Alexander Hamilton. Macro ten dollar bill. Flickr/ Eli Cristman. Some rights reserved.As an aged Benjamin Franklin rose at the Philadelphia convention in 1787 to cast his vote for the new American Constitution, he also cast a warning that should be heeded by conservative devotees of the document’s ‘original intent’ and by other readers of American conservative websites and members of the Federalist Society and of business-corporation funded entities such as The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Political Action Committee, and American Legislative Exchange Council, the William F. Buckley Program at Yale, the Tea Party, and dozens more such conservative think-tank and ‘popular front’ organizations.
“I agree to this Constitution with all its faults,” Franklin said, adding that it “can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.… Much of the strength and efficiency of any government, in procuring and securing happiness to the people, depends… on the general opinion of the goodness of that government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its governors.”
The rest of Franklin’s remarks make clear just how worried he was. And he was far from alone. As I showed here in openDemocracy recently, the founders were reading Edward Gibbon’s account of how the ancient Roman republic had slipped into tyranny, degree by self-deluding degree, as its powerful men titillated and intimidated its citizens into becoming bread-and-circus mobs.
