1/6/2026

It’s in the hands of the judicial and legislative branches.

Everyone remembers the famous warning Benjamin Franklin reportedly gave Elizabeth Willing Powel as he and his fellow framers left the Constitutional Convention’s final session: they’d created “a republic, if you can keep it.” What’s less understood is that we didn’t.

Ronald J. Pestritto’s new Provocation from the Center for the American Way of Life brings the welcome news that valiant efforts have begun to restore the lost republican framework that those great men designed. But since most Americans believe we still live under the regime forged in Philadelphia, what’s equally valuable in Pestritto’s essay is his lucid reminder of just how we squandered the brilliant contrivance that James Madison shepherded through the Convention: the self-governing republic formed, as Alexander Hamilton wrote, by “reflection and choice” rather than by “accident and force,” arguably the finest achievement of the Western Enlightenment. Continue reading →