Deliberative Republicanism and the Triumph of the American Founding

Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at an event hosted by the University of Florida’s independent, student-run publication The Florida Finibus. 

As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Republic’s birth, our attention naturally turns to the Declaration of Independence. The document flames with eloquence; its stunning phrases and stirring call to action are at the heart of our political tradition. American history cannot be understood apart from the principles it declared. Our greatest statesmen have always referred to the Declaration to summon the people back to the “better angels of our nature,” because its soaring poetry reminds us of who we really are. 

Yet, the Declaration was by no means the end of the American Founding. After declaring independence, the Continental Congress still had a war to win—a task that required the toil and bloodshed of seven long, hard years. It took even longer to establish an effective form of government for the thirteen independent states. Despite these immense struggles, the Founders were committed to a principle they announced in the Declaration: “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” In those “new guards” they provided us, we see the true meaning of republican liberty made manifest. 

Among the most impressive, of course, is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Although the Bill of Rights was mostly a concession to opponents of ratification—a reassurance that the newly framed government would not become a consolidated tyranny—the protections it outlines have become among our most precious constitutional provisions. The amendment’s five freedoms (speech, religion, press, assembly, petition) do more, however, than simply carve out a space for individual liberty; they form the principal way we can participate in the life of our republic as citizens. That is to say, the First Amendment offers us the possibility of deliberation. Together, “we the people” have the right to shape the country’s future through discussion and debate. The independence we are celebrating this year—and the constitutional edifice built to defend it—means we have the right to define who we are for ourselves. 

For all our successes as a nation, for all those freedoms we enjoy, the American Republic has many critics. On the Right and the Left alike, many feel that our Founding principles have somehow failed; from any number of ideological perspectives, it seems that the “new guards” we were provided have not secured justice. The solution proffered by many is illiberalism. “Why should we allow freedom of religion when heretics and apostates might use it?” the illiberal right asks. “Why should we allow freedom of speech when racists and fascists might use it?” the illiberal left asks. The ideologue does not want to tolerate wrongness in the world; he seeks to make society virtuous by whatever terrors are necessary. “Let justice reign,” he proclaims, “though the heavens may fall.” 

Ridiculous as the askers make themselves seem, we cannot simply dismiss this attitude with libertarian slogans. Behind the swell of illiberalism is a kind of moral urgency—a genuine desire to pursue the good. These critics of our constitutional order, impatient for justice, are correct to lament the rise of the “morally neutral” public square. But they are mistaken about why the concept of “liberal neutrality” emerged. The First Amendment was not intended to vacate political life of meaning. The Founders, rather, intended to build a forum for citizens' deliberation. For them, this constitutes the highest kind of republicanism. And it is, perhaps, an approach to politics that can help us redeem the time and restore the constitution we have inherited. 

More than a decade before the Declaration of Independence, John Adams contended that the American people were capable of meeting this high responsibility. It may help us understand the real import of the First Amendment if we first understand those who framed it as they understood themselves. John Adams was among the first to really think of the American people as a republic in the early days of the Imperial Crisis. In his 1765 pamphlet A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, he wrote that the true cause of the settlement of the American colonies was “a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror, of” tyranny. Adams specifically connected this spirit to the Reformation and religious controversies raging in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  

According to Adams, what distinguished the American colonies from European regimes was their embrace of “knowledge” and the “freedom of inquiry.” Almost as soon as they arrived on these shores, the Puritan forebears of the Republic established schools and universities. Adams wrote that “Their greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the Scriptures, and a government of the state more agreeable to the dignity of human nature, than any they had seen in Europe, and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it forever.” Compared to the Continent, American literacy rates had skyrocketed. In New England, every township had a school—not just to teach the Bible, but also to teach the principles of freedom. 

According to Adams, this educational achievement is precisely why the Americans were so unwilling to simply go along with imperial policies tending toward tyranny. “The consequences of these establishments we see and feel every day,” Adams wrote.  

“A native of America who cannot read and write is as rare an appearance as a Jacobite or a Roman Catholic, that is, as rare as a comet or an earthquake. It has been observed, that we are all of us lawyers, divines, politicians, and philosophers.”  

Even before declaring independence, the American character was marked by a high conception of citizenship. Self-government, as our Founders understood it, was not merely being left alone. It comprehended the idea of the whole body of the people, virtuously deliberating about both the common good and the highest good.  

Nearly four score years later, Alexis de Tocqueville observed much the same about the American Republic he traveled. In Democracy in America, he opened his account of the founding of this country not with the Declaration of Independence nor even the Jamestown colony, but with the Puritan commonwealths of New England. He saw in their origins “a new spectacle,” namely, “township governments” planting the “fertile seed of free institutions” and “the dogma of the sovereignty of the people.” The “pious adventurers” who settled the coastline were committed, the Frenchman wrote, to a “Puritanism [that] was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine.” They were  

“at once ardent sectarians and exalted innovators” who “tore themselves away from the sweetness of their native country to obey a purely intellectual need; in exposing themselves to the inevitable miseries of exile, they wanted to make an idea triumph.” 

