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At 94, the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield has given the semiquincentennial a bracing interpretation. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, he describes an America that is both the world’s oldest continuous democracy and a perpetually young nation — one that, in his Machiavellian phrase, must be “continually refreshed” like all regimes. The mechanism is the ballot: We are, he says, a country that renews itself every four years. The young are good, he adds, “because they’re revolutionary.”
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It is a beautiful account, and a hopeful one for a birthday. But it leaves out the part of the inheritance that elections cannot touch — and that part is where our trouble lies.
Mansfield himself seems to recognize as much, which is what makes the interview so revealing. Alongside the engine of renewal, he runs a second that pulls against it. He notes that Madison wanted the Constitution to become “venerable,” and he calls that wish “very un-Machiavellian.” He speaks of the founders as a “pantheon” and insists the Constitution “deserves to be venerated, not just accepted.” Renewal says: tear up and begin again. Veneration says: receive, keep, and hand on. These are not the same disposition; they may not even be friends.
Mansfield reconciles them with Lincoln’s image of the Declaration as an apple of gold in a frame of silver — revolutionary fervor as the precondition of prudential veneration. It is the right instinct. But the image names a result, not a cause. The harder question is how veneration gets produced, generation after generation. And the answer is not “every four years.”
His own account of the founding hints at the answer. The young men who made the revolution — Jefferson at 33, Madison and Hamilton not much older — were, Mansfield observes, “under the watch and supervision of Franklin and Washington.” The revolutionary generation did not trust youth alone to renew the country; it paired youthful energy with elders who had something to hand down. “We kept our young under control,” he says, “and they didn’t go for destructive behavior.”
That is not a story about renewal. It is a story about transmission — about the old forming the young, even in the act of revolution.
Here is what an election cannot do. Veneration is not a vote; it is a learned attachment, and like everything learned, it must be taught — not as information but as formation. A citizen does not come to revere a constitution by reading it once. He comes to revere it by being raised inside institutions that treat it as authoritative and that model the keeping of it. The capacity Mansfield admires — the willingness to find something venerable — is the slow work of families, congregations, schools, scout troops, communities, and the local associations Tocqueville thought were the real schools of American liberty. They transmit an inheritance by treating it as something received rather than invented, and therefore binding.
This is the oldest idea in my own Jewish tradition, where the command is not merely to remember but to teach diligently to your children, l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation. Veneration is a transmission problem before it is a political one. What people venerate is what has been handed down and kept.
And transmission is exactly what is failing. The associations that once did the handing-down have thinned — fewer congregations, fewer civic clubs, fewer of the shared places where Americans of different ages once brushed against one another and against a common past. Mansfield’s longtime Harvard colleague Robert Putnam measured the collapse a generation ago in Bowling Alone; it has only deepened since. We have not lost the election. We have lost much of what made the thing elections renew feel worth renewing.
This is why Mansfield’s optimism, though I share his affection for the founding, strikes me as a diagnosis of the wrong ailment. He describes a healthy circulatory system: a regime that pumps fresh blood on schedule. But the disease of the present is not in the circulation. It is in the tissue the circulation is meant to nourish: the local, intergenerational membership through which an inheritance is absorbed. You can refresh the presidency every four years and still produce citizens for whom the Constitution is merely functional, a set of rules in force, rather than venerable, a possession received and held in trust.
Mansfield himself supplies the qualification. “Renewing is never perfect,” he says. Just so. Renewal restocks the office; it cannot manufacture the reverence that makes the office worth holding. A nation can hold a flawless election and still forget how to be a people.
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None of this is cause for gloom or accepting a fait accompli; it is cause for clarity about what to repair. The decline is not a fate. Putnam himself, in The Upswing, argues that an earlier America let its civic life collapse and then rebuilt it over the decades that followed — proof that transmission, once broken, can be relearned. The semiquincentennial tempts us toward two errors: the progressive’s impatience to start over, and the conservative’s confidence that the inheritance will keep transmitting itself. Mansfield is too wise for the first. But even he underrates how much deliberate labor the second requires. Veneration does not renew itself. It is the most fragile thing free people own, because it lives only in the institutions that bother to pass it on.
At 250, our republic survives because it renews its offices. It will endure only if it also renews its people. Our task is not to refresh the regime — we are very good at that — but to rebuild the unglamorous local institutions that carry an inheritance across generations and teach a people why the regime is worth refreshing at all.
