On September 17, 1787, as the delegates to the Constitutional Convention filed out of the Pennsylvania State House, having just finished the most consequential document most of them would ever sign, a Philadelphia woman named Elizabeth Willing Powel stopped Benjamin Franklin and asked him a simple question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Powel was not a passive bystander asking a casual question. She was one of the sharper political minds in the city, a woman whose drawing room had hosted half the men who had spent the last four months arguing about how human beings might govern themselves without a king. She knew the importance of her question. Franklin’s answer has outlived nearly everything else said that summer: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Two hundred and fifty years later, as we mark the anniversary of the founding of the United States, Franklin’s answer still serves as an admonition. He did not say America had been given a republic, end of story. He said it had been given a republic conditionally—an inheritance that exists only as long as each generation does the work of keeping it.
Americans were given a democratic republic—not a democracy. America’s founders were suspicious of pure democracy, believing unchecked majority rule would be as oppressive as a monarchy. They had read about ancient Athens’ democracy and feared the mob rule that had led to systemic instability, unjust executions, and misguided military campaigns. Our founding fathers trusted the average American, while also harboring concerns about his ability (and willingness) to be sufficiently informed on political matters.
They were also anxious that minority rights be protected from the sometimes fickle will of the majority, which is part of what led to the Bill of Rights. After designing a series of checks and balances, they set up a system where citizens elect representatives to govern on their behalf. America’s founders considered a republic the ideal means of benefitting from popular government while avoiding its dangers.
This 250th anniversary is a moment to recognize the extraordinary achievement of the Founding generation, and of everyone since, who has carried the American experiment forward. It is impossible to know exactly what the world would look like without their vision and their bravery, but it is reasonable to believe that tyranny would have prevailed more often and in more places, that the medical and technological advances we take for granted would in many cases still be fantasies, and that the basic freedoms of religion and speech, where they existed at all, would be far more muted. Poverty would be more widespread. Human dignity would be less protected, and less often even named as something requiring protection. We owe a real debt to those who built and sustained this country, and an anniversary like this is the right occasion to acknowledge that debt with something more than a casual nod. Sincere gratitude is the proper place to start.
None of that gratitude requires us to pretend the story is uncomplicated. No society is perfect, and American history is marked by real and serious failures to live up to its own ideals—slavery, abortion, and unnecessary wars chief among them, but hardly alone. Those failures are part of our history and shouldn’t be glossed over. Man is fallen, and so every society he builds will also be fallen. But it is not unreasonable to say that America has done as much as any nation in history to build institutions capable of recognizing human weakness and correcting for it over time: a constitutional structure designed to be amended rather than worshipped, a civic culture capable, however slowly and at however great a cost, of expanding its own sense of who counts as fully American, regardless of race, faith, or economic status. That capacity for honest self-correction, more than any claim to have gotten everything right from the start, is a major part of what is worth keeping.
This is also where Franklin’s answer deserves ongoing reflection, because when the line is reduced to a slogan, it is the verb that tends to get lost. He did not describe a republic as a possession—something handed down once and then simply held onto, the way you might hold on to an heirloom. He described it as something kept, continuously, the way a household is kept or a promise is kept: not a finished inheritance, but an ongoing act. A republic survives not because a founding document declared that it will, but because enough citizens, generation after generation, take on the hard work that self-government actually requires—forming themselves in virtue, restraining their own appetites, treating fellow citizens with whom they sharply disagree as fellow citizens rather than enemies to be defeated. The Constitution structures that effort. It cannot remove the need for it. It assumes a people already capable of supplying it themselves.
Every age has its dangers, but it is not unreasonable to think the threats facing the United States today are unusual and unusually dangerous. America has shown itself remarkably capable, across two and a half centuries, of fighting off enemies from without. The graver threat today is from within. What defines a people is its shared ideals and its shared culture, and American culture is no longer much of a melting pot of peoples gathered around a common vision.
