Political Lessons from 1720s London for Americans Today

A journey back to Great Britain in 1720s to understand why demagogues are so dangerous to the health of democracy

In observing the folly of American politics over the past decade, I have come to the conclusion that we human beings are ill-equipped to cope with the complexities and dangers of democracy on our own. Our brains are too scattered, too emotional, too second-guessing—too fearful—to grasp first principles of government and hold fiercely to them.

That’s why we need the anchor of history. History is the time-tested constant companion of citizens and leaders of free government who seek to defend constitutions from those who would eviscerate them and erect tyranny on their remains.

Think of the founders, Lincoln, Fredrick Douglas, Ida B. Wells, FDR, Churchill, and MLK—all avid readers of history who never could have accomplished what they did without the spiritual force of history by their sides to guide and fortify them.

Lately, one brilliant work of history, Cato’s Letters, written in the 1720s by British political philosophers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, has fueled my conviction that Trump must be severely punished for his crimes in order to restore health to our embattled democracy.

Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution

This collection of letters, it should be noted, ranked in the top three iconic literary texts that influenced the founders in sustaining the War of Independence and afterwards establishing our republic under the U.S. Constitution.

In Cato’s Letters Trenchard and Gordon assert that the only way to preserve the blessing of free government is for the guardians of a republic to root out “top-traitors,” who infamously overturn constitutions through “perpetual delusion and lies,” “vain terrors, and imaginary fears,” “seditious harangues,”  and “fraud and violence.”

Cato's Letters by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, first published from 1720 to 1723 under the pseudonym of “Cato”

The ringleaders who act to destroy constitutional government, according to Trenchant and Gordon, must be “duly and publickly punished.” The reason is that there are no treasons so fatal to free government as those that arise from the top.

“There is no analogy between the crimes of private men and those of publick magistrates,” they write. “The first terminate in the death or sufferings of single persons; the others ruin millions, subvert the policy and oeconomy of nations, and create general want, and its consequences, discontents, insurrections, and civil wars, at home; and often make them a prey to watchful enemies abroad.”

“A good magistrate is the brightest character upon earth, as being most conducive to the benefit of mankind,” Trenchard and Gordon continue, “and a bad one is a greater monster than ever hell engendered: He is an enemy and traitor to his own species. Where there is the greatest trust, the betraying it is the greatest treason.”

"Eli Merritt deftly explores a revolutionary America rife with divisions and driven by a fear of civil wars on multiple fronts. Deeply researched, wide-ranging, and insightful, ‘Disunion Among Ourselves’ persuades that our national Union began from, and still depends on, fending off the many demons of disunion."

Alan Taylor, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian

Criminal magistrates, they say, must be punished—and washed out of the political system—because impunity breeds the spread of corruption worst than that of the Bubonic plague.

“The resurrection of honesty and industry can never be hoped for,” they say with a passion rarely seen in public expression in America today, “while this sort of vermin is suffered to crawl about, tainting our air, and putting every thing out of course; subsisting by lies, and practising vile tricks, low in their nature, and mischievous in their consequences.”

“Where corruption and publick crimes are not carefully opposed, and severely punished,” they contend, “neither liberty nor security can possibly subsist.”

Cato’s Letters, consisting of 144 public essays, were written not by the Roman statesman Cato, the hero of antiquity who died in the fight to save his republic from Caesar’s bloodlust. Two progressive British political philosophers, who apprehended that corruption in Parliament was going to bring down the nation’s fragile limited monarchy, adopted the pen name “Cato” to signal the spirit of liberty and self-sacrifice it takes to rescue constitutional government from the menace of tyranny.

Trenchard and Gordon lived in an era of high anxiety about the fate of British government, fearing more than anything that “the Pretender” to the throne, James Francis Edward Stuart, exiled son of the deposed Catholic monarch James II, intended to overthrow Protestant King George I. If successful, the Pretender would install himself as an absolute monarch, restoring Catholic despotism in the mold of France’s Louis XIV.

The writers correctly believed the government of Great Britain in the 1720s was “the freest in the world.” The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had transformed it into a monarchical republic, one subordinating kingly power to the will of Parliament according to the new Bill of Rights. England was, they boast, “the most virtuous and flourishing state which ever yet appeared in the world.”

The danger was criminal kings and parliamentarians. Trenchard and Gordon argue that these malefactors, whom they describe as “crocodiles and cannibals,” “based-spirited, hard-hearted villains,” and “corrupters of the people,” often invent devious means for subverting the state for which no clear laws exists to bring them to justice.

In these cases, they insist, faithful citizens and courts must search the books to find ways to punish them because “lenity to great crimes is an invitation to greater.” Without “exemplary punishment,” they add, “almost every tyrant grows worse and worse; yet generally leaves a successor worse than himself.”

“If this mighty, this destructive guilt,” they say of the treasons committed by top traitors, “were to find impunity, nothing remains, but that every villain of a daring and avaricious spirit may grow a great rogue, in order to be a great man. When a people can no longer expect redress of publick and heavy evils, nor satisfaction for publick and bitter injuries, hideous is the prospect which they have before them.”

For this reason, “the conspirators against mankind ought to know, that no subterfuges, or tergiversations [lies]; no knavish subtleties, or pedantic quirks of lawyers; no evasions, skulking behind known statutes; no combinations, or pretended commissions, shall be able to screen or protect them from publick justice.

“They ought to know, that there is a power in being that can follow them through all the dark labyrinths and doubling meanders; a power that can crush them to pieces, though they change into all the shapes of Proteus, to avoid the fury of Hercules: a power, confined by no limitation, but that of publick justice and the publick good; a power, that does not follow precedents, but makes them.”

“The great principle of self-preservation, which is the first and fundamental law of nature, calls for this procedure,” they conclude. “The security of commonwealths depends upon it; the very being of government makes it necessary; and whatever is necessary to the publick safety is just.”