NEAR THE END of his legendary 1978 commencement address to Harvard's June graduating class, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, probably without knowing he was doing it, diagnosed the essential problem of self-government.
To [the despiritualized and irreligious humanistic] consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging everything on earth -- imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are not experiencing the consequences of mistakes [that were not] noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most important possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests suffocate it. This is the real crisis.
The essential problem of self-government -- and much else -- is that the we are all, as Mr. Solzhenitzen put it, imperfect and as Christians say, fallen. His diagnosis was more-or-less right; his proposed remedy was abstractly appealing. A "spiritual upsurge." "A new height of vision." "The next anthropologic state."
Absent a Great Awakening beyond all prior Great Awakenings, however, none of this can offer much hope in this practical world of affairs.
What he did not know and probably could not know -- what most Americans do not know -- is that the Founders wrestled with the same problem: how to create a republic that would work, despite being peopled with imperfect citizens and led by imperfect executives, legislators, and judges.
The Founders' prescription was far less grandiloquent than Mr. Solzhenitzen's, but far more practical -- so practical that its design borders on genius. They would limit the federal government to prescribed powers. They would break power into three elements -- executive, legislative, and judicial -- and would break the legislature into two houses. Presidents and legislators would hold office for limited periods, then be required to return to the voters.
As for Solzhenitzen's dream of a more spiritually refined world, Madison's standing reply in Federalist No. 51 is brilliant (emphasis added):
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Oblige governemnt to control itself? How quaint. How old-fashioned. The American elites of today concern themselves only with controlling the governed.
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