Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Every year I introduce my eighth grade students to United States history by writing the following on the board: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” The lesson I try to lead them to is that liberty requires watching, and watching requires knowing what you’re watching for, which is why I hope to teach them their nation’s history. That way after I’m gone, and they’re the “self” in self-government, they’ll be able to help judge and guide their nation’s actions based on its founding principles, its aspirations, its successes and its failures.At the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, a woman outside Independence Hall asked Benjamin Franklin if the delegates had created a monarchy or a republic. “A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”
American history is a chronicle of our efforts to keep it. At some moments our republic has seemed secure. At others it’s stood in peril.
This is one of those dire times.
There’s no single reason we’re in trouble. It’s not just the economy, or inequity, or the demise of self-reliance, or the rise of entitlement, or our rampant narcissism, or the partisan incompetence and intransigence of our government. It’s all those things, to be sure, but one of the less prominent obstacles to governing ourselves is our misunderstanding of how our government is supposed to work and what our role as citizens is supposed to be.
Our government isn’t a democracy. It’s a republic. There’s a big difference. Our founders rejected the tyranny of a king, but they also recognized the danger inherent in the tyranny of the mob.
They believed that sovereign power properly resided with the people. We the people formed this union, we the people established its government, we the people appoint its members and officers, and we the people can remove them from office. However, we the people aren’t the government. That’s because most of us aren’t qualified to govern, just as most of us aren’t qualified to remove each other’s gall bladders, represent each other in court, or repair each other’s kitchen sinks.
That’s why it’s so vital that we choose people who are suited to govern us, and why so many of us feel so despondent over the choice we face in this election, a choice for me between the unappealing and the unthinkable.
Mr. Trump has proven himself the prince of gross distortion and infamy. He isn’t Hitler, but the similarities are striking and worth noting.
The fact that so many of us know so little about how government works can’t entirely be blamed on our apathy. For decades as part of education reform’s disdain for content and “facts,” schools have intentionally chosen not to teach students, meaning future voters, the allegedly “dust-dry” fundamentals of American government. Civics classes have focused instead on “service learning,” “problem-solving,” and “collaborative skills.”
Our resulting ignorance – fewer than a quarter of eighth graders are proficient in civics – is why as voters we’re so acutely susceptible to empty promises, unconstitutional rhetoric and vain peacock posturing that would appall our founders, as humanly imperfect as they were. Sadly, this gives free range to our baser inclinations.
Part of being a history teacher, at least in my experience, is having students ask me who I’m voting for. I’ve always declined to answer. While I explain candidates’ views in the light of history and my understanding of constitutional government, I’ve also remained strictly impartial in my explanations. I tell my students that teachers’ opinions can have undue influence on students’ minds, influence that runs counter to their parents’ ideas, and that I don’t believe exercising that undue influence is proper.
This time, in this election, I have a dilemma. Because this time for me, and I would argue for all of us, we don’t face a choice between competing conventional ideologies, between liberal and conservative, expansive government and limited government. This time I face a choice between Mrs. Clinton, with whom in many respects I disagree and for whom I never expected to vote, and Mr. Trump, who embodies the “love of power” and “real despotism” that Washington warned against in his Farewell Address.
Mr. Madison cautioned that “if tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be under the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” Even more prescient, Mr. Lincoln predicted that “some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us,” and that “when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”
I could recite the familiar, extensive litany of bizarre declarations, outrageous acts, fallacious assertions about government, and outright lies that have characterized Mr. Trump’s candidacy. I could cite his winks at racism, his repeated endorsement of thuggery, as well as the bigoted thugs he’s placed at the helm of his campaign apparatus.
It’s worth remembering that in 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power by election. It’s worth remembering that he promised to make Germany great again. It’s worth remembering that he cynically pandered to the working class while he consorted with the wealthy and powerful. It’s worth remembering how Germany’s political leaders assured each other they’d be able to control him after he took office.
Hitler declared that having lost the war, the German people “deserved to perish.” Donald Trump declared that he “will never, ever forgive” the American people if he loses.
In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler celebrated the “big lie.” He asserted that owing to the “primitive simplicity of their minds,” the “broad masses” are easy prey to “colossal untruths” because their “emotional nature” and naïve sense of shame mean they simply can’t “believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
Mr. Trump has proven himself the prince of gross distortion and infamy. He isn’t Hitler, but the similarities are striking and worth noting. So is the catastrophe into which Hitler led his nation and the world.
Mrs. Clinton, it may be argued, is a typically self-serving, arrogant politician. And there are many legitimate reasons for voters to be dissatisfied with things as they are.
But for what it’s worth, this history teacher sees our republic in peril from the species of man and president that our founders feared.
This is no time for silence or ambivalence.
A republic, if you can keep it.
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