Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually made the statement — “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is a common and apt refrain when discussing the connection between historical perspectives and current events. By drawing on knowledge of what happened in the past, and why, we are better able to understand the flow and direction of the history collectively created in each new day.
“Past Rhymes With Present Times” is a series by Lloyd S. Kramer exploring historical context and frameworks, and how the foundations of the past affect the building of the future.
The Board of Governors (BOG) that oversees the University of North Carolina’s sixteen constituent institutions has created a new graduation requirement for students who enroll at UNC-system universities this fall. According to guidelines the BOG approved in April 2024, all future recipients of a UNC baccalaureate degree must complete “a course or courses covering the foundations of American democracy.”
The new requirement may have gained support among members of the BOG because it provides a university-directed alternative to earlier Republican proposals for a legislative bill on “Reclaiming College Education on America’s Constitutional Heritage.” Despite some important logistical differences, both plans emerged from conservative concerns about historical works that focus more on the moral contradictions of slaveholding Founding Fathers than on the ideals that appear in their most influential documents.
Founding Documents and the Divergence of Trumpism
The required readings for the mandated new courses include the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and selections from The Federalist papers (1787-88) as well as the later Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Although UNC professors had good reasons to question the unusual academic process of a “top-down” curricular intervention, the BOG’s guidelines rightly suggest that knowledge of America’s late eighteenth-century political ideals and constitutional system remains essential for understanding and defending democratic institutions. Our democratic civic culture would likely become stronger if everyone (not just students) studied these founding documents, but most people are so busy with other matters that a summary of some key themes may be useful for wider discussions of why or how present times are no longer rhyming with the political ideals and constitutional structures of past American times.
Ironically, the conservatives who have promoted more required coursework on America’s constitutional heritage may be pushing students toward historical knowledge that challenges Trumpism’s deconstruction of the “foundations of American democracy,” in part because current digressions from America’s early political aspirations become more apparent if you read the famous eighteenth-century documents.
Three major themes shaped the foundational political goals of both the revolutionary war and the Constitution that established a new republican government after 1787. The new nation’s founding leaders believed that people became free when they controlled the institutions that governed their public and personal lives, but they also assumed that the survival of this freedom would require well-educated leaders who respected civic virtues and adhered to a constitutional system that protected individual rights.
The Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence famously linked the rights of self-government with the rights of personal and political freedom in its assertion that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This bold argument for self-government rested on the broader, “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” with “unalienable rights” that include “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
In addition to these general claims for human rights, however, the Declaration listed specific ways in which Britain’s monarchical government was “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world,” depriving people “in many cases” of the “benefits of Trial by Jury,” and even “transporting us beyond Seas” for trials on “pretended” criminal offenses.
Discussions of America’s founding documents might thus begin with questions about how the abrupt deportation of immigrants threatens “unalienable rights,” denies arrested people the legal processes of a jury trial or transports them out of the country for “pretended” criminality, all of which the Declaration of Independence explicitly condemned. The Declaration also denounced the King’s imposition of tariffs and taxes on trade, which were blamed in 1776 as the Trumpian tariffs are blamed today for impeding America’s foreign commerce.
The US Constitution
The Founders of America’s new republic recognized that self-interested political leaders had often destroyed earlier republics, so they sought to prevent the concentration of power in a single ruler by dividing public power into separate branches of government. The authors of the Constitution thus placed the power of taxation and government funding in a two-house legislative branch and explicitly stated (in Article I, Section 8) that “Congress shall have the power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.”
This provision gave control of tariffs to the Congress, but the same Article (in Section 9) also banned all noble titles and the acceptance of “any present” or “Emolument” (payment) from foreign states or princes. President Trump and his family have ignored this constitutional restriction in multiple violations, including the acceptance of a luxury aircraft from Qatar, the collection of millions of dollars from the 220 foreign and domestic crypto investors who purchased $Trump meme coins to attend a presidential dinner, and the sale of $500,000 personal memberships in a Washington Club called the “Executive Branch.”
