The Constitution is No “Parchment Promise”

It has become fashionable online for pessimistic right-wingers to declare that the U.S. Constitution no longer governs America. Our problems are too big, this faction argues, for constitutional solutions. Some have even asserted the inevitability – or perhaps necessity – of a “Protestant Franco.” They hint that only a strong man, armed with absolute power, can set the times aright and restore virtue by force.

America desperately needs a revival of statesmanship, but theorizing about post-constitutional government will not bring it about. In fact, rejecting the Constitution will only hobble conservatives’ attempts to curtail liberalism. Speculation about dictatorship will only alienate the great body of the people the right should be trying to win over.

Our Founders understood just how important consent of the governed is to republican virtue, and none more practically than George Washington. He knew that a statesman had to respond to threats forcefully, even take up arms, whether that meant staging a revolution against British tyrants or enforcing the law against insurrectionists in the Whiskey Rebellion. But Washington also knew that any republic lives or dies by popular support, and that respect for the Constitution was vital in securing it.

Washington’s statesmanship was a mix of ruthlessness and mercy, and constitutes a practical wisdom from which conservatives can still learn much. As Robert O’Connell argues in his excellent military biography of Washington, Revolutionary, the General’s character was essential to winning the War for Independence. The British fought a punitive war, whereas Washington insisted his soldiers fight as gentlemen. He always sought, O’Connell writes, “the ethical high ground, never stooping to the excesses the British smeared over their attempts to suppress the Revolution,” a strategy “calculated to maximize the contrast between British and American war efforts.” 

Read more in Providence.