Ten years ago, I volunteered to create a small garden in one of our neighborhood’s public parks. In hindsight, I made one bad assumption and one strategic mistake. Both seem like cautionary tales when I think about our current politics and governance.
The garden was to be carved out of a weedy patch of grass, sloping from the street down to the waterfront of the lake. Unlike my garden at home, where I am willing to spend hours tending and trimming, watering and weeding, I knew this garden would have to withstand a little neglect. Sure, I intended to care for it, but even at the time, I knew realistically I would not be able to pamper it. This garden needed to be resilient.
With the blessing of the neighborhood association, I killed a big patch of grass and weeds, excavated the plot, amended the soil with yards of compost, and laid the flagstone paths. I researched suitable perennials—plants that crowd out weeds, but not each other; plants that tolerate a little drought; plants that don’t need frequent trimming or dead-heading; plants that grow in the local conditions.
For the first several years, while the plants got themselves established, I dutifully hauled buckets of lake water up to the garden. I spent early morning hours weeding out quack grass, chickweed, and dandelions. Neighbors walking their dogs, or taking their morning run, would stop and thank me for my efforts and tell me how much they liked the garden. By year three, the garden looked great, if I do say so myself. “Now,” I thought, “I can let up a bit on the maintenance.” That was my bad assumption.
The dandelions, chickweed, and quack grass were aggressive. They were just as adapted to the environment as the perennials I had painstakingly selected. In fact, they were the “natural” state of things—not some artificial construct created by me. It took work to keep them at bay. They’d entwine their threadlike roots amongst the roots of the perennials, and I’d mercilessly track them to their source and yank them out. It was never-ending. I had assumed my robust construct needed less maintenance than it actually required.
I hung in there for a few more years, but eventually I quit taking care of the garden. I was tired. “Someone else will do it,” I thought. But no one stepped up. That was my strategic mistake.
Never once in all the previous years had I asked for help when people stopped to chat while I weeded and watered. I didn’t recruit successors. I didn’t coach others on what to weed and what to leave. This spring, someone in a spring fever fueled flurry of gardening passion evidently worked for hours in an attempt to reclaim the garden. It looked pretty good for a couple weeks. But the mystery gardener has not returned, and because the weeds have infiltrated the perennials like a metastasized cancer, I’m not sure the patient can be saved without a radical wholesale uprooting.
Which brings me to our current politics and governance. From my vantage point, I see a lot of old politicians, and I see a lot of vacancies and uncontested races on the ballots. This is not universally true, but I see evidence of it all the way from the Presidency to the local village board. The old politicians—like this old gardener—are past their ability to effectively do the work. And potential new candidates are not stepping forward, perhaps in part because the old-timers are making my strategic mistake, which is that they haven’t made succession a priority. I’m not talking about machine politics, where the incumbents handpick their successors. I mean something more fundamental—an enthusiasm for civics, and a belief in and understanding of the value of this project of self-governance.
Failure to coach successors—the strategic mistake—concerns me. But I fear there are more serious consequences for the bad assumption: the assumption that our constitutional garden can withstand limitless neglect.
Our American system of constitutional self-government is an aberration. It was hacked out of a thicket of literal and figurative wilderness. It was built using a seed catalogue of ideas compiled during the European Enlightenment, but make no mistake: it is not a natural phenomenon. The founding gardeners designed the system to be robust and resilient, but they made some assumptions, too.
Even as James Madison acknowledged that the most enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,1 he assumed that most of the time the citizens would elect representatives who possessed the most wisdom.2 Even as he built in checks and balances to counter the natural ambitions in human nature,3 he admitted that a republican form of government presupposes that the better qualities in human nature outweigh the baser qualities4.
John Adams was more succinct: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious (i.e., virtuous) people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”5
The entire Constitutional framework rests on the assumption that, on the whole, everyone, from the local voter to the President, will understand and believe in the original design, and act in its best interest. In a remarkable testimony to that design, we can still recognize it 234 years later. It has withstood neglect and outright assault (e.g., the explosion of the administrative state, which circumvents representative democracy; the dereliction of duty in Congress, which overburdens the judicial branch and results in deference to the executive branch; the layered accumulation of judicial decisions, which sometimes leads us into undesired cul-de-sacs; the candidates who are more interested in performing than governing).
But even though we can recognize the original design, we feel our political processes and our governance struggling. Let me use a different analogy. Think of our constitutional government as an internal combustion engine designed to run on gasoline. We keep filling the tank with diesel, and then we wonder why it’s seizing up.
In 1787, after the members of the Constitutional Convention had hammered out their proposed Constitution, they had to sell it to the public in order for it to be ratified. The 85 letters published in the New York newspapers, now known as The Federalist Papers, explained and defended the Constitution to the public. In the opening letter, Alexander Hamilton lays out the big question:
It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.
Indeed.
If we fail to train new gardeners, and if we continue to neglect the garden, consequences will accumulate. We don’t want to reach the point where the only alternative seems to be a radical wholesale uprooting. That’s called a revolution. And you can never be sure what will spring up in the aftermath of a revolution. Odds are in favor of the weeds.
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1James Madison, Federalist 10, 22 November 1787
2James Madison, Federalist 57, 19 February 1788
3James Madison, Federalist 51, 8 February 1788
4James Madison, Federalist 55, 15 February 1788
5John Adams to Massachusetts Militia, 11 October 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102.
