In the struggle to forge solidarity in our divided society, the Constitution is not the problem but the solution.
In the struggle to forge solidarity in our divided society, the Constitution is not the problem but the solution.
W e are living through a moment of intense division in American public life, and it often seems like our constitutional system exacerbates our bitter conflicts.
That system can be slow and cumbersome, riddled with veto points and mechanisms of restraint, which can make the majority party in our politics at any given time feel as if its will is being denied. But the system is also democratic, and so in crucial respects majoritarian, which often makes minorities in our politics feel endangered and unprotected. And the key institutions of the system now seem to serve increasingly as venues for vicious partisan combat and clownish culture-war shenanigans. They are places where we display our divisions more often than where we repair them.
All this persuades many Americans that the Constitution cannot serve a divided society — that it takes for granted much more common ground than now exists, and therefore only makes our problems worse. So they call for dismantling some of the system’s distinct features, and especially those that depart from simple majority rule.
But this has things roughly backwards. In fact, the American Constitution is intended to create, not just to occupy, common ground in our society. And its most frustrating features are among the most essential to that purpose. The Constitution was offered as an answer to just the question we now confront: How can a diverse and divided society hold together and govern itself?
The very first ambition articulated in the preamble is “to form a more perfect union.” And the first-person plural in which the document presents itself, beginning with the fact that its first word is “we,” is aspirational as much as it is empirical. Our system of government aims to make that “we” a more durable reality — not just once, through its creation, but in an ongoing way through its continuing operation.
This aim is all the more clear in the Constitution’s structure and substance. Its institutions, and the carefully adjusted balances between them, are in part intended precisely to enable — and even to compel — Americans to be a little more accommodating of one another, a little less frustrated and embittered, and so a little better formed into citizens willing and able to collaborate to advance the common good.
To grasp this aim of the Constitution is to recognize that something has gone wrong in our practice of American constitutionalism. Rather than throw out the system or deform it to better suit today’s grotesque civic vices, we should look to the logic of the Constitution for guidance toward constructive institutional reforms and healthier political habits. If we actually want a more unified society, then we should view the Constitution much more as a solution than a problem.
A Republican Ethic
That unity is a key goal of our system of government does not mean it is its ultimate purpose. That purpose is sketched broadly in the preamble as a whole and described more fully and profoundly in the Declaration of Independence. The body of the Constitution may be understood in large part as a set of formal means toward that final cause.
Yet it is no coincidence that a stronger union — not just among the states but among the people — is presented first among the aims in the preamble, since it is a precondition for the rest. The Constitution was framed with a keen awareness of the plurality and fractiousness of the American nation. It is offered as a way to live with the reality of our diversity and divisions, aiming to mitigate their downsides without harboring the utopian illusion of eliminating them. It seeks to enable social peace, which cannot be taken for granted under modern conditions of pluralism.
Social peace can offer a stable backdrop for political life. In a free society, it is not quiet but raucous. It cannot be achieved by conquest or surrender but only by mutual accommodation. It is the condition of differing without rejecting one another’s legitimacy — of disputing without being at war.
The very idea of a written constitution that stands apart from regular legislation as the framework of a regime, as the setting rather than the subject of political disputes, is rooted in the ambition to establish some such common ground in a permanently fractious polity. By drawing a distinction between views about the system of government and views about policy and interests, it stakes out space for agreement that can allow our disagreements to be dealt with more constructively.
That does require some meaningful agreement about the framework itself even as we disagree intensely about important political and policy questions. Charles Kesler makes this point especially persuasively in an important recent book: Our system can withstand a lot of discord, provided we share a general understanding of the character and purpose of the Constitution itself. That is why some restoration of such an understanding is an essential precondition to the recovery of our civic culture.
That culture, even in moments of relative unity, is a culture of disagreement. The cultural breakdown of this period is not a function of our having forgotten how to agree with each other but of having forgotten how to disagree constructively. And this is what our Constitution can better enable us to do.
In fact, even before it establishes specific institutions, our system gestures toward a set of practices, an ethic, for resolving disputes that we rarely articulate. It offers a set of characteristic modes of dealing with differences that underlie its various elements, if not indeed the spirit of the society it seeks to govern.
