The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were miracles born of unique political and cultural circumstances unlikely ever to recur.
They celebrated and honored separation of powers pitting ambition against ambition—a structural bill of rights to prevent executive branch tyranny. The crown jewel was the exclusive monopoly of the war power by Congress. It has no incentive to declare war except in self-defense against an aggressor that had already broken the peace—unlike the executive. During wartime, the law falls silent. During wartime, secrecy, speed, and energy are paramount. As Napoleon put it, “One bad general is better than two good ones.” During wartime, infinite power migrates to the president under the banner of national security, including the power to play prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner over any person said to be an imminent or future threat. Congress becomes a spectator like an extra in a Cecil B. DeMille cinematic extravaganza.
Thousands of years of history substantiated James Madison’s timeless teaching:
War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.
Hence it has grown into an axiom that the executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war: hence it is the practice of all states, in proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence.
Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 8 observed that war ultimately crucifies liberty:
Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.
Madison was even more emphatic on that score:
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
All previous dispensations prior to the Constitution had endowed the executive with the power to commence war. The predictable result was constant war for the sake of war. About the Roman Empire, for example, Joseph Schumpeter wrote,
There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall on the Roman people.
The Ottoman Empire was at war every day during its five century existence. The Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors openly fought for the sake of fighting and conquering. War is the greatest scourge of mankind. Even geniuses like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud were clueless as to a remedy or deterrent.
Mankind, nevertheless, naturally inclines towards executive despotisms earmarked by constant wars to escape the burdens of self-government and moral responsibility. Mankind prefers bread and circuses and easy promises of heaven by self-proclaimed leaders—religious, political, or otherwise. The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov put it this way in response to a putative second coming of Jesus:
“You came empty-handed with nothing but some vague promise of freedom, which, in their simple-mindedness and innate responsibility, men cannot even conceive and which they fear and dread, for there has never been anything more difficult for man and for human society to bear than freedom…. I tell You once more that man has no more pressing, agonizing need to find someone to whom he can hand over as quickly as possible the gift of freedom.”
The American Declaration of Independence was thus a miracle. The 56 signatories celebrated freedom. They signed their death warrants to secure unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness secured by government by the consent of the governed. They denounced taxation without representation. They proclaimed a duty to overthrow tyrannical governments 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.”
The signatories were an historical aberration. They were elite, learned intellectual leaders who had been victims of limitless executive power. They could run circles around the British ruling class, for example, the periodically deranged King George III or the witless Prime Minister Frederick, Lord North. In contrast to typical sociopathic, narcissistic politicians, the 56 wished to bequeath to posterity liberty, freedom, and dignity for all by risking and giving that last full measure of devotion. John Adams exclaimed, “Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.”
The Constitution—largely the brainchild of Madison, the Isaac Newton of political science—safeguarded the unalienable individual rights sacralized in the Declaration through separation of powers, a structural bill of rights, pitting ambition against ambition to prevent any political faction from oppressing another. Most important on that score was assigning the war power to Congress, not the president, to prevent chronic wars from obliterating liberty and the march of the mind in favor of raw military power and the armored knight. In 1878, British Prime Minister Lord Gladstone, a towering intellect, effusively praised the Constitution as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”
The Declaration and Constitution were born when the United States was untempted by an empire marked by chronic, pointless wars, which requires a Caesar in lieu of separation of powers as elaborated above. America then lacked the necessary economic and military sinews and manpower for global domination.
But by 1898, the United States had become an economic, industrial superpower. Its army and navy had grown by leaps and bounds, fueled by Alfred Mahan’s superficial Influence of Sea Power upon History. There was no philosophical or intellectual elite to replace the authors of the Declaration and Constitution and keep their wisdom alive. President William McKinley and Assistant Secretary of Navy Theodore Roosevelt were political novices compared to George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.
In that fateful year, the United States struck a Faustian bargain: abandon liberty and the opportunity to march to your own drummer as the nation’s glory for an American Empire dominating the world by military force. Thus, Hawaii was annexed, and the Spanish American war occasioned the conquest of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico; Cuba became a de facto satellite; and additional military unconstitutional presidential interventions ensued in Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.
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The rest is history. Ever since, limitless constitutional powers, including the war power, steadily migrated from Congress to the President with little or no popular or congressional resistance. The President is now crowned with more unchecked power over American citizens than George III asserted over American colonists that provoked the American Revolution. The president assassinates opponents like a character from The Godfather. The president initiates pointless wars. The president spends or refuses to spend funds appropriated by Congress. The president picks and chooses which laws to enforce, and initiates frivolous prosecutions or retribution against his political detractors. The president operates in secrecy. The President conducts dragnet spying against the “not-yet-guilty” in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The United States Supreme Court placed the president above the law in Trump v. United States (2024). Constitutional illiteracy among the rulers and the ruled is epidemic.
We have passed the point of no return. The Declaration and Constitution were the high-water mark of civilization—peace, liberty, and prosperity, notwithstanding their dark side, i.e., slavery, the exclusion of women, the oppression of religious minorities, and the horrific maltreatment of Native American Indians. America’s system was a miracle overcoming human nature’s insatiable hormonal cravings for power, wealth, sex, celebrity, creature comforts, and certainty in the face of indeterminacy.
Only Dr. Pangloss could discover anything optimistic about the future of the United States or mankind on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
