Americans rightly celebrate Sept. 17 as Constitution Day — the day in 1787 that delegates in Philadelphia signed the United States Constitution. What we often forget is a letter that George Washington wrote on that same day to the Confederation Congress to accompany the proposed constitution.
In that letter, Washington described what had led to success at the convention over the previous four months: “The Constitution which we now present is the Result of a Spirit of Amity and of that mutual Deference & Concession which the Peculiarity of our political Situation rendered indispensable.”
In contrast to that spirit of amity in 1787, we now live in a society characterized by two political tribes (Team Blue and Team Red) that hate each other. Democrats and Republicans have more unfavorable views of each other than at any time since polling began. This contempt regularly expresses itself in political violence and political assassinations like the kind we saw at Utah Valley University last week.
I believe that for the American experiment in self-government to succeed, we must return to the spirit of charity and moderation that characterized the political behavior of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention.
How did they do it? According to Washington, they were governed by “a spirit of amity and ... mutual deference” because of “the peculiarity of [their] political situation.” I believe that peculiar situation was pluralism.
The delegates to the convention recognized that their political situation was pluralist rather than monist. That is, they recognized that they were meeting together to debate dozens of different issues (a plurality of issues) rather than just one. As a result, they recognized that there were not just two hostile camps at the convention — each with an incentive to dominate the other — but several small factions that would need to form large coalitions of groups working together to achieve a few common ends.
If each delegate simply held out for their preferred position on the many distinct issues debated at the convention, no stable majority could have been created to draft and approve the Constitution. However, recognizing the plurality of issues at stake and the plurality of groups created by those various issues allowed each delegate to see the other delegates at the convention as moral and rational agents trying to pursue the public interest in a complex world of many interests. This intellectual framework is called pluralism.
If, instead, they had seen each delegate as simply belonging to just one of two warring tribes, they would have been led to see each delegate as either a 100% friend or enemy. This intellectual framework, which assumes just one big issue and two groups competing over the one thing, is called monism.
James Madison did as much as anyone to bring delegates together at the Constitutional Convention, to get the debates started with his Virginia Plan, to record the debates in his notes for future generations to study and to urge adoption of the proposed Constitution through his Federalist essays. In explaining how the Constitution would solve the recurrent democratic problem of faction and majority tyranny, Madison famously explained in Federalist 10 that pluralism, created by a large republic, was the ingenious solution of the Constitution’s framers. Pluralism was the dominant intellectual framework of the United States for the first 150 years of its history.
Unfortunately, over the past century, Americans have replaced pluralism with monism — much to our detriment. Starting in the 1920s, American intellectuals and journalists started using the framework of a “left–right” spectrum. According to this paradigm, we can place every person, party, idea or institution on a line running from “left” to “right” depending on their disposition toward change.
The political spectrum tells us that all policies naturally bundle together into two packages because a “progressive” disposition in favor of change leads to one set of positions (higher income taxes, lower import taxes, more gun control, less drug control, foreign intervention in Ukraine, etc.) while a “conservative” disposition against change leads to the opposite set of positions (lower income taxes, higher import taxes, less gun control, more drug control, nonintervention in Ukraine, etc.).
The political spectrum is based on the assumption that there is just one issue in politics — change — but clearly this isn’t the case. There are many unrelated and distinct issues, and the stance someone takes on one issue (say, tax cuts) does not determine the stance they take on another (say, abortion). Since there are many issues in politics and infinite ways to bundle those issues, we can’t possibly model politics using a single line.
The false political spectrum generates tribalistic hatred. If politics is a simple choice between “left” or “right,” then once we have chosen the “correct” side, we have all the political answers. We don’t need to think, reason or consider alternatives; we just need to destroy the “evil” people in the other camp. The spectrum gives us the delusion of omniscience and shuts down constructive dialogue. Rather than recognizing that each of our two major parties is inevitably correct about some things and wrong about others, it leads us to believe the lie that our own party is correct about everything and the other party is wrong about everything. Our political tribe is motivated by a good and wise philosophy (on the correct side of the spectrum), while the other political tribe is motivated by a stupid and evil philosophy (on the wrong side of the spectrum).
The Founders’ pluralist framework, in contrast to monism, lends itself to a “spirit of amity,” “mutual deference” and “concession.” It recognizes the truth that politics is about many different issues, and each fellow citizen we encounter is bound to be correct about some things and wrong about others. The recognition of this truth makes us intellectually humble and curious.
Ideas have consequences, and a bad idea — the monist “left–right” political spectrum — is tearing our country apart and leading to harmful tribalism, sloppy thinking and misinformation.
Constitution Day is a good time for us to reflect on how we can find ways to use the Founders’ wise pluralist framework more, and our own mistaken monist framework less. Only then can we find solutions to the vexing political problems of our time with the same success that they did in theirs with a “spirit of amity” and civic charity.