How to Keep Our Republic
On the last day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Elizabeth Willing Powel, a prominent Philadelphia socialite, asked Benjamin Franklin what form of government was being proposed for the United States. In a reply that has become famous, Franklin said: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
Franklin’s words, often cited to show that the Founders recognized the profound vulnerability of the republican order they crafted, are easy partisan fodder in times of controversy or crisis. Activists, pundits, and politicians have long invoked them to tag their opponents or their opponents’ ideas as precisely the sort of existential threat to a fragile American system that the Founders anticipated might arise.
It is highly unlikely, however, that any one policy, law, or politician would pose such a threat. Even presidents who pushed the limits of their office’s power, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Donald Trump, have not dismantled our republic’s core institutions or set us on a course toward autocracy, monarchy, or dictatorship. This year, as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we also celebrate a quarter millennium without an American Caesar or Napoleon.
Yet there is a sense building in the national consciousness that something isn’t right. A December 2025 Gallup poll found that just 24 percent of Americans were satisfied with the nation’s direction. A Politico poll from a month prior found that 49 percent of Americans thought that the country’s best times lay in the past, while only 41 percent thought that America’s best times are yet to come. As a professor, I interact frequently with young people. Among students of diverse political persuasions and worldviews, I have noticed a shared sense that our institutions, norms, and cultural and social fabric are collectively undergoing a period of decline.
As we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, why do so many people believe that America is on the brink? The answer is complex.
Our civic and political structures remain fundamentally intact, even if they have been pushed to their limits in recent years and decades. Rampant judicial activism, presidential overreach, the amassing of power in the executive branch, and Congress’s abdication of its legislative and oversight responsibilities have all contributed to the gradual deformation of the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances conceived by our forefathers.
Still, these institutions are functional — at least at the minimum necessary. Budgets are passed (eventually); guarantors of social order such as the military, police, and the criminal justice system mostly do what they are meant to do; civil liberties are protected; and social welfare programs chug along. After 250 years, our institutions may be struggling, but they have not failed.
Even so, there is good reason behind the widespread pessimism about our country’s future. While our institutions themselves may subsist, our political culture — the fundamental pillar on which the health of our institutions rests — has become severely degraded, almost to the point of dysfunction.
George Washington put it well in his first inaugural address in 1789 when he noted that “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” What Washington told us then remains true: While constitutional structures, institutions, and political systems are of crucial importance, they will be effective only when they are supported by the people. That is, by the political culture. We must value our institutions enough to resist usurpations by their rulers, even when unconstitutional programs offer immediate gratifications or the relief of urgent problems.
For the political culture to properly underpin our constitutional structures and institutions, certain virtues must be held and practiced by the people. But virtues must be nurtured by each generation. James Madison said that “a well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.” That is certainly true. But Madison’s words also point to the fact that even the best constitutional structures — which I believe ours to be — and the strongest structural constraints on governmental power — which I believe are features of our system, as conceived by the Founders — are mere parchment promises if people do not understand them, value them, and have the will to resist those offering something tempting in return for giving them up.
The Constitution was famously defended by Madison in Federalist No. 51 as “supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives.” He made this point immediately after observing that the first task of government is to control the governed, and the second is to control itself. He allowed that “a dependence on the people is, no doubt the primary control on the government, but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” But even in this formulation, our constraints and institutions do not stand alone; indeed, they are presented as secondary. What is primary and entirely necessary is healthy and vibrant political culture — “a dependence on the people” to keep the rulers in line.
As the ablest scholar and political theorist of the founding generation, John Adams understood as well as anyone the general theory of the Constitution. He knew that a healthy political culture was vital to ensuring that rulers stay within the bounds of their legitimate authority and act as servants of the common good and of the people they rule. Adams famously remarked that “our Constitution is made for a moral and religious people” and “is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Why? Because a people lacking in virtue could be counted on to trade liberty for protection, for financial or personal security, for comfort, or for having their problems solved quickly. In a democratic system — going all the way back to ancient Athens — there will always be people occupying or standing for public office who are happy to offer a deal: an expansion of their power in return for what they can offer by virtue of that expansion. The question, then, is how to form people fitted with the virtues that make them capable of maintaining limited government and our constitutional structures, institutions, and political system, even in the face of inevitable temptations to compromise it away.
Here we see the significance of the most basic institutions of civil society — the family; the religious community; private organizations that are devoted to the inculcation of knowledge and virtue; private (often religiously based) educational institutions; and others play the indispensable role of transmitting essential virtues. These are mediating institutions that provide a buffer between the individual and the power of the central state. It is ultimately the autonomy, integrity, and general flourishing of these institutions that will determine the fate of constitutional government.
These institutions perform basic health, education, and welfare functions as the only real alternative to the removal of these functions to government. But when government expands to play the primary role in performing them, the ideal of limited government is soon lost, no matter the formal structural constraints of the Constitution. The corresponding weakening of the status and authority of these institutions damages their ability to perform all their functions, including their moral and pedagogical ones. With that, they will lose their capacity to positively influence the political culture on which they depend.
It is difficult to conceive of a moment in our nation’s history when institutions devoted to the cultivation of virtue have been weaker. Many of our fellow citizens do not even know what a family is anymore, let alone how to be part of one or how to properly start a new one. Church attendance and religious affiliation are at record lows. And under recent progressive administrations, churches and private organizations whose dedication to the formation of virtue rendered them dissenters from progressive social, cultural, and moral doctrines were investigated, defunded, sued, and otherwise targeted.
This year, we mark the anniversary of a document that acknowledged certain truths to be self-evident, among them that all men are endowed by God with unalienable rights. From the moment of our country’s Founding, the authors of our constitutional and political order saw their project as premised on the notion that the citizenry — though diverse in ethnicity and creed — shared some fundamental premises about human nature and the human person. Now, though, the foundational components meant to form good, moral, and reasonable citizens are frail; they wield less influence in our society and in our politics than they did in the past. Our bonds are weakening; our civic fabric fraying.
If we are experiencing a period of American decline, it’s not because of the constitutional order and political system whose 250th anniversary we celebrate this year. The decline is attributable, rather, to the degradation of what Edmund Burke famously referred to as the essential “little platoons” of society: those building blocks of virtue, from families to voluntary associations, that work together to form an informed and virtuous citizenry. With the elements necessary to foster a healthy and vibrant democratic culture debilitated, is it any wonder that public confidence in our ability to keep our republic is so shaky?