First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Tim Wu, June 2024

Abstract: On or about the Ides of every month except March, the Adams Institute will send two letters to prominent Americans whose words or actions are relevant to the proposed amendment, and whose contributions to the idea of democratic-republican government merit all of our attention. These letters will also carbon-copy other distinguished individuals who were somehow involved in the recipient’s words or deeds, or in our analysis thereof.

Our initial letters, along with correspondence explaining to copied individuals why they were copied, will be published as an open diary of correspondence in the hopes of inspiring discussion of our proposed amendment and emulation of the recipients’ good examples. PDF files featuring scans of all this original correspondence will be available for download, and the substantive content of each primary letter will be pasted in blog-post format.

June 13, 2024

Dear Mr. Wu:

You’ve made and will surely continue to make essential contributions to a discussion in which most of mankind has never had any real voice: By what form of regime shall we be governed? The debate goes back at least twenty-five centuries, to an argument among three Persian nobles over whether they would be ruled as a monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy,[1] and if John Adams is to be believed, political science has not advanced much since.[2]

We write you now to endorse two of your conclusions of importance to this discussion, while taking the liberty to explicitly link them to a constitutional anthropology that accounts for political economy. We will follow up in a future letter to consider whether our policy concept could nullify the adverse consequences of industry consolidation and monopolization, a topic on which you are a recognized expert and which folds into the subject matter of this letter.

In your op-ed What really saved the republic from Trump? [3] you made two key points that should really be elevated to the mainstream of American public discourse:

First, you suggested that the Constitution’s core feature of checks and balances may be powerless to restrain authoritarianism; and

Second, you concluded, as Madison, that in a republic there is really no institutional fix for an absence of “civic virtue.”

The danger to our republic, and the importance of those ideas, has only grown since you wrote that piece. Not since the Civil War have Americans had greater cause to question the future of their experiment in republican government. On the one hand, we have disaffected conservatives openly advocating the dictatorship of Donald Trump. On the other, we have Donald Trump himself overtly affirming his dictatorial ambitions although, no doubt inspired by the examples of Cincinnatus and Washington, he promises to limit his term to one day.

Ironic though that may seem to your typical American that it would be the conservative party to draw first blood against the Constitution – after all hasn’t the Republican Party has always been the party of Lincoln and the Founding Fathers and the Constitution? – it wouldn’t surprise a Roman: It was the conservative faction under Sulla that first seized power by force in the Roman Republic. Nor should it even surprise us today as it was the conservative faction, the slaveholding plutocracy preferring the preservation of its wealth over the Union, that first repudiated our Constitution and plunged the nation into civil war.

Yet, though his name looms large in these discussions, our present Constitutional crisis is, but really isn’t, about Donald Trump. His historical significance lies mainly in being the first politician to effectively exploit the middling insecurity and pessimism brought on by fifty years of wealth concentration.[4] This economic disease has long been worsening, but its symptoms have only lately become acute. Had Trump never been born, we’d be speaking about some other would-be proto-Sulla figure, probably one far younger and more dangerous.

Each of your points about the impotence of separation of powers and the importance of civic virtue fit into an anthropology of political thought that we frequently like to express through this simple but effective wheel-brake-motor-gearbox metaphorical device:

Classical thinkers and our Founding Fathers believed that political revolution ultimately resolves into a cycle, or a wheel.[5]

Following ancient theories and examples, the Constitution was conceived as a brake to arrest that wheel.[6]

But despite that clever political architecture, the diffusion and re-concentration of wealth is the motor which rotates that wheel.[7]

Popular government is stable and responsible, steering between populism and plutocracy, only when wealth is diffused in a broad middle class.[8]

Rome’s path to Caesar and America’s rising authoritarianism, both caused by middling insecurity, prove that the motor is stronger than the brake.[9]

No political society has ever developed a corrective – a transmission or a gearbox – to serenely reverse extreme wealth concentration.[10]

This metaphor supports both of your key arguments. Its anthropology confirms that the final two deliverables of ancient Greek political thought – united in Polybius’s analysis of Rome’s constitution – are the idea of the wheel (Anacyclosis) and the brake (the tripartite mixed constitution). This brake, introduced by Lycurgus into Sparta’s constitution and incorporated by James Madison and John Adams[11] into America’s constitutions, is as you note the centerpiece of American civics education. But as you also point out in not so many words, and as history shows, the brake is powerless to arrest the wheel.

As thinkers like James Harrington and Noah Webster realized with increasing clarity, the motor which turns the wheel is the diffusion and reconcentration of wealth. And as other thinkers like Euripides, Aristotle, and Alexis de Tocqueville saw, stable and authentic popular government exists only on the point on the wealth distribution continuum where wealth is broadly diffused in the upright and independent middle classes. Their observations, witnessing first-hand the stabilizing influence of such middle classes,[12] can be summarized as follows:

Where the middle class prevails, the people are too busy for demagogues, too optimistic for faction, too traditional for radical ideas, too independent for patronage, and too moderate for extremism.

A real middle class, in other words, would never tolerate a Sulla or a Donald Trump. And it is indeed impossible to picture the past generations who voted for Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy countenancing the vulgarity and bombast of Donald Trump or the future generations of demagogues that are sure to follow, conservative or progressive. All of which confirms your second point that republics do not long survive without civic virtue.