Three such distinct modes of disputing stand out in particular. The first is simply the ethos of competition, which again and again characterizes the Constitution’s approach to clashing factions, interests, and ambitions. As Christopher DeMuth has brilliantly shown, “the principle of competition underlies our political order.” The democratic underpinning of the legitimacy of our republic is the competitive election. Federalism, which spins diversity into vitality, sets communities and governments in constructive competition — it is, in this sense, not simply another name for subsidiarity. The First Amendment works to sustain the space for competing ideas, beliefs, and practices to coexist and vie for adherents. And the Constitution assumes, supports, and regulates a commercial economy in which competition is an engine of prosperity.
The Constitution does not articulate a formal theory of competition but rather presumes and embodies the centrality of competition to the strength of a free society. Competition enables both democracy and efficiency, both energy and legitimacy. And in governing, the imperative for competition forces you to face reality — to change when you lose and adapt when you fail and so to grow stronger precisely by learning from diverse approaches and ambitions. As Jonathan Rauch has beautifully argued, this mode of subjecting different ideas to competitive tests and thereby to reality is crucial to the distinct practical strengths of modernity, in ways exemplified by our constitutional order.
But subjecting rival interests to a test to choose a winner is not the only way to deal with difference and division in our system. A second and equally crucial mode of turning disagreement into strength is the ethos of negotiation.
In key moments, our system forces differing interests and ambitions to deal with each other — often literally to make deals with each other. Bargaining and accommodation are invaluable tools for resolving disputes peacefully, not so much by determining which side is stronger as by reaching an accord between them. But the American system does not assume that the instinct for bargaining will come naturally to citizens, or even to their representatives. Rather, it forces people with differing interests and views to engage with each other by making some degree of bargaining unavoidable.
This prejudice in favor of negotiation can easily be mistaken for another example of the ethic of competition, but it is not the same. The president and Congress, for instance, don’t exactly compete — neither can do the work at hand without bargaining with the other. The two houses of Congress don’t put different options before a consumer to see which will be most attractive: They have to negotiate with one another before anything can be accomplished by the branch of our government that they embody together.
This is true in any representative democracy to some degree, but the American system stands out for making such negotiation unavoidable. It practically never empowers any party or player to act alone. Rather, every step must be achieved by some degree of engagement with others. Crucially, even majorities generally need to negotiate with minorities before they can act. This is a frequent source of frustration, and of accusations that our system is insufficiently democratic. But the Constitution recognizes that majority rule can sometimes be a principle of despotism, not just of legitimacy. So, as my American Enterprise Institute colleague Jay Cost has nicely outlined recently, rather than simple majority rule, it seeks something closer to consensus rule.
This is one way in which the Constitution balances the democratic imperative to empower majorities with the liberal imperative to protect minorities. It is precisely a means of manufacturing common ground in society — of producing consensus that otherwise would not exist.
A third key facet of our constitutional ethos may be less familiar, though it combines elements of competition and negotiation. We might call it dialectical institutionalism — the instinct evident in the design of our system to respond to seemingly stark alternatives by embracing both at once. The Constitution does this constantly, for instance embracing at once liberalism and republicanism, individualism and communitarianism, majoritarianism and the protection of minority rights, consolidation and decentralization. This makes the American system a scourge of fastidious political theorists, but it is also responsible for its extraordinary durability.
Nearly every fundamental question confronted at the Constitutional Convention was ultimately resolved in this peculiar way — avoiding either/or in favor of both/and. Would the system empower the small states or the large ones? It would empower both, and leave them ever struggling for balance. Would the president be a glorified clerk or an elevated head of state? He would be both, and therefore neither. The few and the many, the city and the country, freedom and order, equality and excellence, representation and administrative efficiency — to each of these stark choices the Constitution says “yes, both,” and as a result it creates a regime, a democratic republic, that (as the very term suggests) lives in constant tension with itself yet is capable of extraordinary feats.
This dialectical institutionalism allows the American system to respond to its own failures by shifting its weight without losing its balance. And it enables it to benefit from seemingly contradictory commitments while limiting their costs and downsides. This peculiar character of our system is rooted in a particular way of thinking about politics: It looks to countervailing interests and pressures as counterbalances that enable stability, and more profoundly it seeks an active balance — again, not so much quiet as peace — as a core goal of political life.
