America 250: Our Nation Is Overdue for a Civics Lesson
Over the past two weeks I’ve done something I probably should have done years ago: I sat down with our actual founding documents and read them out loud. The Constitution one Friday, the Declaration of Independence the next. No historians, no guests, just me and two short, remarkable documents.
Short is the bit that hit me the hardest. For documents that created the most powerful nation in human history, they are almost comically brief. But that brevity is the secret. The more complex a society, the simpler you want its foundational law to be. Complexity on top of complexity is an invitation for arbitrary rule under the facade of legalese.
Even with our straightforward constitution, we still face the problem of legal bloat, though not nearly as badly as the European Union with its tangled mess of committees, commissions, and councils. But despite our modern regulatory state, it wasn’t always this way.
Our founding documents are referenced by every political faction when convenient, even as we’ve strayed from the founders’ vision. The Declaration and the Constitution shouldn’t be treated as relics of the past, selectively quoted to dress up modern political rhetoric. These two documents track the path from abstract ideas to real-world implementation, and you cannot fully understand either one without the other.
We Are Not a Democracy
My grandfather Gino Papola used to tell me all the time, “We’re not a democracy, we’re a constitutional republic.” With the rise of “democratic” socialism on the left and various flavors of populism on the right, this distinction matters more now than at any other point in my lifetime.
We have a written constitution that binds and restricts “our democracy,” securing the liberties and stability necessary to maintain rule of, by, and for the people for generations to come.
When people invoke “our democracy,” they usually mean one of two very different things, and neither reflects the values of the founding. The first is the institutional technocracy established under Woodrow Wilson and radically expanded under FDR and LBJ. This definition of democracy is perhaps a contradiction in terms, but it’s clear what’s actually being said. It’s “the people I like wielding power over the ignorant masses.”
The second definition is more honest. The populist notion of “our democracy” is that the majority should get what the majority wants. Every four years, progressives will trot out polls claiming that Medicare For All has supermajority support across party lines. And yet, when the polling questions focus in on the details of single-payer healthcare, you get the opposite result. So which is it? Which policy outcome reflects “our democracy”? That’s a problem.
Wilsonian “democracy” assumes that the people know nothing and the experts know everything. Populist “democracy” assumes the opposite. The founders knew that both were wrong.
A system where 50.001% of voters get to do whatever they want is not what the founders had in mind. They were terrified of majority rule. They had read the Greeks and the Romans. They knew that majorities can be a little crazy and that mobs can be as tyrannical as kings.
They also knew that distant, centralized governments are prone to both abuse and neglect, so they struck a balance, building friction into the democratic process while taking certain ideas off the table entirely.
The best example of this is the Congress as originally designed. The lower chamber, the House of Representatives, was built to serve our populist instincts. The upper chamber, the Senate, was built as a check on that populism, spreading out power equally among the states rather than by population. While that much is still true, the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, seriously undermined the Senate’s core function.
For over 120 years, senators were elected by state legislatures. This provided some buffer between them and the messy business of horse race politics. The deliberative nature of the Senate made it well-suited to separate the wheat from the chaff coming out of the House of Representatives. But, except for a few specific powers, it couldn’t act on its own. Both the rebellious teens and the adults in the room had to come to an understanding.
Today, senators are popularly elected, just like representatives. Although they have the advantage of six years between elections rather than two, they’re still subject to the volatile preferences of voters.
If you couldn’t tell already, I’m not the biggest fan of the 17th Amendment. Another one I don’t love, the 16th Amendment, was also ratified in 1913, creating the constitutional basis for the income tax. The amendment process is itself a key example of how the founders tempered the democratic process. Amendments must first be approved by two thirds of both houses of Congress, or by a constitutional convention, and then ratified by three quarters of the states.
So apparently, supermajorities of Americans supported those amendments in 1913, however much I may hate that fact. I think if they could see today’s tax rates, they might change their minds.
A Creed, Not Just a Complaint
The Constitution is the law. The Declaration of Independence is the soul behind it. One of the most important things to understand is that it wasn’t just a list of grievances against the king, though it contains plenty. It was a moral argument addressed to the world.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Bold is not a strong enough word for what that was in 1776. Most of the planet was still governed by monarchy. The idea that every human being possessed rights by nature, not granted by kings or governments but inherent to their humanity, was genuinely radical. The way of the world, for all of human history before this, was slavery, subjugation, the divine right of kings, and might makes right. What Thomas Jefferson was asserting was the exception.
That is what American exceptionalism actually means. Not that we’re superior people. Not that we’re always right. But that our founding, objectively and historically, was the exception to the rule.
Most revolutions fail. The French Revolution is how these things typically go: utopian dreams cashed out in barbaric despotism. Instead, we moved, imperfectly and at great cost, toward a more perfect union. That is exceptional, and we shouldn’t let anyone take it from us.
What We Have to Do as Parents
Here’s where I’ll land the plane, since it’s the whole point of Dad Saves America:
Civics education has been thrown to the wayside in this country. When you go out and ask people basic questions about how our government is structured, you find out fast how bad it’s gotten.
That gap is on us as parents to fill, because the schools and the broader culture aren’t cutting it. The version that does come through those channels usually frames these documents first and foremost as records of hypocrisy rather than the revolutionary moral achievements they actually were.
Yes, Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal while holding slaves. That tension is real and worth teaching honestly. But so is the fact that just 85 years later, this country fought a bloody civil war to close that gap, and that Lincoln, Douglass, and King all reached back to this same document as the foundation for a fully free society. Our kids need both halves of that story, not just cynical criticism.
I also want to push on something that I think even civics-minded conservatives get wrong. The notion that we are simply a creedal nation, that we can teach our founding ideals as abstractions, and that the creed will sustain itself, does not work. Ideas do not survive in people who have no experiential frame to receive them.
Think about what it meant, practically, to declare independence. To throw off an outside authority and bear the weight of self-governance in the real, physical world. The founders weren’t just writing philosophy. They were living it.
Our job is to help our kids live it too. A generation that has never felt genuine independence cannot fully understand why independence is worth protecting. The abstractions stay abstract. And then we wonder why they vote away the very life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness that this country was founded to secure.
Our comfortable, on-demand world has systematically removed the experiences of real independence that used to be typical of childhood. The experiences of being bored, taking risks, and earning something tangible through your individual efforts are the soil in which the ideas of the Declaration can take root.
That’s what “saving America” will actually look like.