Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
Over the past 11 months I have written more than 30 essays for The Fulcrum’s A Republic if we can keep it series. My charge was “to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year,” and to remind readers of the matchless quality of our unique experiment in democracy. The process of putting these constitutional thoughts on paper has been exceedingly rewarding, and I hope readers have learned a thing or two along the way.
Sadly, though, I now fear that I failed miserably in my one crucial task.
The Fulcrum is a special platform “where insiders and outsiders to politics are informed, meet, talk, and act to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives.” In our everyday lives! That’s an important qualifier.
The platform rests on several steadfast principles. Primarily, it is fiercely nonpartisan. I have tried to remain so in my own writings, and where I have strayed the wonderful editors of the publication have put me straight.
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But like most readers I possess a longstanding partisan identity, shaped by years of lived experience. I am a moderate Democrat, more Pete Buttigieg than Bernie Sanders. Even being centrist, though, is ideological. It is hard to be nonpartisan when democracy is a zero-sum game. It is especially hard to be nonpartisan when you believe one candidate for the presidency and his elected party followers so often violate basic moral principles. I have failed in my attempt to remain partisan-neutral by refusing to meet the polarized American voter where she is.
Allow me to explain. Nonpartisanship can mean a few things. It can mean remaining as objective as humanly possible. “Just the facts, ma’am.” It can also mean describing — fairly and impartially— the ideological positions of both sides of a debate. As long as one gives roughly equal time and equal treatment to ideological differences, some degree of nonpartisanship is surely achieved.
There is a third way as well, one that until this election I did not fully understand. Nonpartisanship is also realized if one can get into the headspace of those who disagree with you. “Put yourself in someone’s else’s shoes” is such a cliché. But in a deeply divided polis like ours it may be the antidote to the rage and distrust that now infects so many of us.
I’ve been smug. Indeed, the very hook of this series smacks of exactly the type of elitism and arrogance that irritates so many Republican voters these days. The idea that we should internalize the thoughts of Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson or James Madison when real people are struggling is, to put it mildly, pompous. It’s an intellectual luxury to wave the Federalist Papers in everyone’s face, and it does not help put overpriced food on the table or manage an out-of-control southern border. In some ways, the original story of Franklin responding to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s sincere question about what kind of political design he and the Framers produced is illustrative. “A Republic, if you can keep it,” Franklin said. His response was haughty. And condescending. I’m afraid I’ve been too.
Don’t misunderstand me. I will never shy away from a civics lesson. Americans should know how the Constitution was formed and how the text has been viewed over the years. We must understand how democracy still undergirds our political system and how the guardrails of checks and balances, federalism, individual rights and the “consent of the governed” are fragile. We should never take for granted that 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention invented a republic that has changed the world for the better. And we best never forget that they bequeathed to us a system of self-governance that is so worth preserving.
But now is the time for understanding. Not lessons. It’s a time for walking that mile in someone else’s shoes. No more judging. I swear David Brooks was speaking to me when he wrote in The New York Times: “there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.”
As we continue to strive for some modest measure of unity, a coming together of sorts, we — I — must pledge to understand the whole of America, the good people I disagree with as well as those sitting familiarly under my partisan tent. Such a shift requires a new mindset and a new perspective. It’s time.
