The Founding Fathers anticipated our present travails with despairing clarity. When Benjamin Franklin rose to cast his vote for the Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787, he warned that “this Constitution with all its faults…can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”
Alexander Hamilton saw the enormity of the gamble. Even while campaigning for the new Constitution, he wrote, in The Federalist Papers, that “history seems to have destined Americans, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
“When the people give way,” warned John Adams, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour.”
“History does not more clearly point out any fact than this,” wrote founder Richard Henry Lee, “that nations which have lapsed from liberty, to a state of slavish subjection, have been brought to this unhappy condition, by gradual paces.” It could happen not with a bloody coup but with a smile and a friendly swagger, when the people had grown tired of self-government and could be jollied or scared into servitude.
The founders anticipated someone like Trump partly because they’d been reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was hot off the presses in the 1770s. We should read Gibbon now, too, paying close attention to his account of how the Roman republic slipped into tyranny when powerful men had seduced or intimidated its citizens so that they became a stampeding mob, hungry for bread and circuses.
Gibbon wrote that the overconfident Romans were slow to discover the introduction of “a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire,” under which Roman citizens “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army.”
You might say that Americans have been there before, going back to the early worship of George Washington, whom many would have made a king. But Washington declined this invitation because his own “civic-republican” character was stronger than Trump’s. You might say that the republic has recovered from several earlier lapses, as when the Civil War produced Lincoln’s “a new birth of freedom,” or when the rampant consumerism of “the Roaring ’20s” imploded in 1929 but led to the New Deal.