Civic Charity and the Constitution.

• Author: Griffith, Thomas B.

In 2018, Professor Amy Chua published a book titled, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. (1) By Professor Chua's account, the idea for the book started as a critique of the failure of American foreign policy to recognize that tribal loyalties were the most important political commitments in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. (2) But as Professor Chua studied the role such loyalties played in these countries, she recognized that the United States is itself divided among political tribes. (3) Of course, Professor Chua is not the first or the only scholar or pundit to point this out. (4)

I am neither a scholar nor a pundit, but I am an observer of the American political scene. I've lived during the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember well the massive street demonstrations protesting American involvement in the war in Vietnam, race riots in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and the impeachment and trial of President Bill Clinton. I mention all of this to provide some context for the belief that, in my lifetime, the Republic has been confronted with no more serious a challenge to its well-being and maybe even its survival than it faces today from political tribalism.

I am not alone in playing the role of Jeremiah. New York University's Professor Jonathan Haidt, whose groundbreaking scholarship helps us better understand the reasons competing groups see reality so differently, (5) is not known as a pessimist. But recently he sounded an ominous alarm. "[T]here is a very good chance," Professor Haidt warned, "that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy." (6) The reason for his concern? "We just don't know," he observed, "what a democracy looks like when you drain all the trust out of the system." (7)

Can we prove Professor Haidt's gloomy forecast wrong? At the very least, our public debates need more civility. Peter Wehner describes this virtue so vital to the functioning of our civic institutions:

Civility has to do with ... the respect we owe others as ... fellow human beings. It is both an animating spirit and a mode of discourse. It establishes limits so we don't treat opponents as enemies. And it helps inoculate us against one of the unrelenting temptations in politics (and in life more broadly), which is to demonize and dehumanize those who hold views different from our own.... ... [C]ivility, properly understood, advances rigorous arguments, for a simple reason: it forecloses ad hominem attacks, which is the refuge of sloppy, undisciplined minds. (8) But civility is the very least we should expect of those in the public square. As Arthur Brooks put it, "Tell people, 'My spouse and I are civil to each other,' and they'll tell you to get counseling." (9)

We must do better, and fortunately, we have a model. In 1787, the Framers set aside their tribal loyalties in a successful effort to form a more perfect Union. In a fascinating piece of historical scholarship titled, The Original Meaning of Civility: Democratic Deliberation at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, Derek Webb describes how the Framers overcame tribalism at the Philadelphia Convention to create the Constitution. (10) Much of what I will say about the Convention is drawn from Webb's article. In early July of 1787, the Convention was in a "deplorable state" and faced the very real prospect of failure. (11) George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and others feared that "dissolution" of the convention was "hourly to be apprehended." (12) And yet by mid-September, they had produced the Constitution that would be the basis for our enduring success as a nation. In his letter transmitting the Constitution to Congress, Washington attributed this surprising turn of events--what one popular account of the convention called the "Miracle at Philadelphia" (13)--to the "spirit of amity, and of that mutual deference ... which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable." (14)

According to Webb, three factors helped create this "indispensable" "spirit of amity [and] mutual deference." First, the delegates in the Convention were housed in the same city for four months, making informal social interaction unavoidable. (15) They gathered for deliberations Mondays through Saturdays from "10 or 11 a.m. to 3 or 3:30 p.m." (16) Afterwards they would take dinner together at local taverns. (17) After dinner, the delegates enjoyed evening tea together. (18) Eventually they formed dinner clubs that were open to delegates from all the states and cut across regional and ideological lines. (19) At several key junctures that summer, Benjamin Franklin threw open the doors of his home for lavish dinner parties that featured the finest cuisine available, topped off with Franklin's special casks of porter. (20) As George Mason wrote to his son, dinner parties at Franklin's home allowed almost perfect strangers with glowing political resumes from various states to "grow into some acquaintance with each other" and to "form a proper correspondence of sentiments" that would eventually prove to supply the good will needed to craft the Constitution. (21) Second, the rules of the Convention worked to encourage cooperation. Attendance was mandatory, which meant the delegates were physically present with one another while in session. (22) No one spoke to an empty chamber. And when a delegate held the floor...