Jefferson Center

For centuries, a grim pattern has governed how nations arrive at new political orders. An old order exhausts its legitimacy, the strain builds until it erupts into war, and only afterward do the survivors gather to write the terms of what follows: at Westphalia after the seventeenth-century wars of religion; at Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars; and at San Francisco after the Second World War.¹ In each case, the table was set only after the old world had died. Even then, the terms of the new order were not guaranteed. The liberal order that emerged after the Second World War — a framework of universal rights and democratic governance — was not secure until the Cold War ended forty-five years later, and it is still contested.

Given the current level of polarization and rising political violence in the United States, it is time to ask ourselves a tough question. Can we set the table for renewing our system of self-governance before the catastrophe? I believe the answer can be yes, if we find the will to come together across our lines of difference and excavate our common ground.