The Crisis In Democracy

The national constitution center, in Philadelphia, is a monument to the benefits of pessimism. The center, which is situated across an open expanse from Independence Hall, is a superior educational institution, but, understood correctly, it is also a warning about the fragility of the American experiment.

- Jeffrey Goldberg

The 42 Founding Fathers who are celebrated there, life-size and in bronze—the 39 who signed the Constitution, and three who refused—did not believe that men were good. Quite the opposite. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” “Federalist No. 51” states.

The system of government delineated in the Constitution is a concession to the idea that humans are deficient in the science of rational self-governance. Today, during a moment in which truths that seemed self-evident are in doubt—including the idea that liberal democracy is the inevitable end state of human ideological development—a tour of the Constitution Center reminds us that the Founders did not necessarily believe they were bringing about the end of history.

I recently visited the center in the company of its president, Jeffrey Rosen, the legal scholar and an Atlantic contributing editor. Rosen has committed to memory great stretches of The Federalist Papers, and he recited passages as we toured the center’s collection. (Particularly moving, especially in light of our current president’s anti-press frenzy, is the full text of the Constitution as published, two days after it was signed, in The Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser.)

“The goal in America today,” Rosen said on our walk, “is to resurrect the primacy of reason over passion—what we are watching now is the struggle between logos and pathos. The central question in our democratic age is this: Is it possible to slow down the direct expression of popular passion? The answer to this question is not obvious.”