A Warning in Marble: Part 1 of the 5-part series.
The week of its 250th, what's the real state of American democracy?
“Is mankind the biggest threat to marble?”
I wrote this (admittedly odd) question to myself in the margins of a book years ago. I was traveling the Mediterranean during graduate school and struck by the ruins in Rome and on the Acropolis in Athens, like many millions before me. Wind, rain, heat, and the grinding of the centuries hadn’t done much to these places. Marble shrugged it all off.
But, mingling among sweaty tourists, I saw that the stone did have a natural predator. Us.
Any wreckage seemed to have been wrought by angry hordes or, perhaps, by the emperors and kings who undertook “remodeling” when they seized power. You see it at most of these historical sites from antiquity. At the Parthenon in Greece, for instance, you learn that the structure withstood storms and fires and earthquakes for literally thousands of years. That is, until one afternoon in 1687.
A besieging army turned its guns on the temple, struck the gunpowder stored inside, and blew it open in a single blast. Boom. Two thousand years of endurance were undone in a moment by vengeful men.
This weekend, I flipped through old books in my office looking for inspiration upon the occasion of America’s coming birthday. A warning gawked at me from one of the pages, documented jaggedly in my own handwriting. Is mankind the biggest threat to marble? I wrote the question while traveling and reflecting in a period when I had a more unburdened mind. At the time, Barack Obama was president, my former political party was busily critiquing his tan-suit, cool-guy aesthetic, and our gravest worry seemed to be whether we could cobble together enough votes in Congress to trim his budget.
How quaint!
Today, the pillars of our democracy are in doubt. The very “marble” is endangered, as it turns out, both literally and figuratively.
American democracy rests on a handful of structural supports. They work together to bear the weight, and they’ve lasted long enough that we developed an almost childlike naivety about their sturdiness. We’re the world’s oldest continuous democracy, which means we’ve defied the ages! Surely, we’ll last another 250 years. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves. So you can understand our collective shock when, in a single year, multiple pillars have begun to crack or crumble, all at once.
I was among those who forecasted it. Yet even I was surprised by the speed of the damage. In a detail that would make historians and fiction writers blush, the primary antagonist is a man who actually lusts for marble. He spends a great deal of his time attempting to redecorate his temporary home with expensive stone and our nation’s capital with new self-aggrandizing monuments and our democracy with unusual customs, to the point that they’re each beginning to look like something else entirely.
This week, as the country turns two hundred and fifty years old, I want to walk with you to five of those marble pillars. From the most fragile to the most fundamental. You decide whether the building is structurally sound. The columns were designed to keep our democracy aloft, and at each, I want to stop and ask the same question: will it hold and if not (if it actually falls), what’s left to support the rest?
Come with me to the first pillar. Here, you won’t need to squint to see the damage.
I. Restraint
Our story actually begins in the aforementioned Parthenon. When I wrote about the “vaunted plazas of open society” in my book A Warning, I had this place in mind. The ancient marble temple is one of the most iconic sights in all of human civilization. It sits high atop a compound of ruined temples, known as the Acropolis, where its many pillars catch the light along the sun-drenched cliffs of Athens. Some of the most famous figures of history walked its colonnades.
The philosopher Aristotle would’ve wandered the marble promenades of the Parthenon more than two thousand years ago, toying with ideas as he watched the sun set over Greece or lecturing his students about the perils of power. During this time, he jotted down an idea on which the structure of American democracy would one day rest. Maybe he even developed it on one of those walks.
The law itself should govern the state, Aristotle wrote, rather than any single man. People in power should be “guardians and servants of the law,” never its master; otherwise, the system itself would collapse from the avarice and ambition of meager men. He had nothing but contempt for a state where “the people govern and not the law.” Democracy would eat itself if not restrained.
Aristotle’s words were as much prophecy as philosophy. He saw the pillars crumble around him. He saw Athens convulse with faction and turn on its own. Charged with impiety, he fled into exile, and the city's democracy soon fell. He died within the year.
Two millennia later, the economist and historian Friedrich Hayek traced America’s own creed (a government of laws, and not of men) straight back to Aristotle’s pen. Hayek observed that the idea itself wasn’t original to the United States. What was original was that we wrote it down and aimed it at the rulers themselves. We crafted a Constitution. Ours was the first country to enshrine its aversion to autocracy in a written document, i.e. a piece of parchment that itself was held to be more important than any ruler. This was a place where the president swore his oath to the Constitution and where judges were handed the power to scan the parchment, look the leader in the eye, and tell him “no.”
It was a system built on RESTRAINT.
The law would rule, not the rulers. Aristotle would’ve beamed. But the founders were even more ambitious than that. They hoped to fill the public offices with people who would not need restraining in the first place.
“The aim of every political constitution,” James Madison wrote in Federalist 57, “is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous.”
First, choose the good. Then, bind their hands anyway, just to be safe. The formula was something of a double failsafe. It was meticulously constructed to ensure virtuous folks were chosen to sit in the “chairs” of state and wouldn’t dream of abusing their power, but even if they did, they’d find themselves locked down. Chained to the law and unable to wield power selectively, vindictively, or arbitrarily, lest they be booted from power or prosecuted.
So today, ask yourself the first question the founders posed for us. Have we chosen the wise and the virtuous? (I said you wouldn’t need to squint to see the damage to this first pillar.)
Donald Trump didn’t enter office with restraint on his agenda. He did not write paeans to the rule of law. Don’t take my word for it, though. It was his declaration. He returned to power with vitriolic words that will echo through history in ways far beyond his own comprehension.
