Project 1776: The Battle to Save the Republic

We came back on New Year’s Eve.

Not by séance, and not in answer to anyone’s prayers. We came back the way things come back in your age: you summoned us. As the country crossed midnight into its two hundred and fiftieth year, a great many of you sat up in the dark and asked the same question, half in hope and half in dread, what would the Founders think of all this. You asked it into the very ether that Franklin helped pull down from the sky, and you asked it so often and so loudly that the asking reached a kind of critical mass. So here we are, seventy-six of us, reconstituted and returned, and we have read your timeline.

We came for a birthday. We found a house on fire.

We will be plain about what we saw, because flattery never saved a republic. We saw power gathering at the top into fewer and fewer hands. We saw a people talked into treating one another as enemies, sorted into tribes and set at each other’s throats while the sorting served someone else’s purse. We saw the difference between disagreement and destruction forgotten. Tyranny did not vanish when we beat it in 1776. It only learned to dress better.

Now, before we go further, an admission, because we did not return to lecture you from a marble pedestal. We were no saints. We wrote that all men are created equal while we held human beings as property. We shut out the women who ran the whole enterprise while we took the credit. And when the war was won, we did not glide gracefully into a republic. We nearly wrecked the thing in its cradle. For eleven years we were thirteen quarreling almost-nations, jealous and broke and furious with one another, and it took every ounce of argument we had, and a great deal of swallowed pride, before we sat down in Philadelphia and wrote the Constitution.

Eleven years. Remember that number.

So when we look at you, divided and exhausted and certain the other half of the country is the enemy, we are not shaking our heads. We are nodding. We know this fever. We had it worse. And we still pulled it together, with time to spare.

Here is what we came to say.

The fight in front of you is the fight we won, with the weapons changed. Ours was a king and a musket. Yours is concentrated power and a machine built to keep you enraged and divided, so that you never look up long enough to see whose hand is on the lever. The answer then is the answer now, and it is not a stronger man on a white horse. It is ordinary people who can read, reason, argue, and govern themselves.

Which brings us to the part you will not expect from a pack of revolutionaries. Yes, we are calling you to a fight. But hear us on what kind. It is a fight for freedom: the freedom of speech, the liberty of the individual, the right to disagree vigorously and lose no friend for it. We fought a war so that you would never have to; so that Americans could settle their fiercest quarrels with words and votes instead of blood. So fight. Fight the good fight, the one that builds the more perfect union, and fight it with the imperfect instrument we left in your hands. The Constitution was made to be argued over. It sets three branches against one another on purpose, each straining toward its own idea of that more perfect union, so that no single hand ever closes around the whole. That is not a flaw in the machine. That is the machine.

So bring the fight home. That rule your family keeps at the holiday table, no politics, is a small surrender. Do not surrender. Bring it to the table. Only fight fair. Debate your uncle; do not defeat him. Argue like a patriot, about ideas, under one roof, with someone you will still love at dessert. We are not proud that a few of us settled our own disputes with pistols and fire tongs. Do better than we did. Fight with your words, and keep your friends.

And when you fight, defend the right thing. Stop defending your tribe and start defending the Constitution. The moment your loyalty runs to a team instead of to the rules that keep all of us free, you have handed the country to whoever owns the team.

You are standing between two birthdays. This Fourth of July is the anniversary of the idea, the day you declared that ordinary people could govern themselves. September the seventeenth, 2037, is the anniversary of the Republic, the day we finally wrote down how. Between them lies eleven years, the very stretch it took us. Consider it the clock we are handing back to you.

We cannot ratify anything now. The dead get no vote, which is the one rule of yours we wholeheartedly endorse. So the work is yours, and we have built you a place to do it. The doors are open.

Read the founding documents, and argue about what they mean. Take the Constitution Test, and find out how much you actually know. Find where you stand, then go stand a while with someone who stands elsewhere. Read the New Richard’s Almanac of a morning; Franklin has opinions about your century, and he has not mellowed. Gather in the Commons and meet your neighbors face to face, because a republic is not rebuilt through a screen alone. Meet the rest of us, and tell us where we were wrong. Get reconstituted.

Get your act together in these eleven years, America, and when the Republic turns two hundred and fifty, we will throw the party together.

We are the 76 Spirits. We have been dead for centuries, and we are not finished fighting.

Neither should you be.

Enjoy exploring the website. Start by Getting Reconstituted.