When the Keepers of the Flame Help Extinguish It

[This piece will run as an op/ed in newspapers on the weekend before the 2026 Midterm Elections.]

When Benjamin Franklin was asked, at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, what kind of government the delegates had created, he reportedly answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

That qualification—if you can keep it—points to a problem that inevitably besets human efforts to create good order.

The framing of the American Constitution was one of the most significant steps in humankind’s quest to order its world well. Whatever that Constitution’s flaws, in the context of the long dark history of tyranny across the millennia, that document represented a huge step forward for humankind.

The American experiment was going to enable a people to have their proper voice in how the society operates. Democracy represented a significant solution to “the problem of power,” which has been the main source of destruction and torment in human civilization.

But America has just demonstrated that in such things as “good order,” there’s never a “one and done.” The “Rule of Law” does not enforce itself, as can plainly be seen now in this Trump era. The political values that inspired the American system of government have to be maintained by every generation in turn.

The human world is a living thing. It is not static.

We don’t have to understand exactly what broke down to recognize that something did. The willingness of so many Americans to support a leader who attacks the democratic system they inherited makes it clear that something a healthy democracy needs got lost along the way.

How does a society maintain the good order it has achieved? How does one generation transmit to the next the values and commitments on which that order depends, when so much about that process of transmission is unpredictable?

Fortunately, cultures have developed powerful means of maintaining continuity. Among the most important are patriotism, tradition, and religion.

Patriotism cultivates loyalty to a nation’s identity and its defining ideals. Tradition gives authority to what previous generations have handed down. Religion teaches values and rules of conduct, often investing them with an authority that transcends any particular generation.

These are among the principal ways a civilization seeks to keep its inheritance alive.

That brings into focus one of the most startling aspects of America’s recent political breakdown.

Those three principal means of preserving a civilization’s inheritance have historically been most deeply rooted in Conservative America:

I think of the PATRIOTISM of Conservative America, whose voices have long proclaimed the virtues of our democracy in town squares on the Fourth of July. One would expect those people to be defenders of all that makes us “the land of the free.”

And I think of TRADITION, whose very purpose is to enable cultures to perpetuate themselves. One would think that the conservative Americans who have always upheld the value of tradition would reject utterly any force that continually assaulted the norms of American democracy.

And so also with allegiance to RELIGION — the “Old Time” religion being one of culture’s most powerful tools for ensuring that each generation is inculcated with values, beliefs, and rules of conduct intended to keep people on the straighter and narrower. One would expect Christian conservatives would be the last people to lend their support to someone who is arguably the opposite of Jesus in spirit.

Yet it has been precisely THOSE people – the most vocal about their patriotism, the most attached to tradition, the most publicly identified with their religion – who have provided the political support for the opposite of those old conservative values.

For those who hope that we humans can establish a just, humane, and viable order in civilization, this development is ESPECIALLY SOBERING, because it reveals how difficult it is to transmit essential values intact through the generations.

If even the “keepers of the flame”—those whose allegiance to Religion, Tradition, and Patriotism has historically run deepest—can be led to support the extinguishing of that flame, we are compelled to conclude that Franklin’s warning about the uncertainty of maintaining a good order is even more dire than we might have thought.

If the mechanisms for good cultural transmission are that fallible, the task of creating and maintaining a well-ordered civilization is an even greater challenge than I have realized.

For half a century, I’ve been hoping that humankind could CREATE a good order that would enable us to avoid destroying ourselves. Now I recognize the problem that Ben Franklin understood: even if we CREATE an order that allows humankind to thrive on this planet for the long haul, we must perpetually do what is necessary to keep it.