Keeping a Republic: A 250th Birthday Meditation

As we mark the national semiquincentennial on July 4, we might well reflect on Benjamin Franklin’s answer to Elizabeth Willing Powel, when the elderly sage left the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the Philadelphia matron demanded, “Well, Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a republic, or a monarchy?” To which Franklin famously responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.” That brief riposte underscores a basic fact about these United States: that we are a democratic experiment in republican self-governance, the testing of which is ongoing. And within that fact is embedded a truth that is implied, if not explicitly stated, by the Declaration of Independence: It takes a critical mass of people, living certain virtues, to keep the experiment on track—to make the political machinery of a democratic republic facilitate individual human flourishing and social solidarity.