10/9/2023

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal starts off with Jay Cost’s piece in the Washington Examiner on what’s missing from the ongoing debate between the Left and Right about the theory of governance contained in the Constitution. Is it, per progressives, “a clunky system of checks and balances to prevent the people from ruling”? Or did the founders give us a republican government, which they set down in stone, that should never be altered? Cost writes that the Constitution instead “offers a unique theory of democratic republicanism,” which “empowers the people to govern while attempting to redirect the democratic spirit away from dangerous ends.” In other words, it “relies on the principle of democracy as the foundation of the regime, but it structures popular sovereignty to prevent the republic from being corrupted into democratic tyranny.” Cost sums up the founders’ political theory by noting that the “people ultimately write the law in this country, but they do so under the constraints of consensus.” To this day, the Constitution still “remains a true marvel, a historic achievement, and a continued blessing for generations of citizens of the United States.”

At Providence, Cory Higdon rebuts modern day arguments that the First Amendment of the Constitution established an impregnable “wall of separation between church and state,” and therefore a “godless” republic. But the historical record belies such an interpretation. As Higdon points out, the “wall of separation” metaphor “does not appear in the Constitution; even if it did, it was a phrase bound by a particular historical context.” Also, “a strict separationist interpretation of the First Amendment has little support from the sources of the early American republic.” Historians Carl Esbeck and Jonathan Den Hartog, among others, have noted that the “wall of separation” language “was never about promoting ‘government indifference to religion, or even hostility to it. . . . Church and state could be separated, but religion and politics could not.’”