- [Announcer] The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents the Civic Discourse Project, Civics, Patriotism, and America's Prospects.

This week... - If our republic eventually goes the way of all past republics, what will cause it to go that way?

That's what the founders were worried about in trying to design a new system.

- [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

And now, Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University talks about the constitution and civic virtue.

- Those of us who are citizens of democratic republics tend not to refer to those who govern us as rulers doing.

We don't speak of our rulers when we speak about President Biden or the Governor, or the legislators, or the sheriff.

It is our boast rather that we rule ourselves, that we are a government, not only of the people, which of course all government is, and not only a government for the people, which all good government is, even the government of a benign despot, but government, a government by the people, a Republican, or today the more common term is a democratic form of government.

A form of government under which the people rule.

The people govern themselves.

And there is truth in this boast that we govern ourselves.

We, of course, get to choose or at least play a role in choosing those who do govern us, those who do rule.

And so we prefer to speak of governors and presidents and other elected officials, not as our rulers, but as what?

Servants, public servants, or at least people in public service.

If we watch a politician being interviewed on television, let's say a member of the United States Senate, he or she might say, well, in all of my 38 years of public service, I have never seen such an outrageous thing as what's being proposed by the other party.

But that reference is to public service.

I'm a public servant.

Heavens, I'm not a ruler.

I'm not a governor.

I don't govern people.

I serve them.

Now, of course, these so-called servants are nothing remotely like the servants on say, "Downton Abbey", right?

Did you watch "Downton Abbey", Carson, the Butler?

The extraordinary prestige, and usually the trappings attaching to public office in just about all times and all places would by themselves be sufficient to distinguish, say, the mayor of Phoenix or the Governor of Arizona, or the President of the United States from Carson, the Butler.

But that prestige signals an underlying fact that discomfits our democratic and egalitarian sensibilities, namely the fact that even in liberal democratic regimes, even in democratic republics like ours, high public officials are rulers.

They make the rules.

They enforce the rules.

They resolve disputes about the meaning and applicability of the rules.

We have some judges and justices in the audience with us this evening.

And we don't shy away from referring to the judicial branch of government, whether state or federal, as a branch of the government, do we?

To a very large extent, at the end of the day, what the people in office say goes.

Now, of course, our rulers rule not by dent of sheer power the way the mafia might do in a territory over which it happens to have gained control, but rather our rulers rule lawfully.

Constitutional rules specify public offices and settle the procedures for filling those offices.

So though holders of public office are indeed rulers, they are not absolute rulers.

Constitutional rules set the scope and thus the limits of their jurisdiction, to use that lawyer's term, and authority.

They are, in other words, rulers who are themselves subject to rules.

They rule in limited ways and ordinarily for limited terms, which may or may not be indefinitely renewable at the pleasure of the voters.

They rule by virtue of democratic processes by which they come to hold public office.

They can be removed or significantly disempowered at the next election if the people are not happy with them.

Still, despite all that, they rule.

Now, my point is not to hoot at the idea of government and those holding governmental offices and controlling the levers of governmental power in our Republican democracy as servants.

I'm not holding that idea up to ridicule.

On the contrary, I want in the end to defend the idea that rulers can indeed be servants and ought to be.

I want to establish, however, that if these people we call public servants are indeed servants, they're servants in a very special sense.

A sense that is compatible with them at the same time being rulers.

They are people who serve us how?

By ruling.

They serve us well by ruling well.

A good public servant is a, a servant who rules well.

If they rule badly, of course, they serve us poorly.

They disservice us.

Our founders sought to protect liberty and prevent tyranny by constraining governmental power, by limiting and checking the power of those servants who rule us by exercising authority over us.

And so, for example, at the heart of our constitutional system is the distinction between a national government of delegated and enumerated, and therefore limited powers, validly exercising only powers that have been delegated to it via the constitution by the people, we the people, and state governments as governments of general jurisdiction exercising plenary authority, what in our tradition we call police powers to protect public health, safety and morals and advance the common good.

And of course, even within the national government powers, checking power, you remember this from your high school civics, I hope.

