The Audacity of Hope

parents are imperfect and has learned to play one off of the other—the freedom of the
apostate.
And yet, ultimately, such apostasy leaves me unsatisfied as well. Maybe I am too
steeped in the myth of the founding to reject it entirely. Maybe like those who reject
Darwin in favor of intelligent design, I prefer to assume that someone’s at the wheel. In
the end, the question I keep asking myself is why, if the Constitution is only about
power and not about principle, if all we are doing is just making it up as we go along,
has our own republic not only survived but served as the rough model for so many of
the successful societies on earth?
The answer I settle on—which is by no means original to me—requires a shift in
metaphors, one that sees our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation
to be had. According to this conception, the genius of Madison’s design is not that it
provides us a fixed blueprint for action, the way a draftsman plots a building’s
construction. It provides us with a framework and with rules, but fidelity to these rules
will not guarantee a just society or assure agreement on what’s right. It won’t tell us
whether abortion is good or bad, a decision for a woman to make or a decision for a
legislature. Nor will it tell us whether school prayer is better than no prayer at all.
What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue
about our future. All of its elaborate machinery—its separation of powers and checks
and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights—are designed to force us into a
conversation, a “deliberative democracy” in which all citizens are required to engage in
a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their
point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent. Because power in our
government is so diffuse, the process of making law in America compels us to entertain
the possibility that we are not always right and to sometimes change our minds; it
challenges us to examine our motives and our interests constantly, and suggests that
both our individual and collective judgments are at once legitimate and highly fallible.
The historical record supports such a view. After all, if there was one impulse shared by
all the Founders, it was a rejection of all forms of absolute authority, whether the king,
the theocrat, the general, the oligarch, the dictator, the majority, or anyone else who
claims to make choices for us. George Washington declined Caesar’s crown because of
this impulse, and stepped down after two terms. Hamilton’s plans for leading a New
Army foundered and Adams’s reputation after the Alien and Sedition Acts suffered for
failing to abide by this impulse. It was Jefferson, not some liberal judge in the sixties,
who called for a wall between church and state—and if we have declined to heed
Jefferson’s advice to engage in a revolution every two or three generations, it’s only
because the Constitution itself proved a sufficient defense against tyranny.
It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure,
in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of
any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock
future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and
minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The
Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted
in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstraction
and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory