James Madison and Angelo Codevilla

"From Virtuous Republic to Despotic Force via Incompetent Oligarchy"

The late, great Angelo Codevilla, whose memorial Mass was celebrated in Washington, D.C., yesterday, had planned to give the Constitution Day lecture at my college this past September. Health conditions caused him to postpone the lecture to November. In the intervening months our nation lost perhaps the most acute critic of our decaying regime.

The working title of the lecture that Codevilla planned to give was, I am informed, “From Virtuous Republic to Despotic Force via Incompetent Oligarchy.” The title is not surprising to anyone who followed Codevilla’s regime-analysis over the past two decades; nor is its boldness in frankly stating the uncomfortable truth as he saw it.

I don’t pretend to know what, exactly, he was planning to say, or how he was planning to press his argument. But I was reminded of it recently when I read this short essay from James Madison: “Spirit of Government,” from the National Gazette, February 18th, 1792.

Madison proposes a threefold classification of regimes:

May not governments be properly divided, according to their predominant spirit and principles into three species of which the following are examples?

First. A government operating by a permanent military force, which at once maintains the government, and is maintained by it; which is at once the cause of burdens on the people, and of submission in the people to their burdens. Such have been the governments under which human nature has groaned through every age. Such are the governments which still oppress it in almost every country of Europe, the quarter of the globe which calls itself the pattern of civilization, and the pride of humanity.

Secondly. A government operating by corrupt influence; substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty; converting its pecuniary dispensations into bounties to favorites, or bribes to opponents; accommodating its measures to the avidity of a part of the nation instead of the benefit of the whole: in a word, enlisting an army of interested partizans, whose tongues, whose pens, whose intrigues, and whose active combinations, by supplying the terror of the sword, may support a real domination of the few, under an apparent liberty of the many. Such a government, wherever to be found, is an imposter. It is happy for the new world that it is not on the west side of the Atlantic. It will be both happy and honorable for the United States, if they never descend to mimic the costly pageantry of its form, nor betray themselves into the venal spirit of its administration.

Thirdly. A government, deriving its energy from the will of the society, and operating by the reason of its measures, on the understanding and interest of the society. Such is the government for which philosophy has been searching, and humanity been sighing, from the most remote ages. Such are the republican governments which it is the glory of America to have invented, and her unrivalled happiness to possess. May her glory be compleated by every improvement on the theory which experience may teach; and her happiness be perpetuated by a system of administration corresponding with the purity of the theory.

I don’t know whether Codevilla had Madison in mind as he was writing his lecture, but perhaps Madison’s essay gives us a way to describe where we as a regime have come from, where we are, and where—if we do not resist the worst decadeslong trends that have been accelerating in recent years—we are headed.