America at 250: Have We Been Wise Beneficiaries of Freedom?
- Gary Toyn
- Jun 1
- 6 min read
I went to India recently to attend a friend’s wedding.
What I didn’t expect was a lesson in US constitutional government.
Traveling internationally has taught me many lessons I could never have learned at home.
That’s why I have visited more than fifty countries. One thing I have learned is that every place has something to teach me, if I’m paying attention.
India taught me more than most. The people I met there, at the wedding, in the markets, in the streets, were among the kindest, most generous, most genuinely warm human beings I have encountered anywhere in the world. I left with a deep admiration for India and its people that I carry with me to this day.
But it was a traffic intersection near my hotel in Hyderabad that I couldn’t stop thinking about.
The scene unfolded as I watched from a high vantage point near my hotel. I watched trucks, taxis, buses, and three-wheeled motorized rickshaws pour into a busy intersection from every direction, each driver pressing forward, each claiming space, none yielding. Motorcycles were going against traffic; pedestrians were dodging between cars and buses and ambulances.
It was pure chaos.
Traffic was completely gridlocked. At the intersection, a traffic official appeared and did everything in his power to restore order, whistling, gesturing, and commanding. Nothing worked. The drivers couldn't hear him, or perhaps they simply ignored him as they honked incessantly at one another. There was nowhere to go, and all they could do was wait. The gridlock held for what seemed like an hour. Maybe more.
Nobody was moving. Nobody was winning.
The traffic eventually cleared, not because of the official's authority, but because enough drivers finally began yielding to one another. One small, voluntary, utterly unglamorous act of virtue started a chain reaction that eventually allowed the gridlock to break. Traffic flowed.
I stood there watching it all unfold, and suddenly the lesson clicked in my mind.
The World's Most Enduring Constitution
On July 4th of this year, the United States turns 250 years old. It is, as Dallin Oaks, former law professor, Supreme Court law clerk, and Utah Supreme Court justice, has noted, the oldest continuously functioning national constitution in the world.
Every nation except three* has adopted a written constitution, and nearly all of them bear some mark of the document drafted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.
The British Prime Minister William Gladstone, leader of the very nation the American colonists broke away from, called it “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”
France, by contrast, has cycled through ten separate constitutional orders since 1789, including five republics, two empires, a monarchy, and two dictatorships, while the American framework has endured without interruption.
And here is perhaps the most remarkable fact of all: India’s own constitution, governing the world’s largest democracy, was itself influenced by the American model. The traffic congestion in Hyderabad existed in the shadow of a document whose inspiration was first struck in Philadelphia 250 years ago.
So, the question worth asking at this anniversary is not “isn’t America great?” That is too easy, and too self-satisfied.
The better question, the honest question, is the one Ezra Taft Benson, Secretary of Agriculture under Dwight D. Eisenhower, asked publicly in 1986:
“Have we been wise beneficiaries of the gift entrusted to us?”
He answered it himself, with uncommon candor: “We must, with sadness, say that we have not.”
The evidence is not hard to find. In the 2022 midterm elections, only about 45% of eligible Americans voted, in the world’s most imitated democracy. A 2022 Annenberg survey found that fewer than half of American adults could name all three branches of the government their Constitution created, and one in four could not name a single one. And the civility that self-governance requires has been replaced, in much of our public life, with contempt.
What the Document Actually Requires
Here is what I believe that Hyderabad intersection was trying to tell me.
The Constitution does not create order. It assumes it.
The framers were not naive about human nature, quite the opposite. They built separation of powers, checks and balances, and enumerated limits on government precisely because they understood human nature’s tendency toward self-interest and the abuse of power. But the document they created rests on a foundation no law can legislate: the voluntary willingness of ordinary citizens to subordinate immediate self-interest to the functioning of the whole.
