People paying attention to politics in the US have probably come across the term virtue signaling. It is typically used to mock anyone that expect others to live for a cause higher than self-interest. Folks have claimed it is virtue signaling, instead of virtuous, to resist racism, homophobia, sexism, or to support noble causes like helping the poor. Instead of adjusting to be more virtuous, these folks want to resist letting anyone call them out for bad behavior. Often enough, the folks resisting virtue see themselves as patriotic too, without realizing they are at odds with the nation’s founding principles.

The founders would be horrified by resistance to virtue. They might even call it corruption signaling. Hamilton, Washington, Franklin, Madison, Jefferson, etc, all strived to live virtuously, though we may disagree with how they defined “virtue”. George Washington is a great example. It was so shocking for King George III to learn that GW willingly gave up power, after beating the Brits in the Revolutionary War, that he declared, “well… if he did that, he’d be the greatest man in the world!”

Striving to be virtuous is not just the right thing to, it represents an attempt to counter one of the few problems governments face that cannot be solved with law. It represents something that must be learned and maintained by a people that governs itself. It represents an attempt to build a government and a society that resists corruption.

Sudden Radical Change

Prior to the 2016 election, my experience of government in the US was that it seemed like it rarely got anything done and that this was fine because the people of the US were going to do whatever they want all the time anyway. We’re free to be amazing and we’re free to be awful! We’re also supposed to reconcile with each other either by sorting out our differences or by going to court.

I believe that is still roughly the core of the US, but it has been buried under people who are much more radical. It is not my goal to point the finger in this essay, but you probably know what I mean too. It has been eye opening to see how wild the radicals are willing to get.

After 2016, I wondered how likely it might be that the radicals succeed in replacing the older, moderate elements of their party with more radicals. I worried about their progress in filling the party with people who seem like they don’t want the US government anymore. I thought about how worried the founders were about corruption because it felt as though we were about to witness an extreme test of how much corruption the US system can actually resist.

What Were They Thinking

My perspective about what was taking place was different from my friends because I had been reading history. I knew that the US had faced worst before. I knew everyone from the founding generation was terrified when Andrew Jackson took over. I knew Chester Arthur was the first wildly corrupt New Yorker to become President. I had also read enough to have a sense of how Madison saw things when he designed the US government. It’s a design we still use, by a man, James Madison, more cynical about men with power than any of us will ever be.

It is no surprise that one of the best minds of the revolution was cynical. On the intellectual side, it makes good sense to assume the worst. On the more personal side, Madison had several experiences that exposed him to the raw, visceral side of humans at their worst. Madison was accused of being possessed by the devil because he was epileptic and had seizures. He was in Virginia when Christians attempted to wield Virginia’s government against other Christians because they followed the wrong Christianity. He was young when the revolution began, but he was old enough to know humans can’t be trusted with power precisely because they’ll use it. And of course, he knew they’d relentlessly pursue acquiring it.

The most impactful breakthrough I had while trying to wrap my head around the way he thought came when I realized Madison’s design genuinely assumes everyone involved is the worst person of all time. He, if anyone, would’ve assumed tyrants succeed in gaining power and he would’ve done everything he could to ensure the government survives them. It is from this starting point that we can understand the rest.

First, get a new government started by articulating the gist of how the system operates. The main idea is that for every structure of power there is at least one other structure of power that can stop it. Then provide 10 laws, to make it clear what is and isn’t allowed. We can’t trust how people will interpret anything open ended. Then, have everyone break out into subgroups, called states, and do the same thing for each state. If anything is missing, add it or let the states add it. The main problem to solve is that the government must be extraordinarily difficult to change. Change must only be possible when an enormous amount of people agree about how to change. If the starting rules are basically right and people can’t change it, the starting rules should be able to last. In the interest of ensuring neither the Federal or State governments get too cocky, we’ll leave it unclear which is more powerful. This happy ambiguity can flex towards either side based on what the people alive at the time want. In short, the design starts with almost no laws and is almost impossible to change. In theory, the design creates a durable government that maximizes freedom because exactly because it starts with no laws and its default state is to be useless.

I mean… who thinks like that?! Who builds a useless government on purpose?!

The productive cynicism of James Madison is at its best when he argues in Federalist 10 that this model can scale indefinitely because it becomes harder to find enough agreement from everyone involved to change the government into something more corrupt and less likely to serve its people. Worst case scenario the government just doesn’t change until the people can reconcile with each other enough to have the necessary votes for doing anything.

The amusing thing about a government that does nothing by default is that the intended user experience is for everyone involved to be frustrated all the time and to feel like the government rarely ever does anything. Madison would say that’s the point. I want to think he’d also raise an eye brow and say, “why would anyone want this job?”

Blunting Tyranny

The founders didn’t trust each other. From Ben Franklin’s perspective, it took all the way from 1752, when he first brought up the idea for a union of the colonies, to 1774, when the colonies finally agreed it might be worthwhile to look out for each other. His 1752 plan, known as The Albany Plan, failed because every state was too distrustful of any other state. (Typical, right?) By the time the Constitutional Convention took place, they all worried it was inevitable that the worst person in the world would eventually gain power, so a useless government was surprisingly non-threatening. A king, which none of them wanted, could be a tyrant according to their fleeting passions, but someone elected by a democracy that requires support from loads of other elected people would face enough resistance to simply disable their ambitions.

Many of the founders had studied the collapse of Rome and drew similar conclusions. They knew Julius Caesar transformed Rome from a Republic to an Empire by leveraging the corruption of its leaders. They knew that a US Republic would face the same issues in the weaknesses of people with power. More specifically, they felt that corruption cannot be stopped with law. Instead, they would need the system to somehow encourage everyone to fight corruption whenever it was found. Their solution was to leverage our competitive natures and turn us against each other by incentivizing everyone to root out corruption in their opponents. We can’t trust people to not be corrupt, but we can trust them to use any means necessary to take down their opposition. Can’t we?

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
– James Madison

It’s not always easy to know what someone means when they say corruption. One way to consider it is by imagining an ideal leader, one of great virtue, and then compare leaders to that ideal. If their own morality is not comparable to an ideal leader, they are not worthy and possibly corrupt. To minimize corruption, pursue virtue. That’s exactly what the founders wanted us to do!

I mentioned at the beginning that people who think virtue signaling is bad are at odds with the founding principles. This is because virtue is one of our safeguards against corruption. Virtue should be celebrated and we should all strive to live virtuously. To claim otherwise is to increase the odds a tyrant eventually rises to power with enough elected support to bypass the checks and balances and behave like a king. It is, after all, a problem that cannot be solved with law. We must choose to do it ourselves.

Some Quotes

Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.
– Samuel Adams

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.
– Ben Franklin

Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people.
– George Washington

Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private virtue, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.
– John Adams

No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and … their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice … These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.
– Thomas Jefferson

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical imaginary idea.
– James Madison

A vitiated impure state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.
– Patrick Henry