“What our country needs is a long-term, multi-pronged rediscovery of the true Constitution and a commitment to live by it. The thought of Orestes Brownson can help us in this rediscovery.”
President Donald Trump, in the early days of his new term, is diligently working to reverse over a century of abuse of the Constitution of the United States by unelected bureaucrats in federal agencies. As he declared in his March 4th Joint Address to Congress, “…the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over.” This is a simple assertion of Article II of the Constitution: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” And as President Trump questions the legitimacy of agencies not directly answering to the President of the United States or Congress, he is also recentering the First Amendment such as through his executive order on “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”
He is also returning to government “by the people, for the people” by reasserting the Tenth Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”) through, for example, announcing plans to end the Department of Education “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
Nevertheless, a permanent restoration of the constitutional order cannot be accomplished by executive orders alone. Far too many Americans equate democracy with the federal government and are determined to return to a big-government agenda as soon as possible. What our country, thus, needs is a long-term, multi-pronged rediscovery of the true Constitution and a commitment to live by it. The thought of Orestes Brownson can help us in this re-discovery.
Brownson, who was born on a Vermont farm and lived from 1803 to 1876, was one of the United States’ most important and original thinkers. As a journalist, he wrote incisively about many of the constitutional and political debates of his day. In his 1939 biography of Brownson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. asserts that there was no other American writer who equaled him: “For thirty years in his magazines he commented on virtually all important questions both of the day and of eternity…His observations on society had a profundity no other American of the time approached.”
Just after the Civil War concluded in 1865, Brownson published his magnum opus, The American Republic. In it, he affirmed that the Constitution magnificently harmonized two truths that had eluded all other forms of government: the right of society to protect and defend the weak and helpless (i.e., law) and the affirmation of an individual’s God-given rights that cannot be taken away by government (i.e., liberty). He pointed to the cause of the war as equally destructive exaggerations of these fundamental principles. In the North, the abolition and temperance movements wanted to protect the vulnerable by using federal power forcefully to overturn local laws. No matter how monstrous these local laws, Brownson believed that it was improper to overstep the Tenth Amendment. The tendency in the Southern States was the opposite: They overemphasized the rights of white citizens, denying any obligation of society to protect the weak and helpless.
In The American Republic, Brownson begins his analysis of the government of the United States not in 1776 but, rather, with God’s act of creation of the universe. Brownson believed that God’s creation was constantly being thwarted by the free will of fallen men throughout history. Historically, human beings—whether during the time of the Ancient Greeks, through feudalism, all the way to the British monarchy—failed to apprehend correctly the ideal government conducive to human flourishing. But then, through the happy circumstance of our nation’s founding, our Founders wrote a constitution in accordance with God’s divine idea for creation and its human governance. As Brownson put it in 1873, “I cannot conceive a more profoundly philosophic, or more admirably devised constitution, than that of our own government.”
For Brownson, the authentic Constitution of the United States is founded on a territorial democracy and united the states jointly, not severally. He reaffirmed the commitment that “all men are created equal”; tempered the concept of popular sovereignty (some things are too sacred to be decided by a plebiscite); clarified what freedom truly should be (i.e., not just the ability to do whatever one fancies but, rather, to act in accordance with man’s telos); and definitively resolved the issue of church and state.
In 1865, Brownson already saw the beginnings of the administrative state, the countless agencies of the federal government, that we have today, as well as Congress ceding its law-making authority. “There is a growing disposition on the part of Congress to throw as much of the business of government as possible into the hands of the Executive,” he wrote then. This “growing disposition” blossomed under the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Although Brownson may not be as well known as other key writers from American history, his works deserve to be read and discussed, even now a century and a half after his death. As we debate the American character in the years to come, it will be fruitless to descend into arguments based on erroneous interpretations of the Constitution and its purpose, including ones that led to the Civil War. Americans should rediscover the work of Brownson, starting with The American Republic because, as he wrote within, the United States “has a mission, and is chosen of God for the realization of a great idea…the realization of the true idea of the state, which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual—the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy.”.
Tom McDonough is executive director of The American Family Project.