“I am your retribution,” he bellowed at a rally during the 2024 campaign. He meant it. Restraint would have no part in his second term, though he could’ve been more specific and clarified that he’d blow past institutional constraints to pursue both revenge and riches. As such, he is pretty much the archetype of the man the founders feared.
Let’s start with revenge. No research is needed. Any concerned American today can tell you, stream-of-consciousness, much of what the sitting president did after returning to office. He went after his enemies… issued executive orders punishing law firms that crossed him… hand-signed investigative orders into individual critics… turned the Justice Department loose on a long list of enemies… brought charges against former advisors who defected… threatened to jail or execute sitting senators and congresspeople who questioned his orders… told the cameras that his detractors were “traitors”… slashed funding for the universities and coerced them to bend to his will… cancelled the contracts of non-compliant businesses… cancelled the comedians who mocked him… slashed federal funding to Blue States that didn’t vote for him… sent troops into the cities that despised him… and empowered agents to shoot citizens who defied him, with Trump’s officials telling a stunned nation that his gun-toters had “absolute immunity.”
I could go on. But we must save space for the riches, as the Constitution’s constructors had also hoped restraint would keep our leaders from profiting off the presidency. Alas, they never met Donald Trump.
Weeks within retaking office, he put out an open solicitation — to any foreign government listening — that he was looking for a new airplane for himself… not long after, he accepted a $400 million jumbo jet from the government of Qatar that will effectively become his own when he leaves office (the most lavish foreign gift ever taken by an American president and a textbook breach of the Constitution’s ban on emoluments)… launched a personal cryptocurrency the week of his inauguration and a family crypto empire that has poured hundreds of millions into his pockets (while his own regulators quietly dropped their investigations into the firms paying in)… turned the East Wing of the White House into rubble for a billion-dollar ballroom, bankrolled by the very corporations with business before his government and in which he himself has a stake… awarded no-bid contracts to friends… allowed family members to undertake official business for the United States while raising billions in investment from some of the same entities and nations on the other end of that official business… and so much more.
His corruption is so on-the-nose that he even decided to put his face on America’s money. The currency minted for our nation’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday was meant to carry the milestones of the American story, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the end of slavery, the long march for civil rights, and so on. Those designs were set aside. Another version was drawn up, including the new proposed dollar coin bearing Trump’s face, a raised fist, and the words FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT.
Restraint is nowhere to be seen.
But what about the second component of that double failsafe? The rule of law. Are not the leader’s hands still tied? Is he not bound, too, by written rules of our democracy?
In 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that a president is substantially immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. In that moment, the servant of the law was placed, in large measure, above it. That damage to the “rule of law” cannot be overstated. Aristotle’s nightmare was not smuggled in through some back door in the darkness; it was announced from the bench in broad daylight by the highest court in the land. While better men and women would have ascended to high office and treated this ruling carefully or read it more conservatively, this man did not. Donald Trump sought its outermost limits from the start — and then to exceed them.
Some will say that every president tests the edges of power. And every one of them has, in one way or another. My alarm here is over the convergence of both factors, i.e. a man placed above the law and using that newfound freedom openly and all at once to punish the people he hates and enrich the people he loves, himself first among them. That has no precedent here in America. Definitionally, it is boundless corruption of the highest order.
Accordingly, we needn’t ask whether the pillar of RESTRAINT will hold. It is not cracked or gashed. It has crumbled. Chunks of marble are piled high as a tombstone to democratic virtue.
The shock many of you have felt upon seeing this wreckage is the same shock that all who witness history feel in realtime. We’re lulled into thinking that momentous events belong in old books. We’re surprised when they happen in front of us. And we’re even more surprised when the heroes of history do not leap from the page to stand in the way.
Do they really expect us to take over? Well, yes, they do.
After all, a constitution is just a letter from the dead to the living. The dead cannot make us read it any more than they can make us abide by it. The law couldn’t stop any of this from happening because the law has never been able to stop anything by itself. It binds only those who consent to be bound and who show restraint. Once that is gone, many ominous possibilities are brought forth.
Consider what the collapse of this first pillar means. If the most powerful man in the country is beyond the law’s reach, for now, the least powerful are well beyond its protection. My family was met with this raw reality. I don’t remind you in search of a shred of sympathy. I do it because “retribution” stays an abstraction for most folks until you give it a face. I want you to look it in the eyes.
In the weeks after the president personally ordered his agents to investigate me for “treason,” I came home to find a wife in tears, worried about losing our home. There she was again, weeks later, sitting in our bed reading messages online of threatened harm against our infant daughter, written by gleeful members of the president’s mob. A close friend called to offer to help cover our mortgage, because the business I had built was coming apart as frightened colleagues fled. Lawyers called with updates about the criminal charges the government was working to bring against other people who’d attacked Trump, men and women staring down the possibility of decades in prison — a warning of what the president might do to me. Meanwhile, friends who’d stood beside us at our wedding sought distance until it all “blew over.”
There was no trial and no charges. Only the criticism I’d leveled against the man in power, and for it, the addition of my name to a public enemies list. That’s what a single signature on a piece of paper did to a single family. Now, multiply it by every name already on the list, every name likely to be added, and every name that is meant to fear the stroke of his pen. Those are the ripple effects of unrestrained power.
When a column of that size comes down, the whole building is supposed to come down with it. It hasn’t, not yet. The load has shifted onto other pillars. Tomorrow, I want to tell you where the pressure has gone — and why the bulk of the force could go “unseen,” even by defiant patriots like you.
Your friend, in defiance,
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