Understanding the Constitution #20: It Requires Civility and Compromise
Another election has delivered another divided Congress. While the results offer some hope that extremism has been tempered, it’s too early to celebrate. Angry and dangerous partisanship persists. Though 64 percent of Americans in a 2021 poll want members of Congress who “will compromise to get things done,” compromise seems as elusive as grabbing fog. Even that poll’s good news is tempered by extremists. The same survey found that only 33 percent of those who described themselves as “very conservative” want a compromiser. Liberals claimed they’re more supportive of members who compromise, but the extreme wing of their party regularly criticizes those who try to do just that.
Compromise is the willingness to “give something to get something.” The need for political horse-trading was built into the governing mechanism of the Constitution, which divides power among the three branches of the federal government and between the national government and the states. Since no one has all the power, the Constitution sees compromise as the way to get things done. Without it, we get gridlock at best and at worst the cynical belief that democracy just can’t work
Where compromising bogs down is that those doing political horse-trading have to listen to each other and develop sufficient trust to find agreement. In short, they have to act civilly. Civility comes from the Latin civilitas, which means courtesy. Civil society must to a sufficient extent be a courteous society or it degenerates into warfare, political and/or real. When politicians stoke anger, fear and hatred inside and outside the chambers of Congress, civility is nowhere to be found.
The Constitution doesn’t mention civility nor does it offer any way to achieve it. But one of its founding architects, Benjamin Franklin, had a lot to say about political courtesy. As a young Philadelphian, Franklin formed a group of local tradesmen, called the Junto, to learn together and devise ways to improve society. Before becoming a useful member, initiates had to answer the question: “Do you have disrespect for any current member?” Junto members also had to pay small fines for “all expressions of positiveness in opinion or direct contradiction of others.” In short, they couldn’t assert they were clearly in the right and that others were obviously wrong. As Franklin had earlier himself resolved, they should be “humble inquirers.”
As the oldest member by far at the Constitutional Convention decades later, Franklin urged this approach to civility in the contentious maelstrom of sovereign states deciding if they could compromise to form “a more perfect union.” As chronicled in his richly detailed biography of Franklin, Walter Isaacson notes that Franklin reminded the delegates at one point that “Both sides must part with some of their demands” and at another that “We are sent hither to consult, not to contend, with each other.”
On June 11, 1787, Franklin sought to breach the convention’s largest chasm, the one separating large and small states over representation in Congress. “Until this point [about] the proportion of representation came before us, our debates were carried on with great coolness and temper,” he said. “Declaration of fixed opinion, and of determined resolution never to change it, neither enlighten nor convince us.” “Positiveness and warmth on one side,” he went on to say, “naturally beget their like on the other.”
The issue was still not resolved on June 28, and Franklin then suggested each session of the Convention open with a prayer. The final “great compromise” in which members of the House would be apportioned by a state’s population and each state in the Senate would have equal representation was still days away, but Franklin’s proposal reminded delegates that civility would be needed to get there.
Even on the Convention’s last day, September 17, 1787, Franklin urged civility and compromise, acknowledging the need for humility, a key ingredient in civility:
“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. Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error.”
He ended his speech, which at 81 and feeble he needed James Wilson, a fellow Pennsylvania delegate, to read with these words:
“On the whole, Sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.”
“A stand for compromise,” historian Barbara Oberg has noted, “is not the stuff of heroism, virtue, or moral certainty. But it is the essence of the democratic process.” As Isaacson also put it at the end of his biography, “Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies.”
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