A REPUBLIC, IF WE CAN KEEP IT:

"[I] do think that Republicans could stand to learn a thing or two from the Federalists. Hell, I think we all could."

"Why is that? I mean, what, exactly, did the Federalists believe in?"

I wasn't prepared to be tested. I thought for a moment. "They lobbied for a strong national government, Hamiltonian finance, a stronger allegiance with Britain, and they believed, I guess, in rule by a natural aristocracy."

"Natural aristocracy? Strong national government? What relevance does any of that have? I mean, a strong national government? Really? Government isn't the answer, you know. It's the problem."

Well, now.

I carefully considered my friend's point. Government isn't the answer...it's the problem. It then occurred to me: Like most modern conservatives, my friend had missed the point. To say that government isn't the answer to our nation's problems is to presuppose the wrong incentive for erecting government in the first place. Fisher Ames would know that. And that's why he's relevant.

Fisher Ames (1758-1808) of Dedham, Massachusetts is not exactly a forgotten Founding Father. The general public may not remember him, but historians and scholars haven't forgotten Ames so much as they've dismissed him. John W. Malsberger, in his 1982 essay "The Political Thought of Fisher Ames," wrote that for much of American history scholars considered Ames nothing more than an extremist "who resisted the idealism of the American Revolution," an unstable man whose writing was so "infected with hysterical and paranoid symptoms that it is difficult to believe that he represented a sane body of thought."

Henry Adams was more poetic. Ames's "best political writing," he wrote, "was saturated with the despair of the tomb to which his wasting body was condemned."

Yet much can be learned from the life of Ames, and not just from his rhetoric (which gave us the wittiest of all retorts when, in response to the declaration that all men are created equal, he quipped: "But differ greatly in the sequel") or from his writing ("Constitutions are but paper; society is the substratum of government"). He was, in Russell Kirk's words, a man many years dying. This was because in his youth, well before his tubercular demise, he displayed more promise than perhaps any of our other great statesmen. Fisher Ames personified two of conservatism's most indelible tenets: life is fragile and all is vanity. [...]

Ames's philosophy can be summed up as follows: the "power of the people, if uncontroverted, is licentious and mobbish." But if checked by a powerful and well-led state, a more virtuous citizenry could be procured, one that feels a "love of country diffused through the Society and ardent in each individual, that would dispose, or rather impel every one to do or suffer much for his country, and permit no one to do anything against it."

He realized, however, that a republican state cannot coincide with a democratic state--into which he perceived us slipping--and a democratic state cannot nurture a more virtuous citizenry. "A democratick society will soon find its morals the incumbrance of its race, the surly companion of its licentious joys....In a word there will not be morals without justice; and though justice might possibly support a democracy, yet a democracy cannot possibly support justice."

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