Can a Republic Survive Conditional Legitimacy?

Commentary

Americans have never been expected to trust the government blindly. Indeed, the American constitutional system begins with distrust.

James Madison famously observed in Federalist No. 51 that if men were angels, government would be unnecessary. The Constitution assumes that power can be abused and therefore divides, checks, and restrains it.

Distrust, therefore, is not necessarily the enemy of republican government.

But there is an important difference between distrusting those who exercise power and believing that the institutions through which they exercise it are legitimate only when our side controls them.

America increasingly appears to be crossing that line.

Recent Gallup polling found that 89 percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread in government, the highest level in two decades of measurement. Institutional trust also increasingly depends upon partisan control. Republicans become dramatically more trusting of the executive branch under Republican presidents; Democrats move in the opposite direction.

The institution remains essentially the same. What changes is who controls it.

This raises a more serious question than whether Americans trust their government: Can a republic survive conditional legitimacy?

There is certainly plenty of blame to go around, but the historical origins should not be obscured in the interest of appearing evenhanded.

The government itself helped create the modern crisis. The trust and credibility gap over Vietnam began under John F. Kennedy and became overwhelming under Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, as official confidence increasingly collided with observable reality.

Later, Watergate put salt in the wound caused by Vietnam, which Richard Nixon had inherited rather than created. Institutions cannot repeatedly mislead citizens and then complain when citizens cease trusting them.

But something else occurred during the 1960s.

Important elements of the New Left and counterculture moved beyond criticism of particular leaders or policies toward rejection of much of the inherited order itself. Traditional morality, Christianity, patriotism, sexual restraint, the family, military service, established authority, and eventually much of the American historical narrative came under sustained attack.

The argument increasingly became not merely that the people running America’s institutions were wrong, but that the institutions, traditions, and civilization themselves were the problem.

The sexual and drug revolutions, counterculture, radical politics, and rejection of traditional religion were not politically neutral phenomena. They emerged overwhelmingly from the left. This does not mean every liberal embraced them, or that every criticism they made was wrong. But historical origins matter.

Nor did the counterculture remain outside the institutions it criticized. Over succeeding decades, many of its assumptions migrated into universities, journalism, entertainment, foundations, and portions of America’s professional and cultural establishment.

Eventually, parts of the right reached a fateful conclusion of their own.

If these institutions have been captured, why should we trust them?

Universities are corrupt. The media are corrupt. The FBI and the Intelligence Community are corrupt. The civil service is the “deep state.” Courts, elections, and experts become suspect.

Some of these criticisms have merit. Institutions can become politicized, officials lie, and experts make mistakes. Bureaucracies protect themselves. Universities can become ideological. Journalists can abandon objectivity.

The answer cannot simply be to demand that Americans “trust the experts.”

But something dangerous happens when justified skepticism becomes a general assertion of illegitimacy. Parts of today’s populist right increasingly employ a logic resembling that pioneered by the radical left: institutions controlled by people fundamentally opposed to us do not merely make bad decisions—their authority itself becomes suspect, trading one extreme of the political spectrum for another.

The ideologies and historical origins are different, but the habit of mind is increasingly similar.

That brings us to the difference between trust and legitimacy.

Trust must be earned. Legitimacy cannot mean approval.

We must move away from childish thinking. I can believe a president is incompetent while recognizing that he is the man sitting at the Resolute Desk. I can believe Congress passed a foolish law while recognizing its constitutional authority to legislate. I can believe the Supreme Court decided a case incorrectly without concluding that the Court has ceased to be legitimate.

Most importantly, I can lose an election without concluding that the Republic lost its legitimacy because I lost.

A republic requires people capable of losing.

Peaceful political defeat is one of civilization’s great accomplishments. The loser accepts an outcome he dislikes because he recognizes something larger than himself, his candidate, and his faction. The winner likewise recognizes that electoral victory does not free him from constitutional, legal, and moral restraint.

George Washington understood the danger. In his Farewell Address, he warned against the “alternate domination of one faction over another.” He was not asking Americans to stop disagreeing. He was warning against allowing a political faction to become stronger than allegiance to the constitutional order.

Yet this raises a deeper question: Upon what does legitimacy ultimately rest?

If truth is whatever my faction declares it to be, there is no standard above political victory. If morality is merely preference, there is no standard by which the winner can be told that something he possesses the power to do is nevertheless wrong.

The American Founders did not understand liberty that way. The Declaration appeals to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Human dignity and rights precede government.

Neither the state nor the majority creates truth.

Nor does my political faction.

John Adams understood that a republic, therefore, requires more than institutions. In 1798, he called religion the basis of moral obligation and the “only Ground of Confidence between Man and Man.” His better-known warning that year was that the Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious People.”

Institutions consequently have obligations. The government must tell citizens the truth, and corruption must be punished. Universities, journalists, courts, law enforcement, and experts cannot squander credibility and then demand it back.

This must be a two-way street, where citizens also have obligations, responsibilities, and duties. We cannot condemn corruption in our opponents while excusing it among our allies. We cannot demand constitutional restraint when out of power and discover unlimited authority after winning.

A healthy republic does not require citizens to trust everything. That would not be a republic.

It requires citizens capable of distinguishing skepticism from cynicism, disagreement from illegitimacy, political defeat from tyranny, and principle from faction.

Government must earn trust.

We must all keep in mind that foreign adversaries are exploiting this trust deficit.

But a republic can survive only when its people recognize that legitimacy rests upon something greater than whether their side won the last election.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.