Two-hundred-and-fifty years after America’s Founding Declaration, the citizenry has grown discomfited and demoralized. Polls show support for democracy itself is down, especially among the young. So the semiquincentennial is a good time to take account of the ideals that represent the genius of America, and to ask whether they can be reengaged to improve our governance today.
That genius and those ideals include singular devotion to the rule of law, checks and balances, and James Madison’s insight in Federalist No. 47 that concentration of all power in the same hands is “the very definition of tyranny” — even when, as Jefferson observed, the concentrator may be himself elected. Also included among our Founding ideals was dedication to the precepts of republican virtue: self-restraint, self-improvement, humility, and respect for the moral and civic duty to serve the public interest over individual private interests.
The Founders knew that it was not only the virtue of the nation’s leaders, but also of the citizenry, that was crucial to the survival of the Republic. Benjamin Franklin warned the Constitutional Convention that a government “can only end in despotism . . . when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.” And Alexander Hamilton warned, in Federalist No. 1, that “men who have overturned the liberties of republics . . . commenc[e] demagogues, and en[d] tyrants.”
America also had luck: Founders who, while not angels — and, on slavery, far worse — acted primarily as fiduciaries of the public trust rather than to line their own pockets. They called this virtue “disinterestedness.” Their model was George Washington, who, as a boy, copied out, among his over 100 other rules of civility, the rule: “Labour to keep alive in your Breast that Little Spark of Celestial Fire called Conscience.” The Framers were realists. They knew future presidents would not all be Washingtons, so they designed “precautions for keeping [rulers] virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” And Madison told the Virginia ratifying convention: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” Virtuous leaders without virtuous followers can go only so far.
America now confronts a challenge to that technique. In Donald Trump, we have a president who will not agree to be governed by quaint theories of checks and balances, at least so long as Congress can fairly be described as inert, indifferent, and quiescent. Madison believed that an ongoing contest of wills between ambitious legislators and chief executives would keep arbitrary power in check: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” He would be astonished by today’s legislative capitulation.
On the legal front, the current-day news is mixed. On emergency tariff powers, the Supreme Court deferred to Congress and reined in the president. On birthright citizenship, the justices sided with the plain words of the Fourteenth Amendment over the president’s intransigent ones. And in the Census and Federal Reserve cases, the chief justice called out presidential “pretexts,” reminding judges that they are “not required to exhibit a naivete from which ordinary citizens are free.” Put less euphemistically, this means that many judges, and some justices, believe the present government is routinely lying to them.
When told that Washington would surrender power after winning the Revolution, King George III said: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” But Washington’s virtue no longer reigns in our land. Our president now teaches that honor is for chumps, and that imperious and corrupt behavior is the coin of the realm. So what is a nation to do? First, we shouldn’t completely panic — not yet, anyway. The rule of law is substantially alive and reasonably well outside of the White House. Second, Congress must simply start doing its job again, mustering its institutional ambition to counter the president’s. That remedy is inherently political; it lies with the voters who may very well deliver a strong opinion on this score in the forthcoming midterms. Third, lower-court judges must stay strong — civil society has won case after case against the president’s campaign of retaliation against ideological opponents. As Georgetown Law professor Stephen I. Vladeck has argued, Supreme Court justices should reinforce and insist on due respect from the Executive for the role of their fellow judges rather than undermine them via shadowy, emergency decisions.
Finally, as any rock-ribbed Reagan Republican like me would advise, look back to Reagan. At Westminster in 1982, he predicted that “the march of freedom and democracy . . . will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history” and proposed a campaign “to foster the infrastructure of democracy.” “Democracy is not a fragile flower,” he said. “Still it needs cultivating.” His proposal became the National Endowment for Democracy — bipartisan, transparent, and chartered to promote free expression, free elections and the rule of law abroad. Congress should now do the same at home. This administration, which has sought to zero out NED’s funding, should instead reverse course and embrace an “America’s Endowment for Democracy” — the AED, a defibrillating wake-up shock for domestic civic complacency, and an excellent legacy for any president and Congress.
What could be more genius, or more virtuous, than reinvigorating our democratic ideals by retraining America on its Founding principles? “We the People” would then possess both the understanding and the means to tame a Machiavellian presidency — just as our Founders intended 250 years ago.
This article is an abridged version of the speech Alan Rual delivered on October 2, 2026, at the 62nd Progress Foundation Economic Conference in Zurich. It first appeared on October 17, 2026, in “National Review” and is reproduced here with the author’s kind permission.
