To Heal America’s Divided Politics, Humility is the Answer Nobody wants to Hear

In recent years, partisan antipathy has further exposed the open wounds impairing American politics. Take, for example, the roughly three-quarters of Democrats and Republicans who describe members of the opposing party as closed-minded. On this inglorious score, however, they have a not-so-incidental point. Amidst eagerly fanning the flames of political discord, Americans of every persuasion seem at best to have forgotten and at worst to have neglected an indispensable democratic virtue – humility. The upside: humility is the answer to healing America’s divided politics. The downside: humility is the answer nobody wants to embrace.

While early American history has a propensity to supply current generations with harrowing lessons in what to avoid rather than what to repeat, the immediate lead-up to the approval of the United States Constitution is an exemplar in the very humility required to meet today’s precarious political moment.

On September 17, 1787 – on the final day of the Constitutional Convention, at the conclusion of which the document would be put to a vote – an ailing Benjamin Franklin penned a speech that was read aloud to the still-disjointed group of delegates. Addressing those who remained in steadfast opposition to ratification, Franklin’s closing words continue to echo true: “I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would, with me, on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and… put his name to this instrument.” What happened next, well, is history – the sort of history it ill-behooves Americans to discount contemporarily.

A constitutive element of the constitutional democracy Franklin helped establish that day is the notion that nobody and, for that matter, no political party has an exclusive claim to all the solutions. Instead, a healthy democracy necessitates humility among its adherents, both in the face of what we presume to know and what we might not. Humility transforms into a virtue precisely because it engenders the democracy-reinforcing view that there is far more to be gained from the struggle to chart a collective path forward than that gained from the comfort of grandstanding within individual political silos.

Equally, a healthy democracy rejects the fashionable but false dichotomy that one can have either courage or humility in their convictions. After all, courageousness can be measured, in part, by our willingness to accept the possibility of error in that about which we are most confident – by practicing, in a word, humility. This is tried-and-true advice especially suitable for divisive American political leaders today, whose unyielding hubris exudes nothing but unyielding cowardice. Even as some abdicate it, all democratic citizens have a duty to avoid succumbing to such a trap.

To envision how humility could manifest, look no further than the uncompromising tug-of-war waged in everyday American political discourse between the devoutly religious and the devoutly secular. While neither side is irredeemable, neither is beyond reproach.

Just imagine how much America’s divided politics could be healed if the religiously inclined articulated their policy preferences in terms accessible to believers and nonbelievers alike, thereby fostering democratic deliberation in which every stakeholder has an equal seat at the table and a shared basis from which to participate. For example, how might debate surrounding vaccination look different if religious opposition were framed as a matter of bodily autonomy rather than divine edict? Hint: once-deadlocked debates would get off the ground.

Likewise, just imagine how much America’s divided politics could be healed if the secularly inclined embraced rather than scorned the mobilization of religious beliefs to change hearts and minds. For example, among injustices spanning racism to xenophobia and housing insecurity to food deserts, how might efforts to combat poverty look different if partnerships between secular and religious activists were the norm, not an aberration? Another hint: desperately needed progress would cease to be so fragmented.

Here is the all-important rub: through humility, both the religiously and secularly inclined would come to see that they have far greater in common than what truly separates them.

To be sure, the task is tall if Americans are to embrace humility in the backdrop of today’s hyperpolarized landscape. It is, indeed, the answer to America’s divided politics that nobody wants to embrace but everyone needs to embrace. And yet, the history of America is replete with consequential moments in which the apparent mundanity of humility triumphed over the apparent allure of vanity. These are moments not just exemplified by the sage counsel of Benjamin Franklin in 1787 but by that of an iconic Republican president in 1865. That president, in times perhaps even more fraught than these, began the arduous process of healing a broken nation ravaged by civil war.

It was, after all, Abraham Lincoln who delivered these timeless words: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” That America somehow found a missing democratic virtue against all the odds, a democratic virtue of which this America is in short supply and in desperate need – in a word, humility.

Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are those of their author alone and should not be interpreted to
reflect the views of the United States Department of State, the Fulbright Program, or any of its
affiliate/partner organizations.