by Neil Gorsuch
The challenge when it comes to civics, though, isn’t limited to education but extends to engagement. Someone has to run the zoo. How can we expect good government if we don’t have good men and women willing to run it? Who is going to ensure that the executive branch is faithfully administering the laws? Or that the people’s disputes can be resolved fairly and impartially? Or that the laws are altered to reflect the people’s changing preferences? Many young people today, it seems, harbor little interest in serving in government. Some may see it as distasteful or view other avenues as more lucrative. Others may be worried about living under the microscope, with a light shined on their every mistake. Still others may consider the process of government unimportant. According to a recent study by Harvard and University of Melbourne political scientists, only about 30 percent of U.S. millennials agree that it’s “essential…to live in a democracy.” Many say they see themselves as global citizens instead. I admire the sentiment to the extent that it signals an interest and a concern for all human persons. But I worry when it signals a disinterest in our own government’s affairs. As a global citizen, after all, who do you expect to protect your “unalienable Rights”? Where will you go to complain when you are denied the “Blessings of liberty”?
Keeping our republic depends not just on passing knowledge to the next generation; it depends on able young people willing to take on the challenge—and accept the sacrifices—of self-government. Remember John Adams’s warning to his son: “Public business my son, must always be done by somebody.—it will be done by somebody or other—If wise men decline it others will not: if honest men refuse it, others will not.” Take to heart, too, the words of Teddy Roosevelt:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
To those who doubt the effort is worth it, let me share with you the story of Gregory Watson (with the help of reporting from Matt Largey). Back in 1982, Gregory Watson was a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas. As part of a course on the government he was required to write a research paper. So off to the library he went, where he started browsing books on the Constitution. “I’ll never forget this as long as I live,” he said. “I pull out a book that has within it a chapter of amendments that Congress has sent to the state legislatures, but which not enough state legislatures approved in order to become part of the Constitution. And this one just jumped right out at me.”
The unratified amendment that jumped out was one first proposed by James Madison alongside what eventually became the Bill of Rights: “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.” In other words, Congress can’t vote itself an immediate pay raise, only one for the next Congress, so the people have a chance in an intervening election to pass judgment on the idea and their representatives who supported it. While the amendment had failed to secure the required assent of three-quarters of states, it had been ratified by a few. Watson ended up writing a paper about the amendment, arguing something that no doubt sounded audacious: The amendment could still be ratified. His professor wasn’t buying it, though—she gave the paper a C.
That might have been one of the most consequential Cs ever awarded. It spurred Watson to prove his professor wrong. “I thought right then and there,” he said, that “I’m going to get that thing ratified.” A constitutional guerrilla campaign followed. Watson wrote letters to members of Congress asking for help with their home state legislatures. Most of the responses were negative; many didn’t bother to reply at all. But, eventually, a senator from Maine passed the idea to a friend back home and, in 1983, the state ratified the amendment. That emboldened Watson; he started thinking “this can actually be done.” He began writing letters to every state legislator he thought might help. Before long, his campaign started to pick up steam with several states ratifying the amendment every year. Finally, in 1992—a decade after writing that fateful paper—the requisite three-quarters of states ratified the amendment, so more than two hundred years after Madison wrote it, the Twenty-seventh Amendment finally passed. And about that C? The professor came around. On March 1, 2017, she filed paperwork to officially change Watson’s grade to an A.
When asked why he did it, Watson offered words that should inspire us all: “I wanted to demonstrate that one extremely dedicated, extremely…energetic person could push this through. I think I demonstrated that.” I think he did too. Who knows? You might be the next Gregory Watson. You might not amend the Constitution, but there’s plenty you can do to make a difference. Vote. Work on a political campaign. Fight for an issue you care about. Or maybe run for office yourself. Never doubt what can be done by one person of goodwill.
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CIVIC EDUCATION AND ENGAGEMENT, though, represent only one of the preconditions to securing our republic. As Justice Kennedy likes to point out, the word “civics” springs from the same Latin root as the word “civility.” And both are essential elements of civilization. Just consider the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech, free press, and free assembly. Those rights ensure that Americans can generally say anything they want, for more or less any reason they want. But most rights bear a corresponding responsibility. And to be worthy of our freedoms, we all have to adopt certain civic habits that enable others to enjoy them too. When it comes to the First Amendment, for example, that means tolerating those who don’t agree with us, or whose ideas upset us; giving others the benefit of the doubt about their motives; listening and engaging with the merits of their ideas rather than dismissing them because of our own preconceptions about the speaker or topic.
