Founding Fathers’ Warnings Powerful Reminder Amid Government Crisis
By Michael Goodwin

October 12, 2013

In his masterful new book on early America, author Myron Magnet uses concise biographies of George Washington and other Founders to illustrate why our revolution unleashed more than two centuries of freedom and prosperity.

 “The Founders at Home” is a work of scholarship and a labor of love, and offers vivid reminders of the courage of extraordinary individuals who birthed a new idea on Earth.

Take, for instance, the back-stabbing rivals trying to oust Washington as head of the Continental Army. Even as soldiers were leaving bloody footprints in the snow at Valley Forge, their commander had to defend himself against a vicious campaign by supposed comrades. Imagine if they had succeeded.

Or consider the unsentimental wisdom of John Jay, the diplomat who negotiated the treaty for ­independence with Great Britain and later became the first chief justice. Jay warned against the false “nostrums and prescriptions” of the ambitious and greedy, and urged his countrymen to “take men and things as they are.” Otherwise, he wrote, “the knaves and fools in this world are forever in alliance,” and self-government was doomed.

Magnet’s warts-and-all tour is so seductive in part because of our current troubles. Despite the success of the Founders’ grand experiment, events in Washington and around the world have many Americans fearing we are headed for a crack-up.

The fear provokes a wish we had a Washington or a Jefferson to guide us now. But the genius of Magnet’s book is that the “home” in the title refers not only to the actual homes the Founders built, many of which still stand, but also to the profound personal responsibility they felt to their new nation.
At enormous risk and cost, they created a model of patriotism that is not reserved for great men with lofty responsibilities. Their examples still matter because American exceptionalism ultimately is about ordinary people doing ­extraordinary things.

It is not enough to complain about our leaders and declare a pox on both their houses. We  the people, are sovereign and get the government we deserve. If bums are running the country, look in the mirror.

This does not mean that political strife is the problem. In fact, the system of checks and balances is based on the Founders’ assumption that human nature would be guided by self-interest, and that the clash of interests would produce a result that fairly represents the will of the people and the common good of the country. But, obviously, something is broken. The balance between rights and responsibilities has been shattered and the nation’s character diminished.

The same sense of self-gratification and entitlement that infects our culture rules our politics. Elements of our government are as vulgar as the worst of our entertainment. As Magnet shows, the Founders predicted the peril we now face. Washington saw the Constitution as but a piece of parchment that depended upon “virtue in the body of the people.”  If that virtue was eroded, he warned, by a “corruption of morals, profligacy of manners and listlessness for the preservation of the natural and unalienable rights of mankind,” America would degenerate into tyranny.

No, we are not there yet, but ask yourself this: Where on the spectrum of our history are we?

Are the founding virtues still intact, or has their spirit been eroded by the “corruption of morals”?
Are we closer today to the ideals of liberty, or to the tyranny the Founders warned would follow the death of those ideals?

Each of us should answer those questions and act accordingly.

After all, accepting individual responsibility is the foundation of American exceptionalism. 

Thank you,  Michael Goodwin

 October 12, 2013