This is one way to conceive of the combination of these three elements of our constitutional ethos. By embracing conflicting aims together, by compelling political combatants into negotiation, and by putting differing interests into competition, our system drives us to engage with each other precisely where we disagree, and so to build common ground through common action at the very heart of our disputes.
A politics of building common ground through common action is one decent definition of the term republicanism. And that term turns out to be essential to understanding the promise and the demands of the American system. The Framers constantly insisted on describing the regime they framed as a republican government. But we have nearly lost the capacity to grasp what they meant.
In a superb recent book, Michael Hawley argues that classical republicanism rested on the pillars of popular sovereignty, liberty, and natural law. In an important forthcoming paper, the Manhattan Institute’s Andy Smarick argues that American republicanism rests on five premises: that citizens are equal and self-governing, that they must exhibit civic virtue and actively take ownership of the fate of the community, that democracy is the primary means of making public decisions, that public life should advance the common good, and that government should be active but limited.
Both are exceedingly valuable sketches, but they also highlight the need for a rearticulation of republicanism in this moment. I would argue, for instance, that most of the problems now attributed to an excess of liberalism by some on the right would be better understood as resulting from a shortage of republicanism. As such, they require not an overthrowing of an element of our political heritage but a recovery of one that has been nearly lost — a project of restoration rather than demolition, and thus one much better suited to conservatives.
The Framers plainly sought to put republicanism at the heart of their project, and among the implications of that fact is that the system aims at a politics of common action and of solidarity achieved by engagement and accommodation, not hostility and exclusion.
This can also help us see that a recommitment to the way of governing ourselves sketched out by the Constitution would be very far from morally neutral, or purely procedural. Our constitutional practices and boundaries are not ends in themselves but rather elements of a broader and deeper vision of politics. That republican vision prioritizes self-rule — both individually and communally — and considers what it would take to both establish and sustain such self-rule. It is rooted in an anthropology, a moral vision, and a political outlook that leave a lot of room for substantive differences but also insist on some common ground rooted in our Western heritage. And it points toward a morally demanding way of life for each citizen.
Representing Plurality
This republican vision of the common good is evident in the constitutional system not only as an ethos, or a mode of action, but all the more so as a set of institutional arrangements. Here, too, our system was intended to create and not just to occupy common ground, especially through common action.
It is important to speak of the structures of our institutions, and not just of their powers. The innovations of the Constitution had less to do with the powers assigned to government than with the modes and orders — the institutional forms — created in the new system to balance the need for energetic republican government with the need to restrain the many vices to which such governments are prone.
The first of those institutions is Congress, and not by coincidence. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison noted that “in republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.” This is not simply happy news. It is, as Madison put it, an “inconveniency” if your aim is to balance and divide the powers of the state. Yet Madison’s observation was not just descriptive but also prescriptive. It is of the essence of republican government that the legislature should predominate, because the legislature is the branch whose work is fundamentally representative of the public. A government in which the legislature does not predominate is not a republican government.
But the Framers’ design of the national legislature demonstrates an understanding of another more profound and less obvious purpose of legislative action in a republican polity. The legislature matters not only because it is representative but also because it can be formative of national unity.
For one thing, acting together — even through representatives — to make laws that bind us all is an inherently unifying practice. Indeed, the freedom of a society to make laws for itself is an essential priority of republican government and a precondition for the civic unity it seeks. The first six grievances against King George III asserted in the Declaration of Independence involve a denial of this communal right to self-government through legislation.
But the particular modes of legislative action prescribed by the Constitution are especially well adapted to the diversity and discord of our vast society. In an already unified society, a single individual could well represent the national will. This is why American progressives (who have tended to deny the legitimacy of the political diversity of our society, as too many conservatives now do too) have so often been drawn to the president as the only truly nationally representative figure in our system. But the American Constitution is built on the premise that our society will always need to work on unity. That kind of work has to begin with the representation of our plurality, not our unity, which can only really happen in a plural institution rather than a unitary one.
That our national government is not there to express consensus so much as to create it is evident in the design of nearly every one of our national political institutions, and in the relations between them. But it is above all evident in the character of the Congress. The U.S. Congress differs from the sorts of parliaments found in most other democracies because it does not empower simple majorities to govern unrestrained until they lose their mandates. The distinct, overlapping electorates that choose the House and Senate, the ever-present threat of presidential vetoes, and assorted supermajority requirements (including the Senate filibuster, which is not required by the Constitution yet advances its aims) mean that narrow and ephemeral majorities cannot exercise power effectively. They must deal with broad and durable minorities, and work to build consensus before they can exercise institutional power.