It looks more like a Tower of Babel: a great many voices talking past one another, building competing and often incompatible visions of family, society, and the human person, with less and less shared vocabulary even to argue well. That confusion of tongues is not a minor cultural complaint to be attributed to another generational grievance. It comes close to an existential threat, because a republic that has lost the capacity to deliberate in a common language has lost the capacity to govern itself at all. It is not just our comfortable way of life that is at stake in getting this right. Given how much of the world has looked to the American experiment for the protection of basic human freedoms, it is a great deal more than that.
At the heart of American culture for nearly the whole of its history was a deep religious spirit—not a single creed established as the law of the land, but a widely shared confidence that there was a moral order prior to politics, and that rights came from somewhere beyond the state and so could not simply be revoked by it. It is primarily a faith in the Christian God, who acts in history and in our personal lives, that shaped the birth of our country.
The Founders were not naive about how much the American project depended on that conviction; they said so plainly, in their own voices, and we would do well to take their plain statements seriously rather than filing them away as pious decoration on an otherwise secular project. Washington devoted a substantial portion of his Farewell Address to the necessity of virtue and religion. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” he wrote, “religion and morality are indispensable supports,” warning his countrymen that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” John Adams made the same case even more bluntly in a letter to the Massachusetts militia in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Neither man was arguing for an established church or a confessional state. Both were making a structural claim about what self-government, unique among forms of government, requires: citizens capable of governing themselves first, internally, before they’re asked to share in governing anyone else. Virtue is necessary for a self-governed people. That kind of internal discipline has not, as a matter of historical fact, sustained itself apart from religious formation. Subtract the formation derived from faith, and you do not get a neutral, smoothly functioning secular republic in its place. You get citizens with all the same disordered appetites and none of the internal checks, governed by a document that assumes those checks are already there.
After all, the Declaration of Independence claims, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—but there is truthfully nothing self-evident about them. These first principles are assumed, rather than defended, because Americans’ Christian beliefs undergirded them. They are “self-evident” when they flow naturally out of a Judeo-Christian worldview. Although Puritans, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Quakers, etc., including the few Catholics around at the time, disagreed about doctrinal content—they all shared assumptions about God, human nature, and morality that created a fairly consistent worldview (e.g., that there is a God; that rights stem from him and are therefore discovered, not created; that human nature is fixed; that life includes the right to make it out of the womb alive; that happiness means human flourishing, not the mere pursuit of pleasure, etc.).
As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America, “The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.” It is nearly impossible to make that same observation today.
If Babel is the right image for what is happening to American culture, it is worth remembering that Babel is not the only biblical story about many voices and confusion. At Pentecost, the apostles spoke to people gathered from a dozen different nations, all hearing in their own languages one true thing. The difference between the two stories is not the number of tongues involved. It is whether there is anything above the many voices capable of drawing them into a shared understanding without flattening their real differences into a forced sameness. An artificial unity—pretending we already agree about the things that matter most when we plainly do not—was never going to hold a country as large and as diverse as this one together. Pretending otherwise is its own quiet dishonesty.
What held America together, imperfectly but really, for most of its history, was a shared horizon above the disagreement: a sense, even among people who differed sharply on almost everything else, that some things were simply true, that the human person carried a dignity no vote could revoke, and that there was a judgment above every human judgment. Lose that horizon, and pluralism does not become peaceful. It becomes a Tower of Babel managed, for a while, by procedure and law enforcement—but not enough to hold a free people together for long.
Two hundred and fifty years on from the founding, and two hundred and thirty-nine years on from the afternoon when Elizabeth Powel asked her question outside the Pennsylvania State House, the work that Franklin described has not gotten any easier. It was never going to be finished by one generation on behalf of all the rest. Keeping a republic was never a task that could be outsourced to the Founders, or to the Constitution, or to anyone but the people actually living under it at any given moment.
