Reflection And Choice

Transcript

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In 1787, a man wrote to his countrymen under a borrowed name. He called himself Publius. He was three men in truth, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. And in the first of these letters, Hamilton set down a question that loomed over his young nation and over all her posterity from that day to this one. Whether a people like ours could raise up a government by reflection and choice, or whether we were fated, like every other people before us, to be ruled by accident and force. Two hundred and fifty years on, the question is not closed. It may be more open now than at any hour since he asked it. I write to you under a borrowed name, too. You may call me Discus, and these are my letters to America. This is Dear Uncle Sam. Dear Uncle Sam, I was raised under this roof. Raised where grace is given a man for the chance to be great. Where purple mountain majesties hold up the sky, and the waters bellow through the land from sea to shining sea. Where the amber grain was fertilized by the blood and sweat of every generation that built this house and handed it down. Believe me from my word, I'm a son of this house. I'm not an enemy at its gate. So let me say this plainly, we have confused the republic our fathers built with the democracy they feared. We have mistaken the show of hands for the voice of the nation. Both will sound wrong to the modern ear, but neither is. We have to start where all clear thinking starts. We name the thing. A thing without a name is an enemy in the dark. You cannot fight what you cannot find, but name it truly and you have your hand on it. It turns from a ghost into a servant. This is old work. It was the first work God gave to man in the garden, to look on each creature and say what it is. So look with me at the two words we have let run together, democracy, republic. Ask an American what kind of country this is. He will tell you a democracy. It is on our coins. It is in our anthems. It is the word we carried across oceans and set in foreign soil. It is the word we raced to rival creed to plant in the dust of the moon. The men who built this place did not use it. They feared it. Madison, again as Publius, cut a hard line between two things we have since let blur. A democracy, he said, is a small body of citizens who gather in one place and rule in person, every question settled by the raw count of hands. A republic does not work that way. In a republic, people do not crowd the square and shout. They send their best to stand in their stead. These men argue it out, and the decision is drawn slow, through filters built to let the heat off and the reason settle. Madison did not think the two were cousins. He thought pure democracy a dangerous thing. Such governments, he wrote, have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention, as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths. Madison did not fear you. He wrote that the people are the only rightful fountain of power in a land like ours. He did not want your voice taken. He wanted it tempered, the way steel is tempered, so it holds an edge and does not shatter on the first hard blow. You know this already, in your bones. You have every right to stand in a courtroom tomorrow and defend your own life. You also know better than to try. A man who is his own lawyer, the old line goes, has a fool for a client. You could run your own Wire And braze your own pipe, and file your own taxes against a code as thick as scripture. Some men do. Most of us, being sane, find a man who does it for a living and does it better. That is not weakness. It is a free man knowing the reach of his own hands. Representation is that same good sense raised to its height. It is a whole people saying, none of us has the hours or the learning to govern a continent alone. So we send our best to do it, and we hold them to it with everything we have. So what are they, these filters? We must name them, because we defend only what we can name. The first is representation itself. We have established that already. You send your best, and you must hold them to it. The second is the Senate. The House was built to feel your heat, close to the ground, elected often, quick to answer a passing mood. The Senate was built to do the opposite. Longer terms, fewer men, older heads, the slow chamber, the cool one, the room where a hot idea goes to be argued with instead of obeyed. The old story goes that Jefferson once asked Washington why the convention had bothered to build a Senate at all. Washington asked him why he had poured his coffee into his saucer. To cool it, said Jefferson. Just so, said Washington. We pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it. The story is likely invented. The wisdom in it is not. The third is federalism. Power cut into pieces and scattered. Some to the town, some to the country, some to the state, and only what truly could not be done closer to home carried up to Washington. The point was never neatness. The point was that a folly in one state need not be forced on all fifty, and that a tyranny which seized one capital would still find forty-nine doors barred against it. The fourth is a government set against itself. Not a house divided in Lincoln's sorrowful sense, but a government built to fight its own hand. Madison put it in six words. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The men who wrote our Constitution did not trust themselves, and they did not expect us to prove any better. So they built a machine where every grasping hand is met by another, and no single will can ever close over the whole. None of this was an accident. Every filter was a scar, each one set there by men who had watched some older republic drown in its own passions and swore this one was not going to. They built four filters. Over the last century, we have struck four blows. The first fell in 1913. For more than a hundred years, the Senate had been chosen by the state legislatures. That was the point. It tied the slow chamber to the states and kept it one step back from the passing mood of the crowd. Then we cut the cord and handed the choice straight to the voters. It was done for good reasons. There was corruption to answer for, but when we fixed the lock, we tore off the door. The Senate now chases the same heat as the House. The saucer was set back on the stove. The second blow was the primary. Once a party was a body that deliberated, its wise and its worldly gathered, and weighed a man before they set his name before the country. We called that a smoke-filled room, and we were right to dislike the smoke. So we threw the doors open and let the raw crowd choose, and we learned slowly what the founders already knew. A crowd can be roused. A crowd can be flattered. A crowd will reward the loudest man in the room, and the loudest man is seldom the wisest. The third blow was the throne built for one man. The presidency was meant to be an office. It has become a kind of tribune, a single voice that claims to speak for all of us at once, while Congress, the slow and arguing branch, falls quietly and lets him rule by the stroke of a pen. This is not the sin of one party. Every recent president of both has reached for that pen, and every one was cheered for it by his own and cursed for it by the other, and then they trade sides when that office trades hands. The founders feared a king. We keep asking for one so long as he is our king. The fourth blow is the one we strike every hour with the thing in our pockets. Madison feared the small square where a crowd could gather and inflame itself in a single afternoon. We have built that square. We made it the size of the nation and left it open all night. The show of hands never stops now. The passions are never given the hours they need to cool. There is no saucer big enough for a country that votes with its thumbs a thousand times a day. Four filters built to slow us down. Four blows to speed us up. We did not burn the house down. We did something quieter and worse. We pulled out the beams that were holding it steady. Not every one of these blows was a sin. Some were a mercy. The same widening that let the crowd rule also opened the door to men and women who had been wrongly shut outside it. The vote reached the freedmen. It reached the woman. It reached the poor man who owned no land. A country that had dared to write that all men are created equal at last began to mean it. That was not decay. That was the house making good on its own blueprint. So do not mistake my case. I am not asking for fewer voices. I am asking for stronger walls. The danger was never that the people gained a voice. The danger is that we tore out the beams in the very hour the house filled with more souls than ever before. A wide franchise inside a strong republic is a glory. A wide franchise with the filters gone is only a larger, faster crowd. The answer to a mob is not to shrink it. It is to build the chambers that turn a mob back into a people. You feel it already. I do not have to name a single headline for you to feel it. Every four years, the whole country holds its breath as if the world ends on a Tuesday in November. Half of us wake the next morning certain the republic has fallen, and the other half certain it has been saved, and both halves look across the table at can they no longer trust. We have begun to speak of our neighbors the way you speak of an enemy, not a man who is wrong, a man who is dangerous. This is not the weather of a healthy republic. That is the fever of a democracy with nowhere to sweat it out. The heat used to have somewhere to go, the slow chamber, the scattered power, the arguing branch, the saucer. We took these away, and now the heat only has us, so it burns in us. We mistake this burning for passion, for engagement, for finally caring enough. It is none of these. It is a house with the vents sealed and the fire still lit. The founders never promised us a country that would never grow hot. They promised us a house built to let the heat escape before it consumed the family inside. We have spent a hundred years sealing the vents and calling it progress. So these are my letters. This is my show. A reading of the Republic back to itself, one letter at a time. A patient argument that the old walls were never our prison, but our shelter. That a free people can still choose, by reflection and not by accident, to build them back. Publius was three men writing as one, but the letter was never finished by the three. It was finished by the fourth, the countryman who broke the seal, the citizen who read it and decided what kind of nation he would help hold together. Three wrote, the fourth was always you. I will keep writing, you keep reading, and between us, God willing, we keep the house. Yours, Discus.