American Foundation

The first Gulf War was the first full-scale conflict of my life. Being in high school at the time, I absorbed the events and impressions in ways that would hone my observations and thinking in the ensuing decades. Taking a class in journalism during the leadup and then execution of that “100-hour war” was a prescient enabler. Some classes were spent simply reading the newspapers’ coverage or watching CNN, the closest at the time to today’s nonstop media cycles.

War had been a continual theme in school. War defines pivotal moments throughout history. “Living” through one, if only in a classroom and by flying an American flag and yellow ribbon on our family’s house, had me reflecting not only on that first Gulf War, but all wars past, in America particularly, plus all the prominent world wars I had learned of to date.

I thought of the Vietnam War, not so much in an academic sense, but that it was the last war before I was born, and my father served in it. We lost Vietnam, and so Gulf War I, in my high school teenager mind, was going to be America’s redemption, to get back on the track of “winning”.

The two world wars, those were the big ones. WWI was still within living memory, and veterans from the second were numerous and remained a cultural and political force. Appreciable for the time, 1945 was still less than a half century into the history books, yet it was the defining year that forged the world which we arguably live in today.

The American Civil War was hallmarked, by my time in the early 1990s, for not being in living memory anymore, short about 30 years. There is footage from the 1940s of a few extremely old Civil War veterans, hauntingly eerie to me, like film had captured ghosts on camera. I carry with me a fascination, perhaps morbid, of old film and pictures that recorded famous people or events, or even the less so, like the earliest photographs from the 1840s. Or historical photographic trivia that reaches as far back as the technology allows, like that John Quincy Adams was the first president photographed, as an old man, but captured nonetheless.

Adams, for whom we have an actual image of the living man, was born in 1761, nine years before the Declaration of Independence was written. Ben Franklin, my personal favorite of the Founding Fathers, was still alive. Franklin’s life stretched back to the early 1700s, when Isaac Newton was still alive, as an old man.

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We could keep recalling the links of history, but the American Revolution era is an ideal period to slow our momentum into, especially on this 250th anniversary of July 4th, 1776. A quarter of a millennium is not insignificant for anything in human history, and this time is worth the pause, reflections, and celebrations that are happening.

I will not talk about what America is about, what it means, famous people who “defined America”, or the essence of America’s experiment in “democracy”. And I won’t talk about current topics or political viewpoints, except for one that is coming up. For me, when I think of a nation or, specifically, the ideal of a nation that has existed for 250 years, I look at it through the context of history. And when I think of history and time that can be measured in ages, I think of Foundation, specifically the story world created by Isaac Asimov.

Foundation shaped my views on epochs of human history and has caused me to ponder how much of humanity’s course and outright destiny is inevitable. When we consider the centuries, no millennia, of the rise and fall of civilizations, how much of all of those events could have been predictable if one had a particular method to rationalize and extrapolate the pending outcomes? I am not talking about micro events – a person’s life, a single event, a fluke accident – but the ebb and flow of groups of millions, now billions, of people involved in their normal lives making aggregate impacts from their combined activities over each’s life. Could a pending dark age be estimated within a few centuries, or the rise of the next powerful empire within the next 1,000 years?

The entire premise of Foundation is not only being able to predict history’s epochs, but then being able to do something to alter that pending history. Look up psychohistory to understand the mechanism Asimov imagined.

Which brings me back to America. I can’t help but think of James Madison (and his contributors) being a Hari Seldon-like figure in the authoring of the United States’ Constitution. Though the 250th anniversary celebrations are for the Declaration of Independence, it has been the U.S. Constitution, authored over a decade later, that had finally allowed those 1776 ideals to be manifested into a form of workable government. It was recognized then as an experiment in self government, an experiment that has been running for almost as long as the nation itself. Madison and his contemporaries knew well, far better than most of us, the strengths and weaknesses of all their contemporary and historical forms of government, and created a novel form that attempted to be self-sustaining in ways not broached yet.

America’s Founders knew that democracy was among the least desirable forms of government. It’s why I cringe every time someone says we live in a democracy, and why I put it in quotes above. If you don’t believe me, read The Federalist Papers, which go into exhaustive details on all the problems with a true democratic form of government, from the experiments in ancient Greece to the then contemporary attempts at democratic governance in Europe. It’s not hard to speculate on what Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay would have thought about a democracy experiment in a nation of over 300 million citizens.

The crux of the U.S. Constitution was (and is) the separation of powers into three co-equal branches, to oversee federal, republican representation. This was a brilliant adjustment to the classic triumvirate, which always leads to two defeating the weakest of the three. In Madison’s system, the U.S. is “ruled” by three branches, but each branch has its own limits, restrictions, and checks upon the other two. The beauty of this system is the recognition of the natural tendencies of those in power to seek more, and pitted each of the three “co-equal” rulers in what has been, thus far, an eternal struggle with the other two, each with its own unique Constitutional enablements yet along with deliberate weaknesses which, by design, should prevent any one branch from overbearing the other two.

Scholars have written on this effectiveness among the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial, what the practical power structure really has been, and its flaws. My point here is not to wade into those intellectual swamps. The bottom line is that Madison’s experiment has continued, more or less, for nearly a quarter of a millennium, and so far continues to function.

If the U.S. Constitution is America’s Asimov-Foundation, keeping the ideals of the Declaration of Independence alive, then communism is America’s Mule. If you don’t know this reference, look up The Mule and Foundation. In brief, The Mule was a variable not accounted for in Foundation when Hari Seldon devised his grand plan to mitigate the galaxy’s pending dark age. The impact of The Mule completely derailed Seldon’s original projections. In somewhat similar kind, James Madison could not have any answer in his Constitution to repel the tendencies of communist infiltration. Communism, as it is known today, simply did not exist in the 18th century.

Communism was not vanquished when the Soviet Union collapsed, a point I knew back in the early 1990s. China remained, most prominently. And its acolytes persisted, notably in America’s academia, but then predictably spread into pockets of governance throughout America since. Communism always infers or promises utopia of equality, then instead delivers results anathema to the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Not Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, but “Death, Tyranny, and the Pursuit of Evil” as President Trump stated in his July 3rd address at Mount Rushmore.

The rejection of communism does not automatically make one a Laissez-faire capitalist. I like to look towards the ideals of social responsibility professed by Ben Franklin. But the Declaration of Independence itself, while it predated Marx by over 70 years, still offers some of the best retorts, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” As we celebrate the 250th year of those words, we may see, in shorter time than we may appreciate, if these words will help not only to repel but to push back and finally defeat a core source of challenge to American idealism for at least the past century.