The idea that we're not gonna unify the government on a parliamentary model or something like that.

We're actually going to have a separation of the powers of the legislature, the executive and the judicial with these independent branches of government functioning independently and in various ways limiting and checking each other to retain the sovereignty, the ultimate sovereignty of the people, and to prevent the depredations against liberty, which can be expected no matter how virtuous we think our leaders are, can be expected in situations where power is unlimited.

So in stressing the need for civic virtue and for the institutions of civil society that impart those virtues in ways that government cannot, I'm not trying to underplay the importance of structural constraints on power of our constitutional system.

The American constitutional system is in my view, on the most solid possible ground in establishing them and insisting upon them.

But experience shows all too well that these structural constraints, as good as they are, as necessary as they are, will be effective only where they are effectually supported by the people.

That is by the political culture.

The people need to understand them and value them.

And value them enough to resist user patience by their rulers, even when unconstitutional programs offer immediate gratifications or the relief of urgent problems.

And this, in turn requires certain virtues, strengths of character among the people.

But again, these virtues don't just fall down from the heavens.

They have to be transmitted and nurtured through the generations.

If you wanna ask the question, if constitutional government does fail, what will cause it to fail?

If our republic eventually goes the way of all past republics, what will cause it to go that way?

Not only failing but collapsing into the worst forms of tyranny.

That's the historical record of Republican government governments.

That's what the founders were worried about in trying to design a new system that would enable Republican government to long endure, as Lincoln would later, later put it.

I would guess, my money would be on the failure, the innervation, the undermining of the autonomy and authority of institutions of civil society, an undermining that government itself will have played a very significant role in making happen.

So we have a big stake.

We in our prosperity of prosperity, we and our posterity have a big stake.

Your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, in the flourishing of the institutions of civil society, if we want to keep this republic.

And this is not only because of their primary and indispensable role in transmitting virtues, it's also because of their performance of basic health, education and welfare functions.

Getting the kids teeth brushed in the morning, getting them up, getting them to school, getting them fed, looking at their report cards.

You don't want a government office checking the kids' report cards.

That's for mom and dad.

But where the institutions of civil society fail, the only alternative, the only real alternative, will be the removal of their functions to larger and higher associations, to government.

And when government expands to play the primary role in performing those functions because they pushed the institutions of civil society out of the way, or the institutions of civil society have failed, and government has no choice but to come in, government's going to grow and it's going to expand into more and more areas of life.

It will perform the functions that should be performed by families and churches and civic associations of every sort.

And the ideal of limited government, of course, will be lost.

The government will do those jobs because it has to.

It'll do it poorly, do them poorly, but it will do them.

And the corresponding weakening of the status and authority of the institutions of civil society, the damaging of those institutions will mean that the pedagogical functions that they serve will also be damaged.

So we will not be a well instructed people.

We will not be a well-informed and effective citizenry.

And with that, our institutions surely lose their capacity to influence for the good, the political culture, which at the end of the day is the whole shooting match when it comes to whether our rulers really will be servants.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) - Civil disagreement, so many contentious questions of political life at every level.

And the fact that we have so many levels of government from national, federal, state, and local.

What should the civil institutions of society, the little platoons, what should they be educating in everyday life through thought and and action?

And isn't civil disagreement one that they should be trying to model and trying to practice?

- The great challenge, of course, to republics historically, as, as Madison points out in Federalist Number 10, is faction, polarization, tribalism.

And again, that's human nature, isn't it?

We are naturally tribal creatures.

We, we form groups and, and communities, and they're always, they're always insiders and outsiders.

There's our team and the other team, there's our family, our clan, our group, our tribe, our religion, our political party, and so forth.

And it's so easy for us, frail, fallible, fallen human beings to fall into the trap.

And it really is a trap.

And here again, I wanna praise Professor Rawles.

It's so easy to fall into the trap of supposing that anybody who disagrees with me must have a bad motive, must be a bad person.

It's really hard for us to truly acknowledge, more than notionally, I mean, existentially really acknowledge in our hearts that we're fallible.

