The Lead

Can Any Nation So Conceived, Long Endure?

by Jason Ross (EIRNS) — Jul. 04, 2025

As the United States government careens about, occasionally moving in what appears to be a useful direction, and sometimes doing quite the opposite, an observer might recall the famous response from Benjamin Franklin when asked what sort of government the assembled representatives had agreed upon. “A republic,” he is said to have replied, “if you can keep it.”

This exchange took place the day after the September 17, 1787, final meeting of the Constitutional Convention. That meeting opened with a speech from Franklin, in which he said that the new government “can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government.”

Has the U.S. reached that point? Has it forgotten its revolutionary roots, its devotion to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” to become, instead, a mirror of the British Empire?

The answer to that question—and similar ones in all nations—is up to us.

After the convention, Franklin took the occasion of commenting on the carving on George Washington’s chair at the convention, to express his hope. The back of the chair bore the shape of half of a sun above a horizon. “I have often and often, in the course of the session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting,” he said, “but now at length, I have the happiness to know, that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

Today, the presence of a rising sun can be seen nowhere more clearly than in the growth of China, whose growth can be seen, in part, as a revival of the American System, with Chinese characteristics.

In his diplomatic visits in Europe, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is bringing up, explicitly, and implicitly, the most consequential question today: Will the dominant powers of the 20th century work to advance a multi-focal world, or will they mire themselves in zero-sum thinking?

Franklin was one of a line of thinkers and doers who brought the world its first modern republic, whose industrialization and economic rise reflect the unlimited potential of human creativity, and whose actual founding, begun more than a century before its Revolution, brought the best of European thought to a land where it could prosper without oligarchism.

It is for us, the living, to be dedicated to their unfinished work, to the great task remaining before us: the elimination of geopolitics and oligarchism in human relations, a transformation made possible by basing human affairs on the potential of the world’s greatest resource—the beautiful human species.