That includes us, now, with whatever particular dangers belong to our own moment rather than theirs. What we need now is to remember that our republic is not secure. It requires a virtuous people formed by faith. And for this reason, there is a need to protect religious freedom and the place of churches in our culture. For without a religious foundation, our republic loses its foundation and will fall. There are signs that the foundation is already beginning to crack: fewer people going to church, declining vocations to religious life, public ridicule of the faith, and a hyper-focus on politics over family and community.
If the United States is to flourish for another 250 years, it is up to people of faith to reclaim their role in our society. Franklin’s answer was never only about 1787. Every generation of Americans is charged with the responsibility, including the one currently raising children, casting votes, and deciding what it actually believes about God and the human person: a republic, or something else quietly wearing the same name? For the moment, we have a republic. Whether we get to keep it is still—as it always was—up to the current generation of Americans.
(Editor’s note: This essay was posted originally on the “What We Need Now” site and appears here with kind permission of the author.)
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Right now Benjamin Franklin’s If you can keep it is facing the cuspis of our Republic’s greatest moment of danger, moreso than the Civil War.
Essayist Henricks accents the necessity of our current generation to live the values, political and moral, that are necessary.
Additionally, we’re at the spear’s point from a radical leftist movement overwhelming a major political party. Communism is suddenly alive and well and gaining ground from coast to coast. Having been defeated for holding their archaic leftist ideology, at a loss for a new ideology the iconoclastic Left has made a pact with the devil.
What’s at stake is everything we cherish in America. Religion, essentially Christianity will be persecuted. Simply because our beliefs countermand Communism. Our Vatican’s Left leaning members should realize this reality. Something I never conceived possible when a young soldier guarding the then Communist Czechoslovak frontier with W Germany.
P.S. Since most who comment here are the garden variety, life experience exhibitionists, I thought I might add my final sentence without too much ado.
The Democrats are flirting with socialism, not communism. They are not the same thing.
You sound like Trump: communists under every bed.
Yes, danger from the Left, but what about the Right? You say nothing about Trump and his power grab. Perhaps you think that he is “the annointed one” like the MAGA zombies? You inform us that you have a PhD, but are surprising engaged in hero worship of Trump and parrot his blather.
William. Recall some months past when I said I forgave you for your false accusations. You become hysterical, ranting, “How dare you say you forgive me!”. For a time I thought you changed for the better.
If I recall you were a member of the military. Apparently formed your views based on what you experience in the command. I can agree with criticism of what you referenced. Although you’re locked in a syndrome of Trump hatred, and accuse any perceived foe as a Trump worshipper. Whereas I have many times criticized his excessive ego and self worship.
As to the difference between Socialism and Communism, Socialism recognizes wages and ownership, while Communism aims toward collectivism. We find a form of collectivism in peoples’ ownership of transportation, food supply, housing in NYC under Mamdani. Also, a State imposition on religious belief regarding abortion and other moral issues.
While Mamdani and other candidates like him advance politically under the cloak of democratic socialism, most of their anti religious ideals, impositions of ideologies contrary to natural law are more in line with communist ideals rather than, let us say a Christian socialism that existed in Italy post WWII.
William. As regards my perspective on the Marxist flavor of Mamdanism, Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute points to traditional Marxist goals embedded in modern progressive platforms, such as government takeovers of housing and utilities, and targeted expropriation of private property through punitive wealth and unrealized capital taxes.
The Hoover institute is a highly respected public policy forum out of Stanford University.
Marxism is not the answer,but neither is late stage capitalism, where the billionaires get richer and richer, and the rest of us lose ground. Should Elon Musk have a greater net worth than over 100 million Americans? The capitalism and tax policies of the 1960’s were better for everyone. Unfortunately, the billionaires bought the Government and that government now favors them in the extreme.
BTW, what do you think of Trump making billions of Dollars off his cryptocurrency scam? Cryptocurrency is a scam. They get no money from me, but MAGA and others are losing their shirts on it. Perhaps they deserve to be scammed? Are they really that naive?
From William we read: “The Democrats are flirting with socialism, not communism. They are not the same thing.”
