Defending the Republic:
Constitutional Morality in a Time of Crisis; Essays
in Honor of George W. Carey
Edited by Bruce P. Frohnen & Kenneth L. Grasso
(ISI Books, 352 pages, $30)
“A republic,” voiced Scipio in Cicero’s Republic, “is
the property of the public.” But, for republican Romans, the
republic was not an abstraction. It was a concrete institution,
the “public thing” as the Latin suggests, one grounded not in
lofty ideals, but in the mos maiorum, in ancestral
tradition. It was a peculiar, organic body, passed on through
blood and progeny.
Raised on Tacitus and other classics, American colonists and
framers of the U.S. Constitution were all too familiar with the
excesses of empire — corruption, degeneracy, foreign
interference — and sought to avoid past mistakes. As a result,
the framers instead sought a republic, emphasizing civic virtue,
citizen participation and limited government. In an era of big
government and activist judges, however, it is clear that all is
not well with our republican tradition.
In honor of one of the nation’s foremost constitutional scholars,
Georgetown University’s George W. Carey, the Intercollegiate
Studies Institute presents a new volume of essays, Defending
the Republic, edited by Bruce P. Frohnen and Kenneth L.
Grasso. The purpose of this study is to discuss and develop
Carey’s ideas on the American republic, namely, the “origin,
development, and derailment of the American political tradition.”
Our republic, the editors warn, has slowly deteriorated. Part of
this is due to the tension between an older political tradition
that was not individualist or egalitarian and the newer American
creed based on liberal abstractions from the Enlightenment. This
newer tendency maintains that America, above all, must be
committed to freedom and equality, and it does so with a
religious zeal. A hallmark of this tendency is “messianism,”
setting men up as gods and appointing America as “the arbiter of
all mankind and supreme judge of the world.”
In the first part of this volume, Paul Edward Gottfried traces
the ideas of Carey as they are related to Willmoore Kendall, who
co-authored with Carey The Basic Symbols of the American
Political Tradition and participated in the founding of
National Review. Gottfried notes that Carey, like
Kendall, viewed the Constitution as a product of an evolving
political tradition going back at least to the Mayflower Compact.
This tradition, however, is in peril in part because of the
increasing heterogeneity of society. Pluralism engenders social
discord, and Carey inevitably accepts a Rousseauean assumption:
“republican self-government can work only where widespread
consensus exists.” Consensus, however, is unable organically to
develop in communities — at least not while centralization
prevails, a symptom of which is judicial activism. Frohen, in a
later essay, laments, “The Supreme Court in particular has
imposed its ideological vision of a national community on states
and localities, stripping them of their proper functions.” This
activist court undermines local modes of life, and forges a
“centralized tutelary state.”
And how does this tutelary state act on the world stage? Claes G.
Ryn, in the third and final part of the book, addresses the
“neo-Jacobin” tendencies of contemporary American politics. The
original Jacobins, champions of universal principles, led the
French Revolution of 1789. The new Jacobins, as radical as their
predecessors, desire to replace the America “of history, with its
roots in classical, Christian, and British culture,” with their
own America, which is defined “by ahistorical, allegedly
universal, and rational principals, specifically freedom and
equality.” Espousing “enlightenment ideals of universal
applicability,” this new regime is for all people, and must be
spread over the entire globe. Largely supported by
neoconservatives and neoliberals, this hyper-interventionism is
“God’s cause,” which Casey thought to be one of the “false myths”
that “produce fanatics among us.” Ryn aptly notes that any notion
of universality that does not acknowledge the “opacity and
infinite complexity of life” is an “ideological fiction.” It is
unsurprising, then, that these new Jacobins are not unlike
Marxists in their general outlook.
This reviewer has only two minor complaints about this insightful
book. While Ryn and others criticize the universalizing
tendencies of contemporary America, a few authors invoke the
bogeyman of historicism or relativism. Donald S. Lutz, for
instance, imagines Carey as decrying historicism, saying “there
are truths that transcend history and culture.” The real threat,
however, facing the republic today is not one of relativism, but
a Procrustean universalism that makes unrealistic “moral” demands
upon the republic and her people. As Ryn and others point out,
any true universality must synthesize with historical
particulars.
Second, it would have been refreshing had this volume included an
essay on mass immigration and the republic. Carey wrote about the
quagmires of social heterogeneity and lack of consensus but does
not address how high immigration levels can amplify these
problems. Widespread demographic replacement usually results in
at least a different style, if not form, of government.
Other contributors to Defending the Republic include
John S. Baker, Jr.; Francis Canavan, S.J.; William Gangi; Kenneth
L. Grasso; Gary L. Gregg II; Peter Augustine Lawler; Gordon
Lloyd; Jeffry Morrison; E. Robert Statham, Jr.; and Quentin
Taylor — all of whom address various aspects of our republican
predicament. Characterizing the origin, foundation, and
derailment of our republic, these essays contain valuable
information. And perhaps some roadmaps to restoration.
