I’ve decided to try to restrict my political musings to Wednesday, that being a day well-suited for such a woeful child as this.

I happen this morning to have thought of that famous John Adams quote:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

I’ve never liked that quote, for a couple reasons. First, it’s disingenuous: all governments function best when the people are moral and religious. The more self-sacrificing, dutiful, and self-controlled the population, the smoother the government will function. This is as true of a Republic as of a Monarchy. Actually, one could easily argue that this is much more the case with an aristocratic, feudal system than a democratic republic, as individuals have more power in the former and thus more scope for setting the tone of society. Likewise no government can function well on a dishonest, selfish, and unruly population. So, to the extent he’s saying anything meaningful here, it’s something that applies at least equally well to any other form of government (I find this to be the case with a lot of American political proverbs).

In the second place, this strikes me as a particularly unhelpful brand of arrogance, also embodied in Franklin’s “A republic, ma’am, if you can keep it;” an assertion that if there are problems in our Constitution or government, it’s because we the People were not worthy of such a great and magnificent political theory. The same thing is found in describing America as an ‘experiment in self-governance’ and other such phrases; the idea that we’re a special kind of people (a “free people”), that we are supposed to set the example to the rest of the world, to be that “shining city on a hill,” the elect, etc. The idea that our form of government is a great, sacred trust, almost a religious doctrine, which we must show ourselves to be worthy of that we might bring it to the rest of the benighted world (In this very letter Adams refers to the country remaining “untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world…”).

It’s not just that I think this is absurd; I think this is dangerous. Because it sets us that Puritanical standard of “if you’re the elect, you will act as the elect,” only without even the concreteness of Calvinist morality to guide the consequences. We’re thus driven on to seek to become ever more ‘free’ and more ‘equal’ and more an example to the world, without any limits or definitions for these things. So any time anyone feels unsatisfied with the state of the country, or his own place in it, the usual response is that either it’s not a problem at all, or that we need to fix the country itself, rather than recognizing that such things are part of life, that every nation has its absurdities and inconsistencies, and that it’s up to us to make the best of it.

America strikes me as being in the position of Bree the horse from The Horse and His Boy, who, being a talking horse among dumb brutes, had come to fancy himself a particularly brave and important person, which causes him to sink into despair when he fails to live up to his own idea of himself. Aslan then tells him that, though he isn’t in fact very special, he can be a very decent sort of person by recognizing and accepting that. In the same way, I think America needs to recognize that our grand ideas of our own exceptional place and mission are largely illusions born of time and place, and we’re really no different from any other nation (save insofar as every nation is itself). We’re not a special, rarefied species known as a ‘free people’, we’re not the ‘last best hope of man’, we’re just a country like any other full of people like any other. But the best way to be a great and just country is first to accept that.

On another note, we should keep in mind that this comes from an official letter from the President to a group of militia officers (as always, worth reading the whole thing for context: as a side note, he alludes to the men as paying for their own arms and equipment, which is an indication of how our militias were initially conceived), one of hundreds that he sent. It strikes me as one of our charming peculiarities as Americans that we are so ready to take the pablum of our politicians as seriously as Scripture at times. Think of how often this quote is trotted out as representing a keystone to understanding our nation, without considering that it comes from a shovelware correspondence by an unpopular one-term President (meaning no offense to Mr. Adams; to be an unpopular President is hardly a shameful thing).