Naturally, this can be hard and no one’s perfect. We all make mistakes. But I worry that, just as we face a civics crisis in this country today, we face a civility crisis too. According to a study called Civility in America, nearly 70 percent of Americans believe the country has a “major civility problem.” Nearly 60 percent say they pay less attention to politics today because of its incivility and admit that it deters them from becoming more engaged in public service. More than half think civility in our country is likely to decline even further.
These figures should concern us all. Without civility, the bonds of friendship in our communities dissolve, tolerance dissipates, and the pressure to impose order and uniformity through public and private coercion mounts. In a very real way, self-governance turns on our treating each other as equals—as persons, with the courtesy and respect each person deserves—even when we vigorously disagree. Our capacity for civility is, in this way, no less than a sign of our commitment to human equality and, in turn, democratic self-government. Alexis de Tocqueville—the great observer of early American society—understood this connection. “The manners of the Americans,” he wrote, “are…the real cause which renders that people…able to support a democratic government.”
While we’re talking about the founding and civility, too, it might do to recall a bit about the education of George Washington. He deliberately cultivated habits of civility at a young age—habits that no doubt later helped him be effective in leading our new nation. As a teenager, we’re told, he copied by hand the 110 “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” written by the Jesuits in 1595. Many of these rules remain as
true as ever. Take Rule 86: “In Disputes, be not So Desirous to Overcome as not to give Liberty to each one to deliver his Opinion[.]” Some are pretty funny too. Like Rule 12: “[B]edew no man’s face with your Spittle, by approaching too near him when you Speak.”
Maybe they’re pretty old-school, but these rules remain no less important now than when young George scrawled them down as a homework assignment. As the historian Richard Brookhiser has said:
[M]odern manners in the western world were originally aristocratic. [The word] “Courtesy” [for example] meant behavior appropriate to a court….Without realizing it, the Jesuits who wrote them, and the young man who copied them, were outlining and absorbing a system of courtesy appropriate to equals and near-equals….When the company for whom the decent behavior was to be performed expanded to the nation, Washington was ready.
In no small measure, the character of our nation—which left such a deep impression on Tocqueville—was shaped by the character of Washington. Our next generation of leaders must be as ready as he was.
To be ready today, I might suggest a simpler set of rules than the old Jesuits offered. These are a few that Mother Teresa proposed:
If you do good, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway….
Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.
The challenges we face today when it comes to civics and civility, essential ingredients to civilization, are real and all around us. History offers daunting lessons about how difficult civic understanding and civility are to win, and how easy they are to lose. But I am an optimist. We should never lose sight that we live with remarkable success in a richly diverse nation and that Americans have time and again risen resiliently to meet so many grave challenges: from our unlikely success in the Revolution to defending our infant republic in the War of 1812, from the preservation of the Union in the Civil War to the efforts of our civil rights movement to realize the Declaration of Independence’s promise that all men are created equal.
Sometimes, of course, the cynic in all of us gets the upper hand. Sometimes it’s hard to see the way forward for all the trials that lie so squarely before us. But when you find yourself in doubt, I encourage you to remember this story from G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton noted that an ordinary man, asked “on the spur of the moment” to explain “why he prefer[red] civilization to savagery,” likely “would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, ‘Why, there is that bookcase…and the coals in the coal-scuttle…and pianos…and policemen.’ ” But, as Chesterton reminds us, there is sometimes wisdom in a stuttering reply. Sometimes the virtues of civilization are too numerous to count, almost so obvious as to be too obvious to see. If asked to explain them, it’s hard to know where to begin.
The same is true of our constitutionally governed republic. We may not always notice them, but what the Constitution calls our “Blessings of liberty” are everywhere around us. They are what allow more than three hundred million of us to go about our daily lives, each in our ways, mostly in peace. Really, it is one of the great wonders in world history. But if those blessings are to endure, it falls to each of us to do what we can to preserve and pass down civic understanding and the virtues of civility. To help prepare those who follow for the high and humbling responsibility of preserving our Constitution, the greatest charter of human freedom the world has ever known. Soon enough the torch will pass to their hands.
