What We Agree Upon - A July 4th Reflection

America seems an angry land as we celebrate the Declaration of Independence. Rather than uniting to fight a common enemy as we did in 1776, we seem driven in 2006 by disagreement, determined to define ourselves by our differences. We disagree on when our life begins and whether we have the right to end it when suffering a terminal disease. We differ on what marriage means, who has the right to marry, and even who has the authority to decide the answers to these questions. We cannot agree on how humans came to walk the planet and even if life evolved. Consensus on whether the world is warming and if it is, why and what to do about it, proves as illusive as fog that flees with the morning sun. Some of us would arrest those who burn the flag. Others are appalled at a proposal to do so. We want our president to protect us against terrorists, but we argue about whether he has gone too far.

For all of its cacophony, however, America has a solution crafted as a master symphony. The fight over amendments to ban flag burning and gay marriage, the push and pull to shape the Supreme Court for the battle over abortion, the decision on whether to pass legislation to address global warming, and the controversy over whether the President has over-stepped his authority all share a common denominator. The Constitutional process will enable us to find an answer. The Constitution is the touchstone and a gyroscope. It gives us a common faith and a source of stability.

This is a remarkable achievement. We are a “people of the parchment.” While at times we seem to agree on little else, we agree that the Constitution offers a means to resolve our disagreements. We may distrust each other, but we trust this document and the machinery of government it established, both so fragile and uncertain in 1787.

The framers understood that, as Madison said, “men are not angels” and that a “factious spirit” was the price of liberty. They would not be surprised that we differ as we do. They would be pleased that the Constitutional process for peaceably resolving our differences is invoked so readily by so many and that it has earned the respect that only history and fidelity could give it.

The framers would be quick to remind us, however, that a working Constitution requires an underlying set of shared civic values. Without a commitment to something broader and more important than winning a political argument, the Constitution becomes just an instrument for waging ideological warfare.

The willingness to compromise is one of these civic values. When our national dialogue goes too far toward “either-or” and seeks too little of “yes-and,” we risk a polarization that does injustice to our founders’ hopes. The framers created the nation in a masterful set of compromises. They understood that reasoned, heated debate would at some point be resolved through an electoral majority, but they also understood that the majority had obligations to those with divergent views. Thomas Jefferson assumed the presidency in the first American election where political parties contested the outcome. After a savage battle decided only when thrown into the House of Representatives, he reminded his inaugural audience that: “All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” Compromise is not, as some would have it today, a source of weakness and failure. It is an essential recognition that, in the end, we must find common ground if we wish to avoid paralysis on one hand or paroxysm on the other.

The humility essential to acknowledging our own fallibility is a second civic value the founders would have us remember. These men of the Enlightenment expected knowledge to progress and show them the errors of their earlier thinking. They had faults to be sure, but hubris was not one of them. Benjamin Franklin, in asking for a unanimous vote to adopt the Constitution at the close of the 1787 convention from which many angry delegates walked out, modeled this behavior: “I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve,” he said, “but I am not sure I shall never approve them; for having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.” Humility in the face of opposition is not cowardice. It is the courage to admit the possibility of error, which in the end is essential for compromise.
Such civic values make for good government. They also make for the foundation of social trust on which any good government must be erected. Since the 1960s, Americans’ trust in their elected leaders has plummeted. Their trust in “the system,” the Constitutional architecture that supports the house of government, has not.

Social trust is fragile, however. It can be destroyed. The passionate activists of both the left and the right would do well to understand this. E pluribus unum always depends on a delicate balance between the pluribus and the unum, between the desires of diverse interests and the need for community. If we forget the art and importance of compromise, if we demonize the opposition in our love affair with our own certainty, and especially if we forget the ends of the Constitution – a more perfect Union - and view it solely as a means, then we could destroy the vehicle we all depend on to see us through our differences.