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Transcript
The people of Minnesota are showing us what it would be like to rescue our democracy from moral bankruptcy. Normally in a democracy, we should be reluctant to talk about politics in terms of morality, because as soon as we start judging each other’s political opinions as either moral or immoral, we start heading down the road towards intolerance, tyranny, and ultimately, violence.
We can’t live with each other, in peace anyway, if we think disagreement is a matter of good and evil.
But that doesn’t mean that democracy is amoral. It can’t be.
The Founders knew that. They knew that democracy was not just a system of checks and balances, separation of powers and a social contract.
It was built on a foundation of shared moral values. Those values should not be imposed from the top by a church or a king, but should come from the decisions made by a free people, a free people capable of making moral decisions.
It’s easy to find quotes from the founders that demonstrate just how crucial they thought the moral foundation of democracy was — a moral foundation that’s sometimes referred to as “civic virtue.”
It’s a phrase that sounds kind of quaint and dusty these days, which is one indication of how far we’ve strayed from understanding just how important civic virtue is.
Here’s John Adams:
Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.
Here’s Thomas Jefferson on civic virtue:
I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.
People will not come together in a union, and stay together, and sacrifice for each other, unless they can trust that they all share deep beliefs that go beyond their individual self-interest. Otherwise, they can’t trust each other.
And more than that, people need to believe in something, something more than their individual desires of the moment. And we can find endless examples throughout history of groups of people sacrificing their lives, enduring great suffering for something that apparently does them personally no good in the moment, but which they believe serves a higher purpose.
When people don’t share fundamental moral values, they split into factions and ultimately into separate societies. The Founders knew this, too.
Almost immediately after the Revolutionary War, they were expressing their fear of the loss of “the spirit of ‘76” that had united Americans in a higher cause, and the risk that Americans would then turn to their own private self-interest with little care for the survival of the Union. And they were right to be afraid of course: the Union was nearly destroyed less than a century later by the Civil War.
This is the paradox at the heart of democracy. Each individual is supposed to be free to think whatever they want. And yet the democracy can’t survive unless all individuals share certain fundamental beliefs.
They’re sources of inspiration. Inspiration for each of us to serve a higher cause for the benefit of all of us. People don’t do that just because they’re under the terms of a contract. You negotiate a contract and you may break a contract, but you serve a cause. And you do that without sacrificing your freedom by serving the cause of freedom.
That’s what the peaceful protesters of Minnesota are doing, even at the risk of their own lives. And it’s what others have done in Chicago and Los Angeles and across the country. And it’s what we all must continue to do.
Not in the service of any particular political ideology, not in the service of any one religion, although God knows there are plenty of Americans who think the only way to unite a society is by imposing an ideology on them, or imposing a religion on them, or simply exerting autocratic power over them.
Democracy will survive if we all stand up for the shared moral values that make democracy possible: individual freedom, equality, and government by consent of the people under the rule of law. And they can unite people, as we have also seen from any political party, from any religion, or from no religion.
These values resolve the paradox. They unite free people in the cause of freedom.