While we agree with this too, we suggest that the term middling virtues is more precise than civic virtue. Describing the qualities essential for self-government as “civic virtue,” without linking those virtues to economic situation supports the implication that a deficit of virtue is attributable chiefly to moral failure or cultural inferiority. Those favoring this implication, often seeking refuge in their nostalgia for a homogenous Western Civilization, cannot help but attribute “civic virtue” to their cultural or religious heritage, which in turn cannot avoid creating the most invidious distinctions and animosities within such a diverse nation as the United States. In truth – and the point at which we will start our next letter to you wherein we will make our ask of you – the modesty, industry, honesty, loyalty, cooperation, and economic independence essential to republican government, are for reasons understood since Classical Antiquity derivative of moderate fortunes, where everyone has a decent stake in the commonwealth, and none too great, whoever their gods may be.

Sincerely,

Tim Ferguson

[1] See the debate among Otanes (speaking for democracy), Megabyzus (advocating aristocracy), and Xerxes (winning the argument in favor of monarchy), as reported in Herodotus, Histories, III. 80-82.

[2] See a letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 9 July 1813: “While all other Sciences have advanced, that of Government is at a Stand; little better understood; little better practiced now than 3 or 4 thousand years ago. What is the Reason? I say Parties and Factions will not Suffer, or permit Improvements to be made.”

[3] In The New York Times, December 10, 2020.

[4] See Price, Carter C. and Kathryn A. Edwards, Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020. The abstract states: “From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.”

[5] (i.e. Anacyclosis (ἀνακύκλωσις), the idea that the natural and probable sequence of political evolution is tribal chiefdom, monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy or mob-rule) (For the anthropology see, e.g., Pindar, 2^nd Pythian Ode, Herodotus (III. 80), Thucydides (VIII. 97), Plato (Rep. VIII) (Laws, III. 676 A), Aristotle (Nic. Eth. 8.10; Pol. 1286b), Polybius (Hist. Bk. VI), and possibly Panaetius, Dicaercus, Isocrates, Protagoras, and Hecateus). See also Dionysius, (Rom. Ant. VII, 54-56) Cicero, De Re Publica, I, XXIX, II, XXV), Sextus Pomponius, Justinian’s Digest, I Bk. I, Tit. 2., 2. 1-11), Machiavelli Discourses on Livy, Ch. I. Bk. II. See also John Adams, An Essay on Man’s Lust for Power, All Men would be Tyrants if they could, with the Author’s Comment in 1807 (describing Polybius’ sequence as “the Creed of my whole Life. See also Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 9, alluding to Anacyclosis. See also David A. Teegarden, Death to Tyrants!: Ancient Greek Democracy and the Struggle against Tyranny, Princeton University Press, 2014. Figure A1 therein shows that ancient Greek city-state regimes peaked accordingly.

[6] The idea is attributed to the legendary Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus. For the anthropology, see, e.g. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 8.97.2 Plato, Laws, 681d; Laws, 712d; Menexus, 238b-d, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, VII.55, Polybius, Histories, VI.10-18, and Servius the Grammarian, Commentary on the Aeneid of Vergil, 4.682. See also Charles I, His Majesties Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Both Houses of Parliament, 1642, Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI, Chapter VI, John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Book II, Chapters XII-XIII James Madison, Federalist Nos. 47, 48, and 51, and Articles I, II, and III of the United States Constitution.

[7] See James Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana, Part I, John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776 and Defence of the Constitutions, Vol. III, Letter III (Padoua), Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, and Misc. Remarks on Divisions of Property.

[8] See Euripides, Suppliants, Line 238 et seq., Plato, Laws 679b, Aristotle, Pol., 1291b, 1295b, and Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. See James Madison, Federalist No. 10: “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” See also Aristotle, Pol., 1291b, 1295b. See also Tocqueville, Id.

[9] Note that the Roman Republic and the United States are history’s only two superpower republics, making Rome the single best benchmark for comparative historical analysis. On how extreme wealth concentration destroyed the Roman republic, see Appian, The Civil Wars, I.1, Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline, 10, 33. I; 37.3, 38, 53, The Jugurthine War, 4, Livy, History of Rome, Preface, Tacitus, Annals, 3.27, Florus, Epitome, I, XLVII, Lucan, Pharsalia, 1.63. Marcus Philippus said in 104BC that out of perhaps 400,000 citizens, only around 2,000 held any significant wealth.

[10] See Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton 2018. Shows that structural inequality has only been reduced by the shocks of plague, revolution, mass-mobilization warfare, or state collapse.

[11] For John Adams’s influence on the Constitution through his 1787 treatise Defence of the Constitutions, see Benjamin Rush to John Brown Cutting, 18 May 1787: “The principles & facts contained in this excellent publication have already had an influence in our Country, & from thier arriving at the time of the setting of our fæderal convention, it is expected they will be very useful in establishing such a fæderal Goverment as Mr Adams has proved to be most safe—most free, and most durable in all countries.” and Benjamin Rush to Richard Price, 2 June 1787: “Mr. Adams’s book has diffused such excellent principles among us, that there is little doubt of our adopting a vigorous and compounded federal legislature.” See also John Adams’s tripartite 1780 Massachusetts state constitution, which predates the Constitution of 1787, and which is still in effect.

[12] See Aristotle, Pol., 1291b, 1295b, and Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. See also Euripides, Suppliants, Line 238 et seq.: “There are three ranks of citizens; the rich, a useless set, that ever crave for more; the poor and destitute, fearful folk, that cherish envy more than is right, and shoot out grievous stings against the men who have anything, beguiled as they are by the eloquence of vicious leaders; while the class that is midmost of the three preserves cities, observing such order as the state ordains,” and Plato, Laws 679b.

Property monopolized, or in the Possession of a Few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality – this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.

John Adams, 1765