Self-Government Takes Practice. We’ve Stopped Rehearsing

From Madison’s literary society to today’s campus silencing, we forgot what democracy requires.

If you want to understand what’s broken in American politics, turn on cable news. Loud, bombastic, shallow — it’s not commentary, it’s combat. I should know. For years, I was a regular guest on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, PBS, and others. Across the dial, opinions differed, but the tone was the same: vitriol disguised as debate.

If the media are a mirror, then it’s no wonder Americans are losing faith in the very idea of public discourse. Pew Research reports Americans “trust each other less than they did a few decades ago,” showing a stark decline from 46 percent in 1972 to 34 percent in 2018. Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and The Upswing, warns that America’s unraveling is fueled by political polarization that is greater “than during the Civil War.” He recounts how Americans “entered the Sixties in an increasingly ‘we’ mode . . . and we left the Sixties in an increasingly ‘I’ mode.” And in her book Uncivil Agreement, Liliana Mason puts it more starkly: “Our conflicts are largely over who we think we are, rather than over reasoned differences of opinion.”

Yes, we are polarized. But we’ve been here before.

There has never been a golden age of civility in American politics. In fact, today’s political climate echoes the early republic. In her book Affairs of Honor, Yale historian Joanne Freeman describes the Founding era as one tainted by “regional distrust, personal animosity, accusation, suspicion, implication, and denouncement.” It only seemed to get worse. In her subsequent book The Field of Blood, Freeman describes the way 19th century political leaders came to violent blows — caning, duels — in the lead-up to the Civil War.

In other words: Political vitriol is nothing new.

What’s different isn’t the temperature of our rhetoric — it’s the absence of a shared commitment to the ideals of self-governance and the framework to ensure it succeeds. The Founders — despite their flaws — believed in building a system rooted equality, individual liberty, free enterprise, and public virtue. And they trained themselves to participate in this republican life, establishing norms and institutions to prepare them for the hard work of leadership.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the stakes are especially high. America’s challenges — spiraling debt, fractured schools, immigration gridlock, foreign wars and adversaries — are real. None of this will matter, however, if the American experiment collapses under the weight of its own apathy.

The future depends on rekindling what the Founders knew our system depended on: self-governance.

Long before he became the fourth president of the United States, James Madison entered the class of 1771 at the College of New Jersey — what we now call Princeton University. Alongside classmates like future novelist Hugh Henry Brackenridge and later revolutionary and journalist Philip Freneau, Madison helped found the American Whig Society: a student literary club that debated such issues as the growing tensions between Whigs and Tories and advocated for colonial rights.

About the same time, their classmates — including future Vice President Aaron Burr, future Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, and future New Jersey Governor William Paterson — founded the rival Cliosophic Society. Thus began a campus rivalry rooted not in sports, but in political philosophy, rhetoric, and behavior.

These literary societies weren’t just extracurriculars. They were student-run civic training grounds that prepared young men for public life by teaching them to read deeply, write clearly, and speak persuasively. They introduced students to the critical issues of the day, as well as to the virtues of structured conflict and a shared code of conduct — an early rehearsal for democratic life.

In the years leading up to the Revolution, many students — barely out of boyhood — saw themselves as part of a rising generation with a role to play in history. They were part of what Jefferson called the “natural aristocracy,” one not of birth, but of merit. They were future leaders who could think, speak, and eventually, govern. And while it would be a stretch to argue the literary societies made Madison and Burr, they did help shape the intellectual habits and political instincts of the men who would go on to build the early republic.

These societies taught young men how to disagree with seriousness and self-discipline. George Strawbridge reflected at the time that the Whig Society “did more to remove boyish habits and make men of us, and men of sound and correct principles for society and life, then all the reasoning and lecturing, moral or religious that ever was uttered.”

In today’s rhetorical environment, where coarseness is common and debate often performative, it’s easy to forget that disagreement was once an art form — studied, perfected, and understood as essential to democracy — not a threat to it.

In the past, we built that debate muscle in places designed to shape citizens, not just credential them. What the early literary societies offered — a self-governed, disciplined environment for civic apprenticeship — is almost entirely missing today. The consequences of this loss are widespread.

I recall the night I joined the once-king of cable news, Bill O’Reilly, for a segment. At this point, I was appearing on TV several times a week. But primetime was always a different animal. I no longer recall the topic, only that, like many political issues, it wasn’t black or white. Or rather, it wasn’t red or blue.

Midway through, it was clear I was being too nuanced. The producer’s voice cut into my