Benjamin Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention in September 1787 and was asked what kind of government the delegates had given the country. “A republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.”
Two hundred fifty years after the Declaration that made such a government thinkable, that conditional clause is one of the most important phrases in American life: “If you can keep it.”
Franklin did not say the work was finished. He said it was handed to us. Every generation since has either carried it forward or let it slip, and the carrying has never been guaranteed. It has always depended on Americans understanding what they were given and why it is worth holding on to.
The documentary, “The Thread of Liberty: Keeping Our Republic,” was made because fewer and fewer of us understand the importance of our Republic and why its founding principles should endure, and because the not-understanding is no longer accidental.
Consider what our children are taught. On the most recent national assessment of eighth graders, only 13% reached proficiency in American history. Forty percent fell below even a basic standard, meaning they could not read a simple historical document and draw a conclusion from it. In civics – if it is even taught at all – the scores fell for the first time since the test began in 1998. These are not the children of some other country. They are ours, and they are coming of age with almost no working knowledge of how their own government was built or why.
That alone would be reason enough to act. A people who do not know their history cannot defend it, and a people who cannot defend their inheritance will not keep it. But ignorance is only the first half of the problem.
The harder truth is that what knowledge young Americans do receive has too often been bent to serve a purpose. The founding is taught now, in many places, not as a difficult and remarkable achievement – a miracle even, given the odds against the Founders – but as a crime scene.
The men who pledged their lives and fortunes and sacred honor are presented mainly as hypocrites. The principles they declared – and for which millions of Americans have died – are dismissed as cover for self-interest. A student can leave a classroom knowing exactly what may have been wrong with the Founders and nothing at all about what was right.
This is not history. It is history put in the service of an argument, and the argument is that the country was rotten at its root. Once you believe that, everything follows. If the foundation is rotten, then tearing it up is not vandalism. It is justice.
Which brings us to the second reason this film was made: Over the past half-century, a growing number of our fellow citizens have come to feel no particular love for this country, and in many cases outright contempt. For many, this is simply the fruit of ignorance. You cannot love what you do not know and have never been given reason to understand.
But the sentiment has hardened into something more deliberate. There is now a current of thought, well represented among people of real influence in our universities, our institutions, and our media, culture and politics, that regards the American founding not as a flawed beginning to be perfected but as a mistake to be overcome.
These are men and women who have enjoyed every blessing our Republic affords: the liberty, the opportunity, the protection of rights the Founders secured, and who have concluded that the framework which produced those blessings is illegitimate. They do not wish to keep the Republic. They wish to replace it with something they consider more just, more managed, more answerable to experts and less answerable to the people.