Civic Witness Series - Questions from the Attic
How do we explain democratic norms to people who were never taught how fragile they are?
Civic Witness Series: Questions from the Attic, is founded on a simple premise: the people living through democratic erosion have questions the ‘experts’ aren’t addressing; it is inspired by and in honor of Adia in the Attic. Those questions matter because they provide an opportunity for sharing and documenting what democratic erosion feels like to people living through it. We don’t pretend to have “The Answer” to these questions, but we hope to stimulate the conversation her questions have prompted.
THE CONSTITUTION CAN’T SAVE US BY ITSELF
The document survives, but it is and always has been fragile. The unwritten rules that make it work are crucial and they are what we are losing.
The Constitution has never governed America by itself. Its words matter only because generations of Americans—especially those in public office—have accepted the norms of restraint, civility, compromise and constitutional fidelity that give those words practical force. Those norms are now being dangerously abandoned.
An unnamed US President who had a history of controversial positions on executive power and constitutional limitations allegedly said some years ago of the US Constitution that it was just ‘a piece of paper’. Now he may or may not have actually said that. But recently others have, not with derogatory intent meant to minimize the constitution’s relevance, but because the entire nation follows and acts on the principles that are enshrined in that piece of paper almost blindly without laboring on what the conditions were at the time of the founders’ original intent behind the words. This must be the case, of course, because, as they say, the constitution is not a self executing document.
Those words are written in iron gall ink on two hundred year old parchment, not etched in stone handed down from above. We follow it in reverence of its inherent wisdom, its originality, its sense of commitment, and as a blueprint for a governmental system, a kind of line drawing that sketches out an end-state and how to get there. The document survives. The unwritten rules that make it work are what we are losing.
While government officials, scholars and members of the judiciary commonly and regularly struggled and argued with the meaning of the constitution’s dictates, quarreling over interpretations, most of us, average Americans, have lived seemingly unquestioningly under the constitution’s guidance. We accepted it credulously and trustingly every day. For most of us, the exalted status and sweeping inclusiveness of the constitution’s chapters, while few of us knew them in detail, were almost biblical, the inviolable heart and soul of our country. We would never have considered the constitution a mere piece of paper—but a seminal document, infused with virtue, and which compelled us to carry it out to the letter.
For most of us there was never much concern that our constitution would not be followed by everyone, that America’s adherence to it was stable and unchanging, an answer to our needs. We, as average citizens, would often confuse, however, what it delivered with what it promised. Had we looked closely we would have seen that disparity not in the document itself, but in how we would often fail to honor it.
In the early days of the founding, most of the colonies were agricultural, slave-holding or otherwise deeply suspicious of the constitution because of the centralized power it conferred on the federal government. As the years rolled by it was more fully adopted and became embedded into the fabric of the new nation. The founders recognized that the constitution was needed to stitch together the fractious thirteen original states. The earlier design under the Articles of Confederation was not working well. The constitution that replaced them would prove itself in coalescing and guiding the young republic.
The years between independence and constitutional government were shakier than most Americans realize. Only 12 of the 13 states signed the constitution and only 9 ratified it. But it took hold and as it and the nation aged over the next 237 years it was only the virtue of the constitution’s ideas and the willingness to live by it through the faithful practice of a system of norms that we held together as long as we have. It was those norms calling for mature, cooperative, collaborative and civil behavior— standards that our leadership held to as they followed the principles of the constitution— that supported the integration of the young country.
Those norms were, in effect, little more than a broad agreement to apply national camaraderie and respectful behavior by those in public office and the supporting citizenry. Spotty incidents of historical defections from those norms would result in the failure of national coherency, of which the Civil War was inarguably the cruelest example.
Today it is the abandonment of those norms of camaraderie, commitment and virtuous behavior by so many Americans in both public and private life that demonstrate how absolutely necessary they are.
Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and preserving America’s national security institutions.