The Audacity of Hope

yielded to fact and necessity. Jefferson helped consolidate the power of the national
government even as he claimed to deplore and reject such power. Adams’s ideal of a
politics grounded solely in the public interest—a politics without politics—was proven
obsolete the moment Washington stepped down from office. It may be the vision of the
Founders that inspires us, but it was their realism, their practicality and flexibility and
curiosity, that ensured the Union’s survival.
I confess that there is a fundamental humility to this reading of the Constitution and our
democratic process. It seems to champion compromise, modesty, and muddling
through; to justify logrolling, deal-making, self-interest, pork barrels, paralysis, and
inefficiency—all the sausage-making that no one wants to see and that editorialists
throughout our history have often labeled as corrupt. And yet I think we make a mistake
in assuming that democratic deliberation requires abandonment of our highest ideals, or
of a commitment to the common good. After all, the Constitution ensures our free
speech not just so that we can shout at one another as loud as we please, deaf to what
others might have to say (although we have that right). It also offers us the possibility of
a genuine marketplace of ideas, one in which the “jarring of parties” works on behalf of
“deliberation and circumspection”; a marketplace in which, through debate and
competition, we can expand our perspective, change our minds, and eventually arrive
not merely at agreements but at sound and fair agreements.
The Constitution’s system of checks and balances, separation of powers, and federalism
may often lead to groups with fixed interests angling and sparring for narrow advantage,
but it doesn’t have to. Such diffusion of power may also force groups to take other
interests into account and, indeed, may even alter over time how those groups think and
feel about their own interests.
The rejection of absolutism implicit in our constitutional structure may sometimes make
our politics seem unprincipled. But for most of our history it has encouraged the very
process of information gathering, analysis, and argument that allows us to make better,
if not perfect, choices, not only about the means to our ends but also about the ends
themselves. Whether we are for or against affirmative action, for or against prayer in
schools, we must test out our ideals, vision, and values against the realities of a common
life, so that over time they may be refined, discarded, or replaced by new ideals, sharper
visions, deeper values. Indeed, it is that process, according to Madison, that brought
about the Constitution itself, through a convention in which “no man felt himself
obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their propriety and
truth, and was open to the force of argument.”
IN SUM, the Constitution envisions a road map by which we marry passion to reason,
the ideal of individual freedom to the demands of community. And the amazing thing is
that it’s worked. Through the early days of the Union, through depressions and world
wars, through the multiple transformations of the economy and Western expansion and
the arrival of millions of immigrants to our shores, our democracy has not only survived
but has thrived. It has been tested, of course, during times of war and fear, and it will no
doubt be tested again in the future.