We could be wrong, the other guy could be right, or partially right, and we're partially wrong.

Things are hard.

Even the stuff we really deep deeply care about, our deepest, most cherished, even our identity forming beliefs could be wrong.

And even if they're not, it's still possible for reasonable people of goodwill to fail to see what we have perhaps with great effort attained, understood.

- I feel like in my generation, there are trends of a more secular and isolated world.

Isolated in the fact that there's less value on community institutions, but also physical separations like the increase of working from home.

And I'm not trying to put value judgments on either the secularism or the work from home, but I am wondering how we can rebuild or create new types of institutions in the current times?

- That would build community.

- I'm, I'm gonna, I think there are two dimensions of, if I've, if I've understood you correctly, and if I've not, just make me come back.

The first dimension had to do with the loss, indeed collapse of trust in institutions.

And, and that's true.

I mean, all the data, all the survey data, all the work of the, of the methodologists, the political scientists who, who use quantitative measure and so forth, all the research points in the same direction.

And that is the, the near collapse, I guess it would be best to say, of trust in institutions.

And all I can say is that institutions are run by people, and people have all the flaws and foibles and problems of being human.

And this much we can say.

In the case of most of the institutions in which people have lost trust, the people running the institutions have done an awful lot to earn it.

There are reasons that people distrust.

It's not the problem with the people, it's the problem of the people who run the institutions, letting the side down, corruption, dishonesty, partisanship, you know, and, and people see that and they get disgusted by it, and they lose faith in, in institutions.

You're right that we need to rebuild community.

And of course, the, the pandemic didn't help there.

And we could argue about the policies of the, of the pandemic, but whether they were justified or unjustified, the isolation of people undermined community and community formation in ways that are gonna, that are gonna ramify, we're gonna be years living with consequences.

I think of the pandemic and the policies that depending on your point of view, it necessitated or shouldn't have been enacted, or should have been, should have been different.

One of those, I mean, one, one, and then, I don't wanna just single this one out, but to me it's, it's just kind of interesting, is the decline in church attendance.

And going all the way back to Tocqueville, Americans, Tocqueville noticed Americans build community in their houses of, of worship.

And one of the most remarkable things about this country is the way that people of different faiths are able to join together as fellow citizens, even though they're in different places on the Saturdays and Sundays.

Our political parties are not organized along religious lines.

You know, the, there, the Democrats have Catholics and Republicans, Catholics and Protestants, and the Republicans have Catholics and Protestants and and so forth.

But our political system, our political institutions do depend on virtues that, that get imparted in the context of communities.

And I would put religious communities in the forefront there.

So it's a problem for our civic life.

If there is a loss of community at the Ecclesial level, I think we're, we're, if people are isolated in part because they're just not getting together for religious worship.

No matter how religious they are at the, within their own individual homes and their isolated lives, long term that would be a problem.

So I think people in all domains of civil society, pastors, coaches, people who are already able and willing to lead campfire girls and scout troops and do little league and all that stuff, need to push really hard to rebuild those institutions.

It's those institutions that have been damaged and we need to get them up and running again.

It may seem pretty remote from big political decisions, whether there's a little league game going on, but a lot of the virtues that we need in people, people learn in things like little league.

That's the magic of the system, where they learn them in church on Sunday, they learn them in the campfire girls or in the, in the 4H or what have you.

So we've all got a stake in the, in the functioning of civil society.

We can't just say, well, as long as the constitutional institutions are fine, we're okay.

Our founders understood that that wasn't enough.

That that's that point about auxiliary and primary.

You know, the real work of virtue formation is not done by political institutions.

It's done by institutions of civil society, the communities, the little platoons, - Our whole tradition and the constitution is based upon freedom of expression, freedom of the press.

And the press has gone totally to the left now.

So is there any way to get the press back?

So these two last elections, the 2022 elections did not turn out to be one time, one vote Venezuela kind of thing.

- Okay, freedom of the press.

- Okay, and then a last question.

