5 days ago
- General
- Wall Street Journal
Who's in Charge of Keeping a Good Republic?
In Mark Helprin's 'A Good Republic Is Hard to Keep' (op-ed, May 27), readers are reminded of what we got out of a secretive convention held behind closed doors in Philadelphia in 1787 and a portion of the lofty ideals expressed in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. But Mr. Helprin leaves out an essential component of the Lockean social contract articulated therein: To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men. Unless government upholds its end of the bargain, all of the talk about the inviolability of the inherent, unalienable, natural rights of the individual is, to paraphrase Frederick Douglass, a hypocrisy that spits in the face of our sacred ideals.
If the ongoing struggle for individual freedom teaches us anything, it is that the security of our rights depends on ourselves. When one considers what we hold self-evident—that government doesn't possess the power to grant or deny our inherent and unalienable natural rights—we find that all we got from Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues was a federal government that has rarely upheld the terms of our social contract and poses the greatest threat to our freedom and prosperity. The 'good republic' of Mr. Helprin's dreams is exactly that: an aspirational republic the Founders challenged us to establish.
