President Donald Trump was elected in 2016 in part on a pledge to “drain the swamp,” to eliminate the corruption that many Americans have come to believe dominates our politics. Here, Hillary Clinton served as a perfect foil, a stand-in for all the politicians who have gone to Washington to do good and ended up instead doing very, very well.
Anxiety about political corruption is nothing new. In making his pitch, Trump was drawing upon themes in republican political theory that stretch back to ancient Greece and Rome, run through the Italian city-states of the Renaissance and the English commonwealth ideology of Cato’s Letters, and resonate through the founding era of our nation—the notion that a government that serves the public interest is very fragile and easily lost.
Many ancient thinkers believed that corruption was an endemic feature of any “unmixed” commonwealth. According to Cicero, each type of good government (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy) “has a path—a sheer and slippery one—to a kindred evil” (tyranny, oligarchy, or mob rule). The Roman historian Polybius expanded on this idea to develop a cycle through which he believed all governments pass: from monarchy to tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and finally mob rule, in a perpetual process of “growth, zenith, and decadence.” As a consequence, Machiavelli advised “prudent legislators” to refrain “from adopting any one of those forms” and to create instead a system that included the rule of the one, the few, and the many; “such a government would be stronger and more stable,” for the defects of each form would be countered by the virtues of the others. The republican revolution brought about by the Founders was to dispense with such mixed estates and found a government solely on the authority of the people at large.
How can corruption be arrested or reversed once it has begun to set in? Machiavelli analogized the corruption of a republic to the physical decay of the body due to age, and he suggested that the way to reverse civic degeneration was “to return to its original principles,” thereby “restor[ing] the prestige that it had at the outset.” In James Madison’s view, “no government is perhaps reducible to a sole principle of operation”; rather, “different and often heterogeneous principles mingle their influence in the administration.”
In a suggested preamble to the Constitution, Madison offered a comprehensive view of the principles upon which the United States was founded:
That government is instituted, and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right of acquiring and using property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
That the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government, whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purposes of its institution.
In this proposal, Madison made explicit the three principles that combine to form the spirit of the laws in the United States: nationalism, liberalism, and republicanism. The people of the United States—bound together in a single nation—are free because the government respects their rights and because they participate in the creation of the laws that govern them.
The political battles that ensued after ratification revolved around conflicts among these principles. Our nationalist ambitions clashed with our republican principles in a way that offered no clear resolution. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton had implemented an ingenious system of finance, but it also enabled political insiders to enrich themselves based on their foreknowledge of his system. Many members of Congress stood to gain financially if his plan was enacted, a conflict of interest that likely made the difference on key votes. Worst of all, Hamilton’s friends in the financial community formed a banking syndicate that tried to corner the domestic market for government debt—and their failure precipitated the first financial crisis of the new nation.
If all of this sounds familiar, it only goes to show that the ancients understood politics very well. Governments are to be instituted by individuals for the benefit of all—there is an inherent tension there that lends itself to corruption, in the days of Cicero, Madison, and Hamilton as in our own.
Purging government of corruption is probably impossible. But if we wish to deal with it in an effective manner, we need to return to the principles embodied in our founding creed—not in some vague, anodyne sense of gratitude. Instead, we have to reengage with them and relearn critical lessons that seem to have been forgotten. To start, we must appreciate that the Constitution did not settle the relationship among liberalism, republicanism, and nationalism for all time. Public policy in all forms necessarily advances or hinders each principle. Though we typically do not think of contemporary political questions in these foundational terms, Madison understood that this was always the case, and we should follow his example.
We must also remember that these values are often in tension with one another. Republicanism and liberalism come from different traditions of political thought. They overlap in some ways but conflict in others. And nationalism is different altogether; a strong nation need not be either republican or liberal. Thus, holding these values in their proper balance has to be a constant struggle. Neither Madison nor Hamilton “solved” the problem, for it is a paradox that admits of no final answer. But both are to be credited for trying to solve it, for in so doing they helped bring about a better understanding of how government functions in practice. We the people must endeavor to do likewise.
We should further appreciate that the republican quality of government has proven itself to be the most difficult to maintain over the generations. Our government vigorously pursues all sorts of national endeavors, and individual rights—both negative and positive—are more respected than ever before, but it feels as though our government has been hijacked from the people. It is easy to assume that our country is a republic because elections are free and open to all adult citizens, but this is a mistake. As Madison noted in the National Gazette, it is possible for a government to “support a real domination of the few, under an apparent liberty of the many. Such a government, wherever to be found, is an imposter.”
Madison appreciated that the policies that Hamilton was promoting were undermining the principle of popular sovereignty, even though they had no effect on the form of government. We must remain mindful of this and appreciate that policies that advance the national project or the liberal project must also remain consistent with the republican principles that are just as essential to the American creed.
Above all, we should remember that sovereignty ultimately belongs to the people, and if we wish the government to become more republican, we ourselves must rediscover that lost tradition. As Madison put it, “the force of public opinion” is what maintains government in practice. “If the nation were in favor of absolute monarchy, the public liberty would soon be surrendered by their representatives. If a republican form of government were preferred, how could the monarch resist the national will?” We get the government we deserve, in other words. So when the American people demand a return to republican propriety, the government will acquiesce, for “public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.”
This essay is adapted from contributing editor Jay Cost’s new book, The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy (Basic).
