The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley

but these aren’t the most important sources of wealth. The World Bank estimates that natural and capital assets amount to only 23 percent of a country’s riches. The other 77 percent is composed of intangible assets, the difference in institutions, of which the most important element is adherence to the rule of law. Remarkably, this accounts for 44 percent of a country’s total wealth, according to the World Bank.³³

      The United States may be one of the richest countries in the world, but we still pay a price for corruption. If we could somehow make the country more honest, we’d want to do so, and if the cost of corruption is as high as it appears, we should make it one of our chief goals—ahead of changes to the tax code, entitlement reform or fixing our health-care system. But just how might this be done?

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       The Dream of a Virtuous Republic

      THE IDEAL of a corruption-free republic is an old one. It lay behind Socrates’ answer to Polemarchus and the design of a virtuous government set out in Plato’s Republic. It inspired John Winthrop’s vision of a City on a Hill, which he described aboard the Arbella in 1630 during its voyage to the new land. Once there, he imagined, the settlers could begin building a country whose citizens would be “knitt together . . . as one man.” There can be no corruption, he said, where people

      delight in eache other, make others Condicions our owne, rejoyce together, mourne together, labour, and suffer together, allwayes haveing before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke, our Community as members of the same body, soe shall wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of peace, the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us.¹

      A century and a half later, Maximilien Robespierre proposed a dechristianized but not dissimilar republic of virtue for revolutionary France:

      In our country we want to substitute morality for egoism, honesty for honor, principles for customs, duties for propriety, the empire of reason for the tyranny of custom, the contempt of vice for the contempt of misfortune, pride for insolence, greatness of soul for vanity, love of glory for love of money, good people for fashionable people, merit for intrigue, genius for wit, truth for showiness, warmth of happiness for boredom of sensuality, greatness of man for pettiness of the great; a magnanimous, powerful, happy people for a polite, frivolous, despicable people, that is to say, all the virtues and all the miracles of the Republic for all the vices and all the absurdities of the monarchy.²

      Who could reject this happy harmony, universal honesty and magnanimity? Who would not wish to banish all insolence, intrigue, pettiness, all the vices we find annoying in our neighbors? Well, some people wouldn’t, and the question is what to do with those who fail to live up to the dictates of the most exacting virtue. For Plato, the answer in The Republic lay in a fantastically illiberal tyranny of virtue, under the rule of philosopher kings. In John Winthrop’s Puritan Massachusetts, dissenters from Dissent such as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams were simply driven from the colony. For his part, Robespierre believed that the republic of virtue required stern measures of protection from internal enemies, and thus the Terror. Virtue is impotent without the guillotine, he said. “Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.”³

      In the pursuit of virtue, there are things we wouldn’t do, such as abandon the principles of a liberal society. There are also things we can’t do, insofar as corruption is driven by cultural norms, by what is socially accepted. Andrew Breitbart memorably said that politics is downstream from culture. But what is upstream from culture? How might the culture itself be changed? We might want to make Americans less willing to accept sordid backroom deals. But just how is that to be done without sacrificing personal liberties? David Hume was not far off the mark when he observed that “all plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary.”⁴

      The Framers of our Constitution were hard-nosed realists about the manners of mankind, and they weren’t about to launch a moral rearmament crusade when they set out to design a corruption-free government in the summer of 1787. The notes of their deliberations at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were kept secret and not published until all the delegates had died, which allowed them to state their opinions of their fellow citizens with remarkable candor. “Take mankind in general,” said Alexander Hamilton, “they are vicious—their passions may be operated upon.”⁵ That was a little over-the-top, but not a few of the delegates must have nodded their heads in agreement, given their general suspicion of democracy and mob rule.

      The Framers’ solution was to turn things on their head. The republic of virtue would not be erected from below, from Winthrop’s moral community knit together as one man, but constructed from above upon a fallen humanity. The new government would accept the reality of our ordinary vices, but would make it harder for them to infect the body politic. By dividing powers and asking one branch to check another, the Framers sought to restrain those who would use the means of government to serve wasteful private ends. And this could be done without employing Plato’s oppressive restrictions on personal freedom. That was the vision of the Framers, at once noble-minded and liberal.

      It didn’t last. If we were ever a republic of virtue, we’re not that today, as evidenced by how we rank on Transparency International’s CPI. Wholly corrupt politicians such as Louisiana’s Edwin Edwards might find themselves charged with bribery, and backroom deal-makers like Virginia’s Eric Cantor might be dumped by the voters. But it’s easy to point to successful politicians who’ve raised pay-for-play to a fine art while avoiding the threat of criminal liability. Along the way something went wrong. The Framers meant to produce a corruption-free government, but like a boomerang their Constitution flew back and hit us on the head.

The Separation of Powers

      In The Federalist Papers, the selling document for our Constitution, James Madison described a government in which the different branches—executive, legislative and judicial—would be set in equipoise, in a regime of separated powers. The separation of powers means several different things, but all of the convention delegates including Madison thought it would check the possibility of public corruption. That’s not how it turned out, however, for two reasons.

      First, the grim logic of the separation of powers ensures that over time the preponderance of power will come to reside in the executive branch.⁶ That’s what has happened in nearly every other presidential regime and it’s happening apace in the United States. The president has slipped off many of the constraints that were meant to curb his authority through the separation of powers. He makes laws by regulatory fiat and executive order, and unmakes them by refusing to enforce properly enacted legislation. He can reward friends and punish enemies in ways the Framers would not have anticipated.

      It turns out that presidential regimes are significantly more corrupt than parliamentary ones. And that’s to be expected. For one thing, the president’s role as his country’s head of state clothes him with a moral authority that prime ministers wholly lack in parliamentary governments. If presidents are the symbols of their countries, prime ministers are more apt to be figures of fun, and ridicule is a sovereign remedy against the abuse of authority. Then there’s the ability of an opposition party in Parliament to hold a government’s feet to the fire when there’s a scandal. By convention, a prime minister is required to attend a daily question period in Parliament, when he must answer his critics, and the opposition can prolong debate over government weaknesses. “No better method has ever been devised for keeping administration up to the mark,” observed Harold Laski.⁷

      Parliamentary governments have far more effective ways to discipline a misbehaving chief executive. It’s a great deal easier to remove an inconvenient prime minister through a simple no-confidence motion or party vote than it is to impeach a sitting president. Not merely are the requirements of a trial in the House of Representatives and a two-thirds majority in the Senate virtually