In addition to these patterns of financial self-dealing, Trumpism has violated the Bill of Rights that Americans placed in their new Constitution to describe the “unalienable” freedoms that governments must never violate or deny: free speech and a free press, religious freedom, petitions for redress of government injustices, freedom from arbitrary arrests, and freedom from cruel punishments.
Trumpism’s disdain for the Bill of Rights (except for the right to bear arms) appears in constant attacks against the free press, including the president’s demand for payment of “damages” from journalistic work; in the arrest of immigrants and foreign students, which ignores the Fourth Amendment (“the right of the people to be secure… against unreasonable searches” and the need for “probable cause” warrants that describe “the place to be searched”); and in the violations of the Fifth Amendment, which states that nobody can be held to answer for a crime except through the “indictment of a Grand Jury.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is seeking to overturn the Fourteenth Amendment’s crystal-clear statement that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are citizens of the nation.
Students who carefully read the Constitution may therefore recognize the Trumpian defiance of constitutional provisions that block the consolidation of one-sided state power, the use of government offices for private gain, and the violation of “unalienable” human rights. But the rationale for constitutional restrictions on the abuses of public power appears more fully in The Federalist Papers, which have become another required text for courses on the foundations of American democracy.
The Federalist Papers
The Founders’ defense of the constitutional system received its most complete explanation in the 85 essays of The Federalist Papers, which Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote in 1787-88 to convince anti-Federalist skeptics that they should support the new Constitution. Although modern conservatives have often praised The Federalist’s opposition to radical forms of direct democracy and factional disorders, present-day readers will also find multiple warnings about the dangers of Trump-style government leaders.
Some of Madison’s 29 essays provide the best arguments for why a well-defined constitutional system best protects the principles of self-government, political freedom, and human rights. As he noted in one key essay (Federalist #47), “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” but liberty would be preserved if “the great departments of power” could be kept “separate and distinct.”
Madison’s fears about the danger of would-be autocrats led to his key assertion (in Federalist #51) that the “interior structure of the government” must ensure the “separate and distinct exercise” of different powers and “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” because the oppressive acts of governing rulers have always threatened both justice and freedom.
“Justice is the end of government,” Madison wrote. “It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued, until it is obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” The structures and divisions of institutional power would therefore have to protect the democratic republic, because angels would never govern and “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm” (Federalist #10).
The Foundations of American Democracy
Trumpism’s challenges to America’s political and cultural institutions therefore express the kind of monarchical desires for power that the Founders explicitly rejected in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. As the BOG’s new course requirement suggests, however, twenty-first-century generations cannot understand the democratic ideas or constitutional goals of America’s long-developing political culture if they have no knowledge of the nation’s founding documents.
Historical study of the Founders’ era will show how Native Americans, enslaved Black Americans, and all women were excluded from the new nation’s governing system (hence the need for later documents and actions by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.), yet the early democratizing themes provided an enduring foundation for modern political movements that struggled to expand human rights to long-excluded groups.
The Constitutional system’s survival and vitality nevertheless required a broad cultural base of historical and civic education that could give future voters and public leaders the knowledge they needed to participate freely in a democratic civic culture. As Thomas Jefferson argued in the 1780s, political democracies would always depend on schools and universities because “no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness.”
Such ideas flowed into the creation of the University of North Carolina in 1789, and they have reappeared in the BOG’s new requirement for coursework on the founding documents of American democracy–which might produce unintended consequences in well-informed, patriotic critiques of Trumpism. Some students may dislike their required engagement with American democracy’s most influential early documents, but this engagement could strengthen the democratic commitments that will eventually carry us beyond the dangerous political moment in which we’re now living.
Photo via Lindsay Metivier
Lloyd Kramer is a professor emeritus of History at UNC, Chapel Hill, who believes the humanities provide essential knowledge for both personal and public lives. He has recently published “Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys Toward French and American Selfhood,” but his historical interest in cross-cultural exchanges also shaped earlier books such as “Nationalism In Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities Since 1775” and “Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions.”
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