One key reason for these complicated checks on majority power is to protect minorities, of course. But another is precisely to build consensus that reaches further than simple majority power. As legal scholar John McGinnis has put it, “A consensus political process unites rather than divides the citizenry because, in a world with consensus requirements, citizens are more likely to identify with the polity as a whole instead of seeing themselves as part of an embattled minority waiting for its turn to rule.”
Just as social peace isn’t always quiet, so building consensus isn’t always amicable. Indeed, negotiating processes are inherently adversarial. But by compelling different factions to confront each other constructively with the aim of concrete common action, such processes can forge common ground. An effective legislative accommodation doesn’t just give each of two sides half a loaf. It gives us practical experience in living and acting together.
Indeed, as my AEI colleague Philip Wallach has shown, the Anglo-American tradition of legislative power has always prioritized the unifying capacity of seemingly adversarial legislative work. By simultaneously representing a diverse populace and working out differences in its name, Congress can sometimes reflect its compromises back upon the public and create shared ambitions where before there were only conflicting ones.
Most policy debates do not involve the deepest fundamental questions in which our regime is rooted, nor do they involve technical questions with precise scientific answers. Rather, they embody disputes between broadly legitimate if not equally reasonable options for public action. Finding the right answer in such circumstances is not a matter of metaphysical proofs, but neither is it a matter of technocratic formulas. It is a matter of settling on an approach most broadly satisfactory to the relevant community as a whole. The goal is to address a problem in a way that most people are happy with, and which they think reflects some understanding of their wishes and priorities. There is no one coherent public will for a president to instantiate, and no one clear answer for a judge to discern. Rather, there are differences to be accommodated through good-faith legislative bargaining and disputes to be resolved within a shared framework.
Needless to say, this is not what Congress often looks like now. There have been some instances in recent years of genuine cross-partisan bargaining over key issues — especially thanks to the filibuster in the Senate. But accommodation has been all too rare, and much of the time the institution is dominated by culture-war theatrics and partisan grandstanding. When reformers consider how Congress might need to change, however, they too often overlook what it is failing to do. Frustrated with the failure to advance their favored legislation, rather than with the failure to advance national cohesion, they yearn for the model of more narrowly majoritarian European parliaments.
Such a model is unlikely to yield durable legislation in our system. And more important, it would further undermine the capacity of our politics to engage in common work toward reconcilable goals. If Congress is to be reformed, it should be made better able to facilitate bargaining across lines of difference, rather than less dependent on such bargaining. To see that this is one important purpose of the Congress would help us grasp how improving our practice of constitutionalism could better build solidarity.
Steady Administration
The presidency, as a unitary institution, cannot play the same role in advancing national cohesion. It is not a venue for accommodation and bargaining but a locus of action intended both to execute the laws and to respond to demanding exigencies on behalf of the nation.
But in both respects, and along with his other essential duties, the president does have an important role to play in making greater national unity possible. And this, too, is evident in the structure of the presidency, as much as in its powers.
To see how, it is crucial to recognize that the Constitution establishes a government in which — because of the unprecedented scope of the republic — effective administration is exceptionally important. The Framers put great emphasis on this point. James Madison described the poor administration of the national government under the Articles of Confederation as a threat to public peace and a key reason for calling the Constitutional Convention. And Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 68, asserted bluntly that “the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.”
This meant not only effective and energetic management of public affairs, but perhaps above all stability in the work of the government and its relation to the people. As my AEI colleague Adam White has wisely argued, the Framers insisted that “only steady administration, with a reliable rule of law, provides the sturdy foundation upon which American life can build and flourish.”
The term “steady administration” is Hamilton’s, from Federalist No. 70, where he described it as one of the crucial needs of a republic than can only be met by putting the executive power in the hands of a single individual. Steadiness was also a priority for Madison. “The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils,” he wrote in Federalist No. 44. But by highlighting the necessity of steady administration to good government, both of them also gestured toward its importance for the unity of the polity.
For one thing, as Hamilton suggested in Federalist No. 17, the attachment of the people to the national government would depend on its capacity to administer and enforce the laws reliably. For another, effective and steady administration could contribute to the lowering of the political temperature, and to a sense of confidence that elections would not result in sudden and dramatic changes, so that the stakes of political contests were not absolute.
