OPINION:
This month marks Benjamin Franklin’s 320th birthday. Near the end of his life, he wondered what life would be like “two or three centuries hence.” Well, here we are. What would Franklin make of it?
He would be glad that slavery had ended. In a letter to New Hampshire Gov. John Langdon, he called slavery “a practice which is so evidently repugnant to the political principle and form of government lately adopted by the citizens of the United States.”
I think he would have approved of the civil rights laws of the 1960s and would have been happy that women have risen to equal status and opportunity.
He surely wouldn’t have supported today’s discrimination in the form of diversity, equity and inclusion, disparate impact, and other euphemisms for hiring and promoting people based on immutable characteristics rather than individual achievement. For Franklin, the virtues of industry, thrift and prudence were the keys to success.
Franklin started or funded many institutions, including libraries and schools, some of which are still here today in some form. When he founded a charity school in Philadelphia in 1740, he couldn’t have imagined it would become the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. He would surely be proud of that.
I doubt he would be proud that the Penn Biden Center, founded in 2017, named Joseph R. Biden as the Benjamin Franklin presidential practice professor. From 2020 to 2024, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian, “the center did not produce any public policy projects.” By 2022, it was down to three employees. Today, the center seems to have disappeared, along with its webpage.
In Franklin’s time, if you wanted a school or a church or a fire station, you had to go door to door to get neighbors to subscribe and pledge money to the scheme. You were accountable to them for the results.
Franklin would not believe how much the government does today or how many Americans live entirely on government assistance of various kinds. He would have been amazed and disgusted at the variety of federal programs.
Franklin knew human nature. He wouldn’t be surprised to learn that people have scammed federal benefits, as they did in the recently publicized mass fraud schemes in Minnesota. As he wrote in 1769, “there are those in the World who would not wrong a Neighbor, but make no scruple of cheating the King.”
Franklin would recognize the sad state of our national media, which applies a thick, left-wing partisan lens to the scandals it covers. “Nothing is more likely to endanger the liberty of the press,” he wrote in 1788, “than the abuse of that liberty, by employing it in personal accusation, detraction, and calumny.” Sound familiar?
When it comes to our present form of government, Franklin would see that some of his worst fears have come true.
He would understand our deep political divisions. After all, he was estranged from his son William when they took different sides in the American Revolution.
He would regret that, having come together, Americans are divided so much once again.
A master of political compromise, Franklin would despise the factional paralysis in Congress. He understood the perpetual tension between rulers wanting more money for their projects and profit and citizens wanting to keep what they earn. He warned of a “natural Inclination in Mankind to kingly government,” as “they had rather have one Tyrant than 500.”
Franklin wanted local responsibility and the smallest possible federal government. He scorned professional politicians and was proud that in his America, “of civil Offices or Employments there are few” and that the general rule was that “no Office should be so profitable as to make it desirable.”
The opposite is true today. In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is handing out patronage jobs by the dozens and is about to run a city with more than 300,000 employees. That’s 10 times the total population of New York in 1790.
Like Plato, Franklin foresaw that “Ambition and Avarice” were motivators for too many in politics. Patronage and pardons, simony and sinecure belonged to his age too. He thought federal and state officeholders should not be paid, fearing that otherwise, “the Bold and the Violent, the men of strong Passions … will thrust themselves into your Government.”
Once these thrusters were in office, as he warned an English friend, “I am afraid that none of your factions, when they get uppermost, will ever have virtue enough to reduce those salaries and emoluments, but will rather choose to enjoy them.”
For all that, Franklin would very likely be proud to see how America has grown. He would recognize that, for all its flaws, this country is a mighty force for prosperity, peace and justice. He would marvel at our huge population, global influence, towering buildings, mighty machines and scientific progress on all fronts. Franklin would see that all these came from the foundations he and the other Founders laid 250 years ago.
In 1787, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, Franklin warned that the United States “can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
I pray that day is still far off and that we have another 250 years of American greatness ahead.
• Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is a co-founder of the Ben Franklin Fellowship and author of “The Ten Woke Commandments: You Must Not Obey.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.