Oaks identified five principles at the heart of the Constitution’s genius: 1) Sovereignty resided in the people, not in government; 2) Power was divested to the states and not a centralized government; 3) The separation of governmental powers was essential; 4) Individual rights were guaranteed; and 5) The rule of law applied to all, but especially to those in power.
Each principle is architectural. Each one assumes that the people operating within that architecture bring something to it that the architecture itself cannot supply.
That something is virtue.
Not virtue in a narrow or sectarian sense, but virtue in the oldest and most universal sense. The Greeks called it civic virtue. The Roman Republic was built on it. Confucian tradition honors it. Every great civilization has understood that freedom without self-restraint is not freedom at all. It is just a faster road to chaos.
The traffic official in Hyderabad had authority. He had a uniform, a whistle, and the law on his side. What he didn’t have, what no government can manufacture or compel, was the voluntary cooperation of the governed. Coercion failed. Ungoverned self-interest failed. Only virtue could break the gridlock. And virtue, by definition, cannot be forced.
“Our constitution,” he wrote, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
A 250-Year Question
Benson asked his question in 1986. Oaks returned to it in 2022, calling for civility, moderation, and principled civic engagement at a moment when American public life was showing serious signs of gridlock of its own kind.
I am asking it now, in 2026, from the memory of my experience in Hyderabad.
The question does not belong exclusively to Americans. Every constitutional democracy in the world is wrestling with it. What kind of people does a 250-year experiment in self-governance actually require?
The only way that chaotic intersection finally cleared was when individuals, one by one, began to yield their own self-interest in the interest of moving everyone forward. Those small, voluntary acts of yielding were acts of civic virtue. They are the same acts that have sustained civilized society for millennia, and they are still the price of admission to a society that works for all of us, not just a few.
It looks like letting someone merge in traffic, like showing up to vote, like listening to a political discussion you disagree with without contempt, like being courteous and kind to others who don't seem to deserve it, like serving on a jury. None of it is glamorous. All of it is necessary.
It is all the Constitution has ever asked of us.
To be frank, I am often tempted to act solely in my own best interest. But I know there is an important balance between what is good for me and what is good for the whole.
It’s a constant struggle we all face, maintaining that push/pull balance between our own interests and goals, and submitting our immediate needs and interests on behalf of a greater objective: civic peace and order.
At this 250th anniversary of the most enduring constitutional government in human history, I find myself making a quiet promise: I know I can do better. I know I can demonstrate more civic virtue. So I want to be that person.
I hope you do too.
Works Cited:
Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania. “Americans’ Civics Knowledge Drops on First Amendment and Branches of Government.” Annenberg Public Policy Center, 13 Sept. 2022, www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/americans-civics-knowledge-drops-first-amendment-and-branches-government.
Benson, Ezra Taft. “The Constitution: A Heavenly Banner.” BYU Speeches, Brigham Young University, 16 Sept. 1986, speeches.byu.edu/talks/ezra-taft-benson/constitution-heavenly-banner.
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. “Historical Context: The Survival of the US Constitution.” Gilder Lehrman Institute, www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-resource/historical-context-survival-us-constitution.
Gladstone, William Ewart. “Kin Beyond Sea.” The North American Review, vol. 127, no. 264, Sept./Oct. 1878, pp. 179–202. Reprinted in Gleanings of Past Years, 1843–1878, vol. 1, John Murray, 1879, p. 198.
Massachusetts Government. “John Adams and the Massachusetts Constitution.” Mass.gov, www.mass.gov/guides/john-adams-the-massachusetts-constitution.
Oaks, Dallin H. “The Inspired Constitution.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 191st Annual General Conference, 3–4 Apr. 2021, www.churchofjesuschrist.org.
Pew Research Center. “Turnout in 2022 House Midterms Declined from 2018 High, Final Official Returns Show.” Pew Research Center, 10 Mar. 2023, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/03/10/turnout-in-2022-house-midterms-declined-from-2018-high-final-official-returns-show.
*The three nations most commonly cited as lacking a single codified written constitution are the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Israel.
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