The president is subject to the laws, which generally cannot change abruptly, and in making his own administrative judgments he is expected to appreciate the importance of steadiness and of stability. He has a duty to enforce even laws he disagrees with and court orders he opposes. And while he is empowered to propose legislative measures to Congress and to veto bills, he is not ultimately a representative of the public in legislative work but the chief administrator of the government. Social peace, and the sense of security required to engage openly with other citizens rather than approach them as enemies, depends on the kind of stability that such administration makes possible.
The president thus plays a unique role in assuring public confidence in the Constitution and the government, and that confidence is to be achieved not so much by governing as the public wishes in any given moment as by governing well. Although the president is elected, the presidency was not intended to be a fundamentally representative institution. The office is defined by a set of duties. And second only to the president’s duties to respond to threats to the nation’s security are his duties to execute the laws steadily and reliably, and so to set a course that accounts for the dangers of tumult and chaos.
Here too, our contemporary constitutional practice has become disconnected from its intended aims. We now think of the presidency in the same terms in which we think of Congress, which are neither legislative nor quite executive terms but something like performative partisan terms. And we have particularly lost sight of the importance of steadiness and stability in the president’s work. A change of party in the White House now yields a nasty whiplash, as a new chief executive hurries to undo his predecessor’s signature administrative actions and put in place equal and opposite temporary measures of his own.
And the apparatus of regulation built up around the chief executive — what has come to be called the administrative state — too often functions as a substitute legislature, less slow and cumbersome than Congress and more assertive and focused but often not less partisan: It is a parliament of lawyers eager to fill through vigorous administrative rulemaking various policy voids that the Constitution intended only incremental legislative accommodation and deal-making to fill.
This is obviously detrimental to the work of steady administration, but it is at least as harmful to our society’s capacity for unity and civic peace. It vastly increases the stakes of presidential elections, and encourages us to see our society as two opposing camps arrayed against each other for control of the instruments of power.
A restoration of the constitutional system to something like its proper form and balance is therefore not just a matter of constraining government power. It would offer us a way to recover the capacity of our governing institutions to forge some of the common ground we lack, and the capacity of the presidency to secure a stable backdrop for American public life.
The Meaning of Law
At first glance, we might imagine that what the courts have to offer the cause of national unity must be rooted in their power to resolve public disputes. But the courts seek to resolve disputes decisively, which is not generally a way to build common ground. Sometimes there is no alternative to deciding great national controversies by designating a clear winner and loser. But we should want to minimize those times, and to address disputes with fellow citizens through more accommodating means where we reasonably can. The tendency to turn every great national debate into a blockbuster Supreme Court case often amounts to a tendency to evade the hard work of republican citizenship and republican statesmanship.
Of course, there will always be some disputes that are actually about how the laws are carried out and how the Constitution should be understood, and are therefore properly work for judges. Much of the time, such disputes can be resolved by applying the text to a given circumstance. In all but the hardest cases, such textualism isn’t actually all that controversial. Our society is well served by courts that pursue their interpretive work in an originalist and textualist spirit as a general matter — putting the evident meaning of the law above the substantive outcomes desired by judges.
But in hard cases, which tend to matter most, judges often cannot simply apply texts, and it is no use pretending otherwise. Law is inherently vague while the life of a society is full of achingly concrete circumstances. “All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications,” Madison noted in Federalist No. 37.
Some of this liquidation takes place through the work of administration, though what significance judges should give to that work has been a controversial question even among judicial originalists. And some of it must be done by judges themselves. The question of what sorts of theories of interpretation those judges should use in determining the meaning of the law is therefore enormously significant and highly contested.
At its origins, modern originalism sought to be understood as a theory of judicial restraint, which would limit the role of the judge’s own judgment in such circumstances, seeking instead to empower the authors of the text being applied to the extent that their meaning could be understood. This approach thus presented itself as neutral textual analysis.
Over time, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett has put it, “originalism has shifted from being a theory about how judges should decide cases to a theory about what counts as valid, enforceable law. The Constitution’s original public meaning is important not because adhering to it limits judicial discretion, but because it is the law. And because it is the law, judges must be faithful to it.” But in the hardest cases, judges may face not only a lack of will to enforce the original meaning of the Constitution but a lack of clarity about that meaning in the circumstances before them. Some principle, some substantive moral good they assume is inherent in the Constitution, has to guide their pursuit of that meaning.
