John Adams and the Line a Republic Must Not Cross

In an earlier Fulcrum essay, John Adams Warned Us: A Republic Without Virtue Cannot Survive, I reflected on Adams’s insistence that self-government depends on character as much as law. Adams believed citizens had obligations to one another that no constitution could enforce. Without restraint, moderation, and a commitment to the common good, liberty would hollow out from within.

But Adams’s argument about virtue did not stop with citizens. It extended, with equal force, to those who wield power.

Adams understood something that remains easy to forget in moments of fear and anger: the greatest threat to a republic is not disorder alone, but authority exercised without restraint, as Adams warned in Thoughts on Government. Power, in his view, was more dangerous than turbulence when it lost its connection to legitimacy and moral discipline. A republic could endure conflict; it could not endure cruelty normalized as governance.

That concern feels uncomfortably current.

Across several American cities, federal authority has been exercised in ways that are opaque, unaccountable to local and state officials, and visibly intimidating, as documented in reporting on recent federal deployments in U.S. cities. Officers are operating without clear identification. Detentions that appear symbolic rather than necessary. Enforcement actions that communicate dominance more than protection. Even where lawful, these methods matter. They shape how people understand their relationship to the state.

This is not how a confident republic governs.

For Adams, the defining distinction was not between order and chaos, but between citizens and subjects. As Hannah Arendt later argued, authority rests on legitimacy and consent, while violence appears when authority has already begun to fail. Citizens participate in self-rule. Subjects are ruled upon. The difference is not merely legal; it is psychological and moral. When people encounter government primarily through fear, spectacle, or humiliation, citizenship erodes long before any formal rights are revoked.

That erosion does not require suspended elections or rewritten constitutions. It begins with experience. When power feels arbitrary, people withdraw. When restraint disappears, trust follows. When fear becomes routine, participation becomes risky. Over time, the public realm contracts, not because people stop caring, but because the cost of engagement grows too high, speech becomes guarded, and participation begins to feel risky rather than routine.

A state that governs through intimidation does not require virtue from its citizens. It does not trust them enough to ask.

Adams would have recognized this pattern. He knew that republics rarely collapse in dramatic fashion. They decay through exceptions that become habits and through justifications that harden into norms. What begins as extraordinary enforcement slowly redefines what is acceptable. Cruelty ceases to shock the people. It becomes procedural.

That is the danger line.

The issue is not whether a government has the authority to enforce the law. It does. The issue is whether that authority is exercised with proportionality, transparency, and moral accountability. Cruelty, even when legal, corrodes civic trust. It teaches citizens that power is something to fear rather than something they collectively own. It signals that consent is no longer the foundation of governance.

Once that lesson is learned, it spreads.

Institutions that rely on fear eventually demand loyalty rather than legitimacy. They narrow the space for dissent. They substitute spectacle for persuasion. The public realm shrinks further, and civic virtue withers, not only among the governed but within the institutions themselves.

Adams warned that liberty is not self-sustaining. It depends on habits, norms, and mutual restraint. Those expectations apply as much to government as to citizens. A republic cannot demand virtue from its people while modeling its opposite.

The tragedy Adams foresaw was moral exhaustion, not sudden tyranny. A people who no longer expect restraint from power eventually stop practicing restraint themselves. At that point, wealth may remain. Elections may continue. But freedom, in its deeper sense, is slipping away.

A society does not return to safety because power becomes kind. It returns because enough people refuse to let cruelty become normal.

That question comes next in this John Adams on Virtue series.