A gift for aphorism can be indistinguishable, in the long run, from the gift of prophecy. And so Benjamin Franklin, dead for 234 years, shouldered his way into the discourse of 2024 with his legendary answer to the question posed to him outside the Pennsylvania State House in 1787, of what sort of government the Constitutional Convention had come up with: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Whether or not Franklin actually said this is debatable; his reported interlocutor, Elizabeth Willing Powel, said years later that she didn’t remember hearing it, yet the Maryland delegate James McHenry had set the exchange down in his diary at the time. Aphorism also has a way of blurring into apocrypha; nevertheless, no one disputed that it sounded like what Franklin would have said.
