The Founders thought of it as a form of self-control, an exercise in self-government. We think of public-spiritedness as a form of self-expression, an exercise in self-righteousness. It means curbing one’s passions and moderating one’s opinions in order to achieve a large consensus that will ensure domestic tranquility. As the late Irving Kristol argued in an essay 45 years ago, republican virtue is fundamentally the virtue of public-spiritedness as the Founding Fathers knew it: This is not morality writ large, but something more limited and practical. Because those virtues are necessary for the functioning of a constitutional republic, they are often called civic virtue, or republican virtue. For civic education to take root and produce its desired fruit, the people themselves must have certain qualities of self-restraint, goodwill, and moderation. Yet civic education alone, though necessary, is not sufficient. This task begins with civic education, so that Americans know how their government works, and thus what to expect from their constitutional institutions. Each generation has to maintain its institutions and repair any damage that its predecessors inflicted or allowed. But constitutional structure, like any structure, does not maintain itself. What does it take to “keep a republic”? Nearly two and a half centuries into this experiment in self-governance, Americans tend to think that they keep their republic by relying on constitutional structure: separated powers, federalism, checks and balances. His letter invoked Jay, Hamilton, Madison, and John Marshall, but his ideas called to mind another Founding Father: Benjamin Franklin, who, on leaving the constitutional convention of 1787, supposedly told a curious passerby that the Framers had produced “a republic, if you can keep it.” Jane Chong: This is not the Senate the Framers imagined He emphasized judges’ particular role as “a key source of national unity and stability,” but his deeper point was that those values are needed among more than just judges. The connection between Jay’s day and ours is clear: “In our age,” Roberts wrote, “when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale,” there is even greater danger that political passions can turn us against one another, or against constitutional government itself. “It is sadly ironic,” Roberts wrote, “that John Jay’s efforts to educate his fellow citizens about the Framers’ plan of government fell victim to a rock thrown by a rioter motivated by a rumor.”
Jay’s wounds derailed his involvement in our nation’s greatest work of political philosophy, The Federalist Papers. After Jay committed to joining Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in writing essays in defense of the proposed constitution, Jay was seriously wounded by a mob of New Yorkers who had been whipped into a frenzy by rumors of grave robberies. He illustrated his point with a founding-era episode involving the nation’s first chief justice, John Jay. “Each generation,” he wrote, “has an obligation to pass on to the next, not only a fully functioning government responsive to the needs of the people, but the tools to understand and improve it.” For Roberts, this requires civic education-and something more fundamental than that, too. On December 31, in a letter accompanying his annual report on the work of the federal courts, Roberts called on federal judges-and everyone else-to invest themselves in the preservation of constitutional democracy. He had, in fact, already sent such a message, just weeks earlier, on what the Constitution requires of all Americans. In the days leading up to the Senate’s impeachment trial, some people hoped that Chief Justice John Roberts, presiding over the trial, would use his position to send a strong message to the senators on what the Constitution requires of them. White is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an assistant professor of law at George Mason University.