James Madison hoped that “the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom” to lead their republic. And if not? If there was “no virtue among us,” then Americans were in a “wretched situation.” The reason, he explained, was that there were “no theoretical checks” that could render the nation secure in the absence of virtue: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”
James Wilson, who helped produce the first draft of the Constitution and served as one of the first six justices on the Supreme Court, did not think that republican government could survive among a citizenry that could not or would not sacrifice its personal interest for the public good. “By the will and by the interest of the community, every private will and every private interest must be bound and overruled. Unless this maxim be established and observed; it is impossible that civil government could be formed or supported.”
Writing in a somewhat different vein, John Dickinson, who served as a delegate from Delaware to the constitutional convention, asked skeptics of the Constitution to ask how, exactly, a virtuous people would undermine their government. “Will a virtuous and sensible people choose villains or fools for their officers? Or, if they should choose men of wisdom and integrity, will these lose both or either, by taking their seats? If they should, will not their places be quickly supplied by another choice? Is the like derangement again, and again, and again to be expected? Can any man believe, that such astonishing phenomena are to be looked for?”
In all of this, the framers and founding fathers were interpreting the classical republican theorists, who emphasized, in one way or another, the vital importance of civic virtue. The Americans’ vision of virtue was different from that of many of their interlocutors — “Virtue became less the harsh and martial self-sacrifice of antiquity,” the historian Gordon Wood notes, “and more the modern willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity” — but it was still critical to the maintenance and preservation of republican liberty.
As George Washington said in his first inaugural address, “There is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.”
I used to scoff at much of this, thoroughly convinced that institutions mattered more than virtue. It was more important, in my view, to provide the right incentives than it was to try to cultivate values of honesty, decency, forbearance and public spiritedness.
But the example of the past seven years, from Donald Trump’s infamous ride down the escalator in June of 2015 to the present, has pushed me in the opposite direction. Institutions matter, but so does virtue, especially among the nation’s leaders. Even if it is insincere, the performance of virtue helps inculcate those values in the public at large. It says, in essence, that this is how we behave, even as we fight for power and political influence.