In establishing the framework for America’s political institutions, the authors of the Constitution were both liberals (that is, partisans of individual liberty) and republicans (advocates of government accountable to the people). As well, they sought to promote the development of commerce, not only for the sake of enhancing the people’s standard of living and providing work for all, but also because the variety of interests that commerce promotes offers a security against the sort of class-based politics (rich vs. poor) that had torn previous republics (from ancient Athens and Rome to modern Florence) apart.
But contrary to the claims of some Progressive historians and politicians, the Founders’ desire to promote commerce does not mean that they were mere materialists, who aimed only to promote the economic interests of the wealthy, or who thought that the mutual checking of people’s individual or class interests would suffice to protect the people’s liberties. Rather, while recognizing (as Hamilton puts it in Federalist no. 73) that “stern virtue is the growth of few soils,” hence the need for institutional checks and balances, they also acknowledged, as Madison observes at the end of Federalist no. 55, that “republican government presupposes the existence” of civic virtue among the populace more than “any other form,” given that such a system relies less on coercion, and more on the people’s public-regardingness and private morality, than despotic forms do. In harmony with Madison’s argument, George Washington in his Farewell Address emphasized the need to encourage religious belief as a necessary foundation of popular morality.
Under the Constitution, it is largely state and local governments, rather than the federal one, that had the power of encouraging and sustaining popular morality. And until at least the mid-20th century, this division of labor worked quite well. Alexis de Tocqueville’s account in Democracy in America (1835-40) of the mutual support given by (moderate, voluntary) religious observance, sound morality, and self-government at the local level long proved pretty accurate. (Admittedly, governments or the people themselves sometimes went too far in ostensible promotion of morality, as in Prohibition and the Comstock raids.)
The first real chinks in this system were opened by the Supreme Court starting the 1950s, when the Court, acting on the principle that the Fourteenth Amendment had “incorporated” most of the Bill of Rights so as to apply it against state governments, and giving a libertarian interpretation to the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech, the press, and religion, began to deconstruct state and local regulations that had supported private morality by banning pornography or offering nondenominational support (financial or otherwise) to religion as unconstitutional. It is highly unlikely that Congress or the electorate intended any such consequences when they ratified either the First or Fourteenth Amendments. But so far did the Court’s reinterpretation of the free-speech and free-press guarantees as protecting even nonverbal “expression” go that the generally conservative Justice Antonin Scalia later wrote a majority opinion protecting flag-burning on that ground. (By that standard, Colin Kaepernick’s introduction of the practice of refusing to stand for the national anthem was a rather mild further innovation.) So much for a public prejudice in favor of patriotism. Similarly, the ‘60’s Court, going with the trend of the times, guaranteed high school students the right to wear clothing bearing the slogan “f- the flag” to their classes. Perhaps most strikingly, in 1989 in Lee v. Weisman the justices by a 5-4 vote found that a school district’s practice of having clergymen of various faiths recite a nondenominational blessing at middle-school graduations violated the Establishment clause, which in their view required strict government neutrality between religion and irreligion (lest atheist or agnostic graduates feel offended).
At this point my focus shifts to the policies pursued by elective bodies of government over the last several decades that suggest an outright disregard of Madison’s, Washington’s, and Tocqueville’s concern for the preservation of citizen character as a prerequisite of free government, sometimes at least nominally on behalf of (a distorted understanding of) “social justice,” but more commonly in pursuit of sheer lucre, i.e., enhanced tax revenues (enabling legislators to gain electoral support by spending those revenues on behalf of favored constituent groups). The first step in this direction was the establishment of state lotteries, designed to draw cash away from (illegal and untaxed) numbers games, with government rather than racketeers gaining the profits. To promote participation in the lotteries, governments started running advertisements encouraging people to bet in them, conveying the message that this was a far easier way of gaining riches than hard work and thrift. That the message’s effect was to demean the habits on which citizen independence, especially for poorer people, really depends (preying on popular ignorance of statistics by concealing the astronomical odds against winning huge sums) was hardly counteracted by the inclusion in each ad of a phone number for “problem gamblers” to call for help. (It was as if government advertised cigarette smoking, with a notice included on where to seek treatment for lung cancer.) But in order to win the electoral support of the cultured classes, relatively few of whom would be likely to buy many tickets, one of the lotteries instituted by Massachusetts was pledged to support “the arts.”