- Hi, how does a country or society restore civic virtue without imposing or mandating different personal values on others?

- Yeah, okay.

So first, the freedom of the press.

The idea of a nonpartisan, impartial press is actually a fairly new one.

Those of us who grew up in the post World War II generations, if your, if your dad or your granddad was in World War II you probably think of the norm of the ideal as a non-partisan press.

I mean, reporters who do just the facts.

And don't, don't allow personal opinions to infect the facts.

But at earlier points in our history, in the history of the republic, the newspapers were straightforwardly unambiguously and unapologetically partisan.

So if you really wanted to get at the facts, you would read the papers from both sides and you would believe what they said about the other side, but not what they said about themselves or their own, their own side.

This was even true during the coverage of course, of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858.

We of course, don't have transcripts of the debates, but we have something pretty close to transcripts of the debates from the newspaper reports at the time.

But, but it turns out that the Republican papers would edit Lincoln's remarks to improve at least their flow and diction and so forth.

And the Democrat papers would edit Douglas' remarks.

So if you wanna know what they actually said, believe the Republican papers on Douglas and the Democratic papers on, on Lincoln, and there is actually an, an addition of the Federal, of the Lincoln-Douglas debates out that that has, that that did it, did it exactly that way.

One nice thing about the age that we live in is that nobody is stuck with "ABC", "NBC", "CBS", "PBS", "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", and "The Wall Street Journal".

You can go on the internet and you can read all sorts of stuff.

I mean, from all sorts of different perspectives.

Now, I kind of would like to have at least some in the mix, some non-partisan perspectives.

The best we can do there that I can think of is the aggregators, like "Real Clear Politics", which I think does a good job of, I wake up in the morning, I go to "Real Clear Politics", and I see what looks to me like a selection on a non-partisan basis of what somebody at "Real Clear Politics" thinks are the best, most interesting op-ed pieces and speeches and things like that coming from the Democrats and the Republicans in the right and the left.

So I think that's the best we can do, at least the best we are doing right now.

If some aspiring journalists out there want to build institutions that really will provide non-partisan perspectives on the news.

I'm all for that.

I'm not, I'm not denying that that would be a good thing.

We don't have a, we don't have much of a history of that.

Even when our news media purported to be non-par, that post-World War II generation thing.

I mean, the truth is they were pretty partisan.

So now we do the best we can.

On the second question about rebuilding society without imposing.

Of course, here we get into the big questions of political morality and the common good.

What counts as the imposition of your values on somebody else as opposed to what counts as putting into place laws and policies that advance the common good?

Somebody might say, well, you know, to, to stop somebody from engaging in the practice of prostitution is violating their basic liberty.

Other, other people are gonna say, no, that's actually for the, you know, that's actually serving the common good.

Prostitution is damaging not only the people who are involved in it morally, but also to the society as a whole.

Then there are people on the other side that say, you know, you, you want real violations of liberty, rent control laws, rent control laws are real violations of people's liberties.

And by the way, not just rent control laws, but all these government regulations that, that impose on the business owner and even civil rights laws.

These civil rights laws tell people who they can and can't serve.

But that's imposing on, on their liberties.

Now your perspective on that is going to be shaped by your broader understanding of political morality and indeed of, of morality itself.

If you're a certain kind of person, it's just gonna be obvious to you that of course, people should have the right to have prostitution if they, or be involved in prostitution if they want, but they certainly shouldn't have the right to be free of rent control.

From another political if your view is shaped from the other side, they're gonna say, well, obviously people shouldn't be allowed to engage in prostitution, but there shouldn't be rent control laws.

So before anybody gets up and makes a big speech about the imposition on liberty, I think they should examine their own presuppositions and identify what perspective they're coming from and see if they can actually defend with good reasons and evidence and argument the perspective that they hold that's gonna be shaping their idea of what does count as policies that are for the common good and what do really count and should really count as violations of people's personal liberty.

It's not nearly as easy as some people on both sides of the political spectrum think it is.

- And with that one, less thanks to Professor Robert George.

- Thank you everyone.

(audience applauding) - [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

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