In forty years of teaching, the most difficult or at least the most disconcerting question I have been asked came during a summer seminar when I was lecturing on the Constitution and on Lincoln’s attitude towards it. I had been reviewing the various compromises made at the Philadelphia Convention concerning slavery when a student asked, point blank, whether, if I had been there, would I have voted for them. I paused. It was easy enough to explain what the compromises were, why those who made them thought them necessary for the document’s completion and ratification, how the Constitution contributed to the growth and success of the United States, and even how the Constitution itself eventually made possible the abolition of slavery, remaining intact during the Civil War and enshrining the result of the fighting in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteen Amendments. But the student wasn’t asking for history: He wanted to know whether those compromises were rightly made when the future was unknown and could only be a matter for speculation, when one could know only one’s own interests, one’s convictions, the legacy of the past, the circumstances of the present, and abstract right. Yuval Levin has written a splendid essay in defense of the Constitution of the United States, explaining how it was designed for a political people with serious differences: Far from being the cause of our polarization or an obstacle to overcoming it, the Constitution has within it, not a perfect solution to our conflicts but a proven capacity to guide us in addressing them. “How can we act together when we don’t think alike?” It might sound like a rhetorical question, asked in despair. But actually, he shows us, that’s what the Constitution and the complex of institutions it designs or designates make happen, channeling political impetus by dividing power and responsibility between the federal government and the states and by separating federal power among the branches, legislative, executive, and judicial. It doesn’t create a rigid structure or promote stalemate, much less enshrine the status quo; rather, it ensures that differences are not canceled but allowed to find appropriate expression, promoting coalition if not genuinely common action, though rarely the action any one party considers ideal. “Simply put, in a free and (therefore) diverse society, unity does not mean thinking alike; it means acting together.” It’s a brilliant formulation, if a paradoxical one.
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