Tocqueville knew that New England was the vanguard of modern democracy—but unlike later diagnoses of modernity, he did not believe the Puritans (or their descendants among the Founders) were lowering the aims of citizenship. Ancient republics were concerned with virtue and the good life, and so was the modern republic emerging on this side of the Atlantic. Mere “security” or even “prosperity” were not the chief aims of this regime. Instead, widespread education and a living faith meant that the citizens of these new commonwealths could come together as true equals. As two great political theorists once put it, these roots signified that the American political tradition would develop as “self-government by a virtuous people deliberating under God.” 

Nonetheless, the men who actually framed the Republic also understood the dangers inherent to Puritanism. Religious intolerance, they knew full well, would actually inhibit the sort of deliberation they thought would be necessary to republican politics. As Publius put it in Federalist 1, “in politics as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.” In the aftermath of the Revolution, the Founders needed to create new modes and orders that could enable deliberation without empowering would-be oppressors. They were confronted by a perennial political problem: How can we balance the rights of the individual against the will of the majority?  

Among the Founders, it was probably James Madison who devoted the most thought to this problem. From his contributions to The Federalist to his attempts as a statesman to balance the authority of the federal and state governments, the Virginian was always seeking “republican remed[ies] for the diseases most incident to republican government.” Even before he set his mind to the problems of making a new federal constitution, this effort turned him into his home state’s greatest advocate of religious liberty. The principles Madison enunciated in the Virginia disestablishment debate were, furthermore, enshrined in the US Constitution in the First Amendment.

Madison’s most stirring arguments for disestablishing the state church of Virginia came in his 1784 Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. It was, essentially, a petition to the Commonwealth’s General Assembly protesting a bill that would have provided government funding to “teachers of the Christian religion.” Madison’s argument arose from a close analysis of the very republican principles that animated the Revolution that had only concluded a year before. “We hold [a] prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution,” Madison wrote.  

“The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle.” 

Efforts to impose a religious establishment on Virginia, his argument went, tended toward the very tyranny her people had rebelled against. 

In a series of remonstrances, Madison went on to show exactly how the proposed religious establishment violates republican liberty. For one, he argued, it would corrupt both the state and the church. For another, it would incite sectarian disputes that would set the citizens of the Commonwealth against each other and fuel faction. “Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree,” he argued. “The one is the first step, the other the last in the career of intolerance.”  

This concern would be echoed years later in Federalist 10, when Publius wrote that “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them every where brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society,” including “A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice.” This was the essential problem the Constitution’s separation of powers was meant to resolve. As Publius went on to write, “the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to co-operate for their common good.” Limiting government power creates space for greater deliberation. 

Yet it would be a mistake to read the Memorial and Remonstrance as a plea for the kind of public neutrality various liberal thinkers, from John Locke to John Stuart Mill to John Rawls, have made over the years. As University of Florida professor Aaron Zubia pointed out in a recent academic article, Madison’s influences extended beyond the ideology emerging from the radical Enlightenment. He did not understand the social contract as a truce in sectarian fighting; rather, he sought to order society according to the principles of reason and conscience Americans inherited from the long tradition of classical republican thought. 

Ultimately, Madison’s case for religious liberty did not rest on an abstract account of human rights like that of the philosophes. He was by no means indifferent to the practice of religion the way his friend and political ally Thomas Jefferson sometimes appeared. The very first remonstrance of the document illustrates this well: 

[W]e hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, ‘that Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.’ The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. 

The point of the Founders’ efforts on behalf of religious liberty, from the Virginia disestablishment debates to the First Amendment itself, is not to make us care less about religion but to make us take it more seriously. Religion, as Madison and his compatriots knew, is one of human beings’ highest duties. The same can be said of the other four freedoms secured by the First Amendment. The Framers did not intend for these protections, to borrow a phrase from Abraham Lincoln, to blow “out the moral lights around us.” They summon us up into the noble work of citizenship; they demand that we deliberate with our fellow Americans about the most important things in life. We must think, together, about what we want our republic to look like. One could even say that this freedom we have inherited demands that we practice a certain kind of public philosophy, considering the common good in light of the highest good.  

For those who have not studied the history of the Early Republic closely, it may come as a surprise that the ratification of the First Amendment did not immediately end religious establishments in the United States. The Bill of Rights, of course, went into effect long before the Supreme Court incorporated the Constitution’s limitations on federal power against the states. But as Hillsdale College historian Miles Smith IV demonstrated in his recent book Religion & Republic, many in the Founding generation continued to consider America a Christian nation. They wanted to retain a prominent place for religion in public life—sometimes even to maintain an established church. 

My aim here is not to argue that the long process of disestablishment following the ratification of the First Amendment was an inevitable outworking of its principles. Rather, it seems to me that the ongoing debates about the role of religion in American public life were a sign that the Framers’ vision for a deliberative republic was working. Without descending into the kind of sectarian squabbles or outright conflict that characterized the European Wars of Religion, those early Americans were able to have serious debates about what kind of society was best. They balanced prudential considerations with the principles of natural right; they sought to understand who they were so that, together, they could govern rightly. This is the summit of the American political tradition, the fundamental activity our constitutional structure seeks to promote. 