The logical next step in this direction was for states beyond Nevada (which had pioneered the practice decades earlier) to legalize casino gambling, especially in its most addictive form, slot machines. (See the brilliant 2012 book by MIT scholar Natasha Dow Schull, Addiction by Design, on how today’s electronic slot machines are scientifically designed to induce addiction, and on the particular vulnerability to this addiction among those who can least afford it.) Contrary to the promises made for the second state to legalize casinos, New Jersey, the depressed site of Atlantic City showed little or no economic or social gain.
Next came the legalization of marijuana in a growing number of states, again for the sake of enhanced government revenues, ignoring the established finding that smoking pot has a demonstrably harmful effect on the brains of younger people (who are no more deterred from obtaining it by legal age limitations than they are from smoking cigarettes or accessing beer), as well as the fact that today’s marijuana is several times as potent, hence potentially harmful, as the stuff smoked in the celebrated ‘60’s. But of ultimately greater harm may be the moral effects of government’s encouraging “getting high” as a way of life – and the status of marijuana as a gateway drug to stronger (and still universally illegal) drugs. (While Federal legislation still bans the sale of marijuana, the law can hardly be enforced when it’s authorized by state law. And Congress is likely to abolish the prohibition in the near future.)
The process of weakening civic morality in the name of social justice as well as tax revenue has been taken to a further extreme in states like Massachusetts by the practice of guaranteeing a certain quota of the (so far) limited number of licenses for legal cannabis dispensaries to residents of “minority” communities, as “compensation” for the devastation they are said to have suffered in consequence of the government’s “War on Drugs.” (Note that the “war” was directed far more at the sale of harder and more destructive drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, than at marijuana.) So rather than assisting members of minority neighborhoods to prosper through high-quality vocational schools or opportunity zones, government aims to “benefit” them by helping them enter the addictive-drug business (while making the drugs more easily accessible to customers from those neighborhoods). All this at a time when governments have been in hot pursuit of manufacturers of oxycodone, which has a legitimate medical use in alleviating pain, as recovering cancer patients can attest, despite its abuse by some unscrupulous dealers.
But the latest reductio ad absurdum along these lines is the legalization in New York City, in accordance with a newly enacted state law decriminalizing the possession of hypodermic needles and syringes for the purpose of injecting drugs, of the open use of such drugs in public places such as parks, with police under strict orders not to interfere. Going just a bit further is the growing call for local governments to establish “supervised injection sites” where users of heroin and other highly dangerous opiods can be assisted to inject themselves in a “safe” manner under the direction of medical professionals, so as to prevent fatal overdoses. While no such sites currently exist in this country, there is “momentum” to establish them in Massachusetts, as reported in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette (October 13).
Doubtless medical supervision will reduce the number of overdoses among those who would otherwise shoot up elsewhere. But does no one recognize that by establishing such sites, government will be removing what an advocate quoted in the Telegram story calls the “stigma” that deters potential users in the first place, thus vastly expanding their number (and hence increasing the number of deaths among those who can’t wait to get to a supervised site)? When government removes the stigma from addictive drugs, it again harms most those who are most vulnerable to having their sense of restraint undermined (say, teenagers). (As the New York Post editorialized, by denying intravenous drug users “a bottom to hit,” that is, jail, New York effectively deprived them of access to the mandatory treatment programs that sponsors of legalization claim to support.)
Having forgotten the lessons of the Founders, as well as the greatest classical and modern political philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau), our lawmakers fail to realize that in their pursuit of financial capital to redistribute, they undermine the more fundamental moral capital on which the preservation of free government, and in particular the welfare of the most vulnerable among us, depends. Contrary to leftist critics of the free-enterprise system, it isn’t private capitalists so much as our ostensible solons who would sacrifice the national well-being in the pursuit of easy profits – as well as votes from deluded members of poor communities that stand most in need of moral support so as to encourage the development and practice of the much-derided “bourgeois” virtues.
David Lewis Schaefer is professor of political science at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.