The tendency of originalists to ignore or dismiss this problem has driven two waves of conservative unease with originalism over the last several decades. Both have been rooted in the sense that substantive neutrality is neither possible nor desirable as a principle of interpretation, and that it renders the work of judges morally vacuous. The first wave proposed that individual liberty, rooted especially in a libertarian reading of the opening of the Declaration of Independence, ought to be the substantive interpretive principle in those hard cases. The second has argued that an ideal of the common good, rooted particularly in the classical and Christian legal traditions, should serve that purpose. In practice, the two would point in opposite directions in many particular cases, but they are remarkably similar as critiques of modern originalism and as arguments for an assertive and active judiciary. Both chafe against the notion that a judge’s role is to make himself scarce, which in hard cases they view as an evasion of responsibility.
That critique has real force. But it may ultimately only point toward a stronger argument for originalism, and one that sheds light on the role the judiciary can play in the kind of solidarity-minded constitutionalism we have been tracing. The notion that genuinely hard cases require an organizing interpretive principle is persuasive, but the most persuasive candidate for that role is the very republicanism that underlay the constitutional thinking of the Framers.
In truly uncertain cases, where the original public meaning of the constitutional text is not clear, judges might avail themselves of the political philosophy that most prominently motivated the authors of that text. That philosophy is not so much liberal as republican, and it is far from neutral with regard to public morality. It is grounded in an anthropology of human fallenness and human dignity, a sociology of civic responsibility and communal self-rule, and a politics of solidarity and common action.
As a practical matter, however, a republican interpretive principle would have a great deal in common with contemporary originalism, since it would prioritize the work of the legislature — as the embodiment of the community’s practice of self-rule — over the substantive preferences of judges or presidents, would value steady and effective administration, and would grasp the importance of accommodative consensus-building, social peace, and the rule of law.
That said, drawing such practical guidance from an orientation to republicanism would require a lot of intellectual work to clarify the meaning of modern republicanism — as the Framers understood it and as we should — and its relation to natural law, to liberalism, and to democracy. This would be constructive work for conservative political and legal theorists in the coming years.
A More Perfect Union
Conservative constitutional thought should champion the republican cause as an appealing organizing principle more generally. It points toward the shape that a constitutional restoration ought to take: the reinvigoration of Congress as a genuinely legislative body enabling cross-partisan negotiation; the prioritization of steady administration in the reform of the executive branch; an assertive role for the courts in requiring the elected branches to step up to their responsibilities rather than having judges take those over; a restoration of meaningful federalism rooted in a commitment to communal self-rule that balances majority will with minority rights; and an emphasis on responsible citizenship and civic virtue in our engagement with politics. That is what it would mean to pursue a restoration of republicanism to its proper prominence in America’s civic vocabulary.
And this kind of approach to constitutional restoration stands to offer not only political and administrative benefits but also a practical path toward greater national unity. The Constitution was intended to help our fractious society address its divisions. It offers proven and plausible means for doing so. Yet we have lost sight of those means, and indeed of the possibility that meaningful national unity can be forged at all.
That Americans have come to see themselves as hopelessly divided is both a cause and an effect of the constitutional crisis we confront. Today, that hopelessness demands that we call upon the resources of our political tradition. Too many thoughtful Americans now dismiss that tradition as morally hollow. But they have mistaken crude caricatures of our political heritage for the real thing, and so risk denying our society the capacity for recovery.
At the heart of our republicanism is an idea of the human being and citizen rooted in the highest traditions of the West: that we are each fallen and imperfect yet made in a divine image and possessed of equal dignity; that individuals are social creatures meant to live together; that living together requires a commitment to pursue the common good; and that this pursuit in a free and therefore diverse society requires of the citizen selflessness, accommodation, restraint, deliberation, and service.
That ideal should be the starting point of any constitutional restoration. It calls upon not only our institutions and our elites, but upon every one of us to take on the responsibility of citizenship, and to accept the duties that come with the high privilege of calling ourselves Americans. It gives us each something to do, and gives us all a lot to do together. And we will need to take it seriously if we mean to preserve the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.