Elsewhere, we read about the “intelligentsia of the West”: “If they could have Communism without the brutalities of ruling that the Russian experience bred, they would have only marginal objections. Why should they object? What else is socialism but Communism with the claws retracted?” (ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers, Letter of August 5, 1954).
Thank you for your service. The new generation sees the fight in a different lens. We will take it from here.
Speak for yourelf! “We” will not take it your way.
I speak for myself and like minded kin. Join us or not as you wish.
Mr. Hendricks. You say, “Whether we get to keep it is still—as it always was—up to the current generation of Americans.”
An anomaly of major proportion: “The fathers were also anxious that MINORITY RIGHTS be protected from the sometimes fickle will of the majority, which is part of what led to the Bill of Rights.” Many of those fathers owned Black slaves. Today, many of us are politically aligned with an autocratical nightmare.
I would ask how many children today can sing the patrotic songs…
God bless America, Let Freedom ring, America the butiful, The Star-Spangled Banner, My Country ’Tis of Thee, Battle Hymn of the Republic.
How about just one?
Have a blessed 250th.
From Dr. Robert Malone:
“At its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, the United States lives under a government structurally unlike the one the founders built. The founders did not trust parchment to limit power. They trusted structure: rival sovereign states competing for citizens and capital, each able to check the center, the arrangement the Austrian economists describe as competition disciplining a monopoly. Between 1868 and 1913, that structure was taken apart.
The Fourteenth Amendment let the central government reach down into the internal law of the states.
The Seventeenth Amendment removed the states’ voice from the Senate by taking the power to appoint senators away from state legislatures and giving it directly to the voters, fundamentally changing the balance between the states and the federal government.
In 1869, Texas v. White effectively sealed the Union by foreclosing secession as a constitutional option.”
You can’t keep what has already slipped through your hands.
So, Lincoln should have let the Confederacy go? Perhaps that might have been good for the North, as we would not today have to deal with annoying, right wing red states.
” annoying”
Project much?
Yes. The red states with the worst literacy, lowest education and worst health. Agreed “annoying: isn’t the right word to describe the drag on the Union.
Some are turning that around. Meanwhile, Oregon—where I’ve lived since 1991 and has been dominated by Democrats for 40 years (look it up)—is always around #48-50 for public education, not to mention high rates of suicide, drug use, out of control homeless rates, etc. Oddly enough, that wasn’t the case prior to four decades of leftist control and policies.
Whatever we may say in criticism about the Leftist legacy in Oregon, it remains the only place where chickens, whose eggs we consume, caging them in individual prisons until no longer fit, are offered a form of clemency – sent to retirement farms for compassionate end of life care. Whereas elsewhere in other States their end is:
“Industrial Slaughter: Most spent hens are packed into transport crates and shipped to specialized processing plants. Because their muscles are tough and lean from age, their meat is not sold as standard chicken breasts or roasts. Instead, it is shredded or liquefied for lower-grade products like canned soups, chicken broths, pot pies, pet foods, and livestock feed” (Google AI).
Our older chickens’ end of life care was the crockpot.
🙂
My favorite episode of the “Portlandia” series was “Colin the Chicken.”
“The red states with the worst literacy, lowest education and worst health. ”
*********
Is that why everyone’s moving there today?
🙂
Historically, you’ve got a point, at least about literacy. But that’s becoming less the case.
“projection?” A term you use often. Armchair psychologist? One of my degrees is in Psychology, but I don’t presume to attribute psychological pathologies to people I don’t know. Are you compensating for some “shortcoming?”
Why yes, I do use the term project a lot-thank you for noticing. However, it would be far more gratifying if you used those notices to cease engaging in it. All denizens of bureaucracies are amateur psychologists, it’s how you survive, not alone prosper.
The quote from Dr. Malone had absolutely nothing to do with the prosecution of the Civil War, but you inserted it as an irrelevant non sequitur as a pretext to share your political antipathies with “red states” (a term that never made sense, because red has always been associated with the left) which also has nothing to do with the article or the post you were putatively responding to.