This kind of deliberation, clearly, necessitates a certain set of virtues. Publius tells us, in Federalist 55, that “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind, which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust: so there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.” The late George Carey referred to this  sort of virtue as “constitutional morality.” It includes the habits and mores George Washington enjoined in his Farewell Address, such as patriotism and prudence. But it also requires a willingness to hear our fellow citizens out, to engage honestly in debate, and to maintain a certain openness to persuasion.  

Of course, these are precisely the virtues we are not practicing as a republic today. Our debates are simultaneously heated and substance-less. No one could mistake what happens on Capitol Hill for genuine deliberation. A fourth branch of government—the administrative state—has come to dominate the actual process of lawmaking, despite lacking any roots in true popular sovereignty. Increasingly, at least in public affairs, the United States is becoming a republic of vice. Something has become derailed; the Constitution is not working as intended. 

There are many causes of this derailment, ranging from fundamental alterations to the Constitution’s arrangement of powers to the rise of social media and the information economy. Radical political movements have gradually shifted citizens’ expectations of their government, introducing a new constitutional immorality that would horrify our Founders. This is not the place to outline all the derailments that have occurred since 1787 or 1776—but I would like to offer some possible cures for what is ailing our body politic. 

First, we must revitalize civic education. Salutary efforts are already underway: the schools of civic thought being established at many states’ flagship universities, for example, or certain strains within the K-12 classical education movement. This renewal is in its earliest days, but it is necessary that efforts continue. Our Founders believed that a certain kind of education was absolutely essential to good government. 

John Adams himself turned to education as a solution to the Imperial Crisis. At the end of his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, he warned that the reactionary “Don’t Tread On Me” mentality of the early resistance would not secure the virtuous liberty Americans imagined. “This spirit,” he wrote, “without knowledge, would be little better than a brutal rage.” Adams thought that the patriotism suited to a deliberative republic had to be reflective, rooted in the pursuit of truth first and foremost. “In a word, let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing,” he proclaimed. Even as early as 1765, Adams’s aim was to help Americans see their place in the grand sweep of Western civilization. His vision for this sort of education is inspiring: 

Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. Let every order and degree among the people rouse their attention and animate their resolution. Let them all become attentive to the grounds and principles of government, ecclesiastical and civil. Let us study the law of nature; search into the spirit of the British constitution; read the histories of ancient ages; contemplate the great examples of Greece and Rome; set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests, in short, against the gates of earth and hell. Let us read and recollect and impress upon our souls the views and ends of our own more immediate forefathers, in exchanging their native country for a dreary, inhospitable wilderness… Let us recollect it was liberty, the hope of liberty for themselves and us and ours, which conquered all discouragements, dangers, and trials.  

A true civic education does not end with merely knowing what the Founders said or thought. That is well and good, but we must also learn to—even dare to—“read, think, speak, and write” as they did. The defense of liberty in a deliberative republic must be an intellectual enterprise for all citizens; we must all become “pious adventurers” in the spirit of those who laid the foundations of our Republic. We must learn to use the liberty we have inherited to pursue the Good. 

For this reason, a distinctly American civic education must also be a liberal education. The great conservative Russell Kirk once wrote that “a liberal education is intended to free us from captivity to time and place: to enable us to take long views, to understand what it is to be fully human—and to be able to pass on to generations yet unborn our common patrimony of culture.” An education fit for free men and women is one that, he argued, “defends order against disorder.” In that sense, liberal education shares with civic education a fundamentally conservative purpose. 

Yet Kirk and others in his conservative tradition maintained that there is a tension between civic and liberal education. Even happy republics exist in a turbulent world, full of threats and enemies both foreign and domestic. Civic education enables citizens to preserve their constitution against those threats—but in less humane republics than our own, this becomes a kind of indoctrination. Liberal education, however, prepares scholars for philosophy by teaching them to pursue the Good simply rather than the good of a regime.  

The American innovation, the great ambition of our political tradition, is to ease that tension by founding our Republic on more humane principles than any previous republic had embodied. “Can it be, that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a Nation with its virtue?” Washington asked in his Farewell Address. “The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human Nature.”  

Instead of rejecting the moral urgency of the postliberal right and left, it is fitting and proper that we redirect it through the right kind of education—both formal and informal—that can inspire affection for our Constitution. As Publius put it in Federalist 10, “according to the degree of pleasure and pride we feel in being republicans, ought to be our zeal in cherishing the spirit, and supporting the character of federalists.” There is nothing wrong with the desire to pursue common goods or even the highest goods; that pursuit, however, must be within the context of our own political tradition, not the speculative innovations of ideologues. 

Two hundred and fifty years after declaring independence, there can be no doubt that the American Republic faces manifold dangers. Not the least, of course, is the decline of the humane virtues that make civic life possible. But the Constitution—including the First Amendment—establishes a forum for us to participate, as equal citizens, in the deliberation about the good of our country. It is for us to live up to that high calling. It is for us to once again “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to the cause of liberty. 

Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.