s treatment of them.
Aristotle defined three types of good government, each of which inevitably evolved from good to evil.. Monarchy was rule by one, which Aristotle said inevitably becomes tyranny. Aristocracy was the government of the best, which degenerates into oligarchy. Polity was his word for rule by the people. It always, he said, turned into the evil of what he called “democracy,” but what Americans would today call “mob rule.”
Britain by the 1700s felt they had found a proper balance of the three through its monarchy, its hereditary nobility in the House of Lords, and the people, whose interests were represented in the House of Commons. The Founding Fathers did not dispute that balance was a necessity, but found it in a careful balance of power and authority between the federal government, the state governments, and the people.
By the 20th century that balance came undone, chiefly through the Constitutional amendment that moved selection of United States Senators from state legislatures to election by the people. The removal of the restraining voice of the states has helped to lead to more international conflict, more national debt, and a barely restrained federal government.
Much of the undoing of the vision of the Founding Fathers took place under a President, Woodrow Wilson, whose pre political job was college professor.
The genius of the Founding Fathers lay in their ability to look beyond emotion, fear, and political posturing to create the best system of government ever conceived – “a Republic, if you can keep it,” advised the French and Indian War veteran officer Benjamin Franklin.
The farther America gets from that vision, the more disruption and struggle it faces from within. Returning to a government based on practicality and good sense would necessitate choosing leaders whose worldview avoids emotions, obsessions with historical legacy, academic theory, kowtowing to hysterical special interests, and worse.
In other words, the best way to restore the nation that once was may be to elect more farmers and military veterans and bring the different centers of power back into balance.