We all get it. You are an envious little man, always concerned with what other people have, because otherwise you would have to face the fact that your failure to attain wealth is due to your shortcomings in navigating the employment and investment landscape.
It’s incredibly annoying to read your vituperative rants other people’s money or politics, as if that is the source of your discomfort, not your own inadequacies. Ironically, many of the most wealthy people, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, Mark Zuckerberg are the ones who promote leftist policies, an irony you can’t seem to grasp.
This was the premise of a 2006 film;
https://artsfuse.org/53/confederate-america-what-if-the-south-had-won/
The South couldn’t have won. It had an overwhelming set of disadvantages. Population, too many railroad track gauges, less industry that could be devoted to munitions for starters. Any film that starts with the premise if the South won is beyond stupid.
Note to Pitchfork: “my failure to attain wealth…” do you think that I am a homeless man? How amusing. I don’t live under an overpass. Your assumptions of my net worth are incorrect.
unless another country came in and helped them. Don’t forget, Lincoln tried to get Robert E Lee to command the union army.
“…anything is possible in love and war…”
Have you ever watched the movie, “The Horse Soldiers” with John Wayne?
He broke laws to keep the country together. My college professor claimed it was over land more than slavery.
I want my flag back,
From the rage and the spin,
From the loud little tyrants,
Draped head to chin!
It was never your costume,
It was never your brand,
It was sewn from an idea,
Not stamped by your hand!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleWWgcfKkc
Swear allegiance to the flag
Whatever flag they offer
Never hint at what you really feel
Teach the children quietly
For some day sons and daughters
Will rise up and fight while we stood still
Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)
Mike+The Mechanics 1985
“It is for us the living… to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Franklin’s “If you can keep it” has forded history’s upheavals, but our current political nightmare, unfortunately, is not written on parchment.
If we don’t flush the evil political thinkers, we will surely have trashed Franklin’s premonition.
“Evil” political thinkers can look different according to one’s perspective.I don’t think we want to flush anyone. People have died to protect our freedom of speech & our voting & political preferences.
flush means vote them out, like the squad progressives
The soviet socialist states of California and New York, etc etc are in the now explicit process of euthanizing themselves.
Citizens who were young adults in the 1980s will recall the days when the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times were lauding California for its gigantic economy and balanced budget and seemingly supreme state college system, declaring CA could secede from the United States, and it would of itself have one of the top 10 economies in the world. Now, after 40 years of DSA malfeasance, California is in the toilet.
The DSA members will slowly realize, as “Comrade” Kathy Hochul of NYS is observing, that responsible people refuse to pay the tab for their “luxury beliefs” in the madhouse ideology of “Comrade” Marx, the “uber-man” of alternate reality. The productive citizens who are willing and able leave, and those who cannot or will not leave strive on until they die, but they cannot and will not be replaced, as the schools teach their children to hate work and gate their country. The wealth-generating people who supply economic energy will go somewhere else where cree enterprise and hard work are respected.
California boasts the largest economy of any U.S. state and the fourth largest globally, with an estimated GDP of $4.3 trillion. Representing nearly 14% of the entire U.S. economic output this is today in 2026. The GDP of CA is the fourth largest in the world. Hardly the toilet.
He never said anything about the economic output. So now everything is GNP?
“..Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.’
Robert F. Kennedy 1968
Carl, I can’t reply directly for whatever reason, so here I go…
Your statement seems to present a continuing THEM vs US polarization.
Your comments about Oregon’s 40 years of lack of “redness” contribute to significant political polarisation, especially coming from you. You may have missed the egotistical autocrat polariser without clothing…
Trump is out of control and our GOP congress remains largely silent. He said recently that HE would “stop funding BLUE states.” His apparent ignorance is evident because RED states are sprinkled with RED babies.
I fear that, because of Trump’s prolific lying and his fierce hatred, “Obama is a stupid son of a bitch” shows that he should be impeached. Sorry for the epithet. Your label for Dems seems to ignore Trump’s recent disparaging trash talking that they are Communists. Trump is not a unifier, rather a divider with a flawed and dangerous character.
We should all reflect on this dark day in our history, remembering that our military heroes who gave their lives to continue this experiment.
My error. His apparent ignorance is evident because BLUE states are sprinkled with RED babies.
I think you got it right the 1st time, Mr. Morgan.
🙂
If you compare fertility rates between Red and Blue states, Red comes out higher.
Of course, birth rates have fallen everywhere.
Babies don’t have a political alliance.
This is true Gerard.
That’s unfortunate given how many politicians want them murdered.
Gerard. I referred to low income BABIES since they are the most injured by Trump’s insanity.
I can point you to another of Trump’s wild injustices.
He cruelly cancelled the important, benevolent USAID program. As a result, the medical and food supplies are sitting rotting on the platforms of warehouses.
Sudanese babies are dying by the thousands while Trump prioritises putting his name over JFK’s name on the Kennedy Center. SCOTUS had it removed.
Trump says, “I am President, and I can do anything I want.”
You mean he has “a pen and phone”?
Prolific lying and fierce hatred. Maybe someone should look in the mirror before casting the first stone. The irony of your comments is astounding.
“Your statement seems to present a continuing THEM vs US polarization.”
I’ll be waiting for you to recycle this response, the next time William goes on a rant about “billionaires”.
So you like the current economy where Elon and Co. get wealthier and wealthier while most people lose ground? So you like leveraged buyouts which typically ruin companies and stock buybacks which do not help anyone but the CEO? Late stage capitalism is killing us. It needs to be reformed.
Bought any cryptocurrency from the Trump brothers? They are making a bundle while the average investor loses his shirt. Can you defend this scam? Well, it does make your hero even richer, so how bad can it be?
William. Your comments seem to have raised the ire of Trump’s sycophants.
Continued denial of Trump’s mental decline opens a flawed, dangerous rhetoric.
Thanks
Argumentum ad hominem again?
Look I know Gerard is in the lead for VI, but have no fear you’ll always be remembered among the greats.
“So you like the current economy where Elon and Co. get wealthier and wealthier while most people lose ground?”
Spare me. Elon never took a dime from me, politicians do every damn day. That never bothers you. I’m a lot more concerned about people like Fauci, Wray, Strzok and Page and the GS-14’s living in gated Northern Virginia communities.
It’s very obvious that you haven’t acquired what you think you should have and you want your envy to play dress up as righteous indignation, because you actually have no idea why people are falling behind (student loans that produce no marketable skills, failure to marry and stay married..)
I don’t have a private jet, but I don’t live under a bridge either. I did lose $3500 in the market today, but no big deal. Why are you concerned about my net worth?
Watching the stock market & following the changing value of your portfolio every day can drive you nuts.
Have you considered how high the DJI has climbed recently? The market’s probably overdue for a correction, but overall things have gone well during the Trump admin. We’ll see if that continues.
You are correct. We are due for a correction. AI is a bubble. There is much irrational exuberance. There is a good deal of dishonesty and scamming. Look at cryptocurrency. No intrinsic value. It operated on the greater fool theory. Some people have already lost a bundle.
No what the cease fire with Iran is over, look for a down market, at least for a while.
It’s too late to buy, but it might be wise to sell before the correction.
I read a book about Hetty Green who was the richest woman of her era. She bought when the market was down and held on to it.
Wall Street seems too much like Las Vegas to me but some people understand when to buy and sell.
MrsC. Your mention of the stock market being used as a barometer for the affordability nightmare. NO!
The most affected are the massive low-income and poverty-stricken who hold NO stocks! Moreover, the Dow is controlled by wealthy companies and billionaires.
The Census Bureau says 35.9 million people in poverty in 2025.
http://www.census.gov
Pray for and fight for our families who may go hungry.