In the midst of growing polarization and the aftermath of a divisive impeachment trial, some have called for a revival of the values espoused by America’s Founders and historic leaders.
Last week’s episode of We the People focused on those values— summed up by the term “civic virtue”— and host Jeffrey Rosen discussed them with Margaret Taylor, senior editor and counsel of the Lawfare blog, and Adam White, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Civic virtue describes the character of a good participant in a system of government —the personal qualities associated with the effective functioning of the civil and political order or the preservation of its values and principles. According to White, the Founders designed the American republic with those qualities in mind and believed they were essential to upholding it.
“Our constitutional structure itself presumes certain virtues among the people,” White said, identifying self-restraint as one of those virtues. “The point is self-restraint with an eye to something beyond your immediate needs or wants, being able to recalibrate your own behavior in accordance to a higher goal—and in a way that's what republican virtue would require—an ability to get along within the framework of slow, deliberative, conflict-ridden, republican self-government, knowing that you needed to restrain yourself in the process for the sake of the process as a whole.”
White also cited Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. Franklin laid out these virtues in his autobiography, which he started writing in 1771, and recommended that readers try to master one virtue at a time in pursuit of becoming a better American. White and Rosen also pointed to other philosophical inspirations for the Founders, including Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the writings of Sir William Blackstone, John Locke, and Montesquieu, and some of the teachings of Judeo-Christian religions.
Taylor agreed that these civic virtues undergirded the Founders’ conception of the constitutional structure (while noting that the Founders believed in the freedom to exercise all religions, not just Judeo-Christian ones). She added that the Founders recognized the fragility of a system that depended on such values, and she expressed concern that today’s public figures sometimes do not adhere to them:
“I think what we’re seeing more in modern life is that . . . our sort of bad impulses maybe are not quite as restrained. So what we see is a constitutional system that is being tested by actors in various parts of the government who, by their actions— what I would call sort of intemperate or just off the cuff sorts of actions— are reminding Americans and scholars like us about the fragility of that system and how, if actors within it don’t act in accordance with civic virtue, it really exposes how a lot of things I think Americans thought were [such] a firm part of our political culture [were] really based on norms and not on laws.”
Taylor and White further reflected on how today’s public figures discuss the values that make up civic virtue— as Attorney General William Barr did in his October 2019 speech at Notre Dame Law School— and seek to demonstrate them— as Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) did in the floor speech explaining his impeachment vote. Senator Romney, the only Republican who voted to convict President Trump of abuse of power, said in part that he felt compelled to do so because he swore an oath before God to administer impartial justice at the start of the impeachment trial. White said this focus on the oath was the key takeaway from Romney’s speech:
“He recognized that in swearing that oath to do impartial justice, he was undertaking this public obligation one that he was then by honor and, as he explained in his case, his commitment to his God and his faith, he was duty bound to undertake. It comes close to what Benjamin Franklin identified as the virtue of resolution, to resolve to reform what you ought, the ought being defined outside of you. . . . Romney, I think, by focusing on the oath, really put his finger on this idea of self-restraint and exemplified the kind of statesmanship that the founders were hoping for, not just in an impeachment trial, but in the work of the Senate more generally.”
Taylor added Romney’s speech was “a true and actual act of political courage."
"Our political culture right now, in varying ways, seems to be rewarding confrontation and party loyalty, and punishing compromise and cooperation among our political leaders, and I do wonder how that ends," she said. "Do we reach a turning point where something like what Mitt Romney did becomes more sort of the norm, or is he kind of the last gasp of this notion of separating your sort of party views from what you think your constitutional duties are?”
Taylor and White agreed that public figures must model the values of civic virtue in order for them to be revived among the public.
“If you do not have people in government who are modeling these characteristics, it is taken as a green light with people in their normal lives to do the same thing,” Taylor said.
White added that living out these virtues is crucial to the very idea of “self-government,” reflecting on the meaning of that term.
“It’s not just a coincidence of words,” he said. “It’s two deeply interwoven themes . . . Individual self-government was necessary for the sake of public self-government, whether among the people themselves or a president or the courts restraining themselves, or legislators restraining themselves in a way in the course of governance.”
Taylor and White are authors of two separate essays for “The Battle for the Constitution,” a joint project between the National Constitution Center and The Atlantic which features essays exploring the constitutional issues at the center of American life. Read “The Founders Set an Extremely High Bar for Impeachment” by Margaret Taylor here and “A Republic, If We Can Keep It“ by Adam White here.