WELCOME TO NEW CITIZENS
Not long after my appointment to the Court, I was invited to the Ninth Circuit judges’ conference. Before we get to work on judicial matters at a conference like that, everyone sings the national anthem and says the Pledge of Allegiance, and sometimes there’s a welcome ceremony for new citizens. It’s a special part of the conference, a reminder to us of the wonder of our country and some of the reasons why we do what we do. When my colleagues asked me to welcome the new citizens at their conference, I was honored. In this short talk, I sought to capture what Louise’s naturalization meant to me and my family—and to honor the same choice the new citizens and their families gathered that day had made.
I remember hearing the oath you just took many years ago when my wife became a naturalized citizen. And I remember thinking back then: The oath is so short, only 140 words, but the words are powerful ones. When you finish them, you leave behind one identity and take on a new one. You join a new community of people—one spanning a vast continent, from all faiths, from all ethnicities, from all walks of life. The path to taking the oath almost always involves sacrifices and hard choices too. Some of you may have put yourselves in danger to arrive here. Others may have served in our armed forces. Some of you have traveled long distances and left friends and family behind. Today, we honor what you have done and the choices you have made and we welcome you as our fellow citizens. We are honored that you have chosen to help us in writing the next chapter of our country’s story, and I am grateful for the chance to share a few words with you.
It seems to me that one thing that’s so unusual about the oath you’ve taken and the country you’ve joined is the fact that we are a nation of immigrants. The United States does not have a shared common culture in the classic sense. We do not have the many centuries of shared heritage that exists in, say, China or England. Instead, America is largely bound together by ideas. And the truth is, some of those ideas are hard and entail real challenges for all of us.
Take the idea found in the very first sentence of the Constitution. The Constitution’s preamble says that “We the People” “ordain and establish this Constitution” in order to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” It is no small thing that the founders claimed our new government was formed by “We the People.” They didn’t say the government was formed by the Continental Army or the Congress or the States or some bureaucratic drafting committee. Institutions like those, the preamble made clear, exist to serve the people—not the other way around. In this way, the founders attempted a bold new experiment in government by and for the people.
In this way, too, the founders made clear that one of the great obligations of American citizens is to ensure that power continues to reside in the people. The promise of self-government is not self-executing or self-perpetuating. Keeping our republic, our experiment in self-government, is a shared responsibility—part of our duty as citizens. Each and every one of us has a role to play in passing along the blessings of liberty to our children and our children’s children. I encourage you to participate in that task through speaking, voting, petitioning elected representatives, or performing public service. Our collective challenge is made easier and our efforts enriched by your presence, your voice, and your ideas. Today, you become part of the latest in a long line of patriots responsible for carrying the torch and ensuring that liberty will indeed prove secure for our posterity.
Then, too, there’s the challenge posed by the opening passage of our Declaration of Independence. Although the Constitution is our basic law, it would be a lesser document had it not been preceded by the Declaration. In the Declaration, the founders sought to explain the reasons why they were seceding from Great Britain. And they began by explaining: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [and] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Today, you join a people still striving to make real the ideals of the Declaration’s promise that all people are created equal and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Joining in that task is hard too. Among many other things, it comes with the duty of having to listen to and
tolerate other points of view. That can be a challenge, especially in polarizing times. But democracy depends on our willingness, each one of us, to hear and respect even those with whom we disagree strongly. And polarizing times are nothing new. Alexander Hamilton wrote in the very first of The Federalist Papers that even “wise and good” people will disagree on questions of “the first magnitude.” A fact, he said, that should “furnish a lesson of moderation” to us all. In a government by and for the people, we have to remember that those with whom we disagree, even vehemently, still have the best interests of the country at heart. We have to remember that democracy depends on our ability to reason and work with those who hold very different convictions and beliefs than our own. We have to learn not only to tolerate different points of view but to cherish the cacophony of democracy. As Benjamin Franklin reminded us, in a democracy we have the choice of either hanging together or hanging separately.
I join my colleagues here today in expressing our honor that you have chosen the path to citizenship in the United States. We welcome you to our ongoing experiment in self-government and are grateful for your help in our common struggle to make good this country’s promise. I am delighted to call you my fellow Americans and I offer each and every one of you and your families my deepest congratulations.
