Christians are told to be “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” The founders of the American Republic had few illusions about man and government.
Freedom, they insisted, depended on “jealousy,” not “confidence” or faith in rulers. They would have thought Obama foolish or cynical for demanding that we give our rulers the benefit of the doubt for good motives. Government, as they knew, is the natural enemy of liberty. They weren’t hypnotized, as later generations would be, by the word democracy. Nor were they terribly shocked by evidence of Original Sin.
Liberal high hopes for our first black president were a hangover from the naive old belief in the Noble Savage. Obama has banked heavily on that belief. Samuel Johnson, immune to every form of ideology, never fell for such emotional rubbish: “How small, of all that human hearts endure, / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!”
The jingoism of democracy defies reason. Frequent headlines attest that elected rulers are no more corruption-proof than any others.
Nothing seems to disillusion Obama, however. He used to teach constitutional law; but if he ever read the Federalist, it appears to have been lost on him. His literacy is quite superficial. He barely knows what he is saying, and he never mentions the Tenth Amendment, the key to the whole Constitution. (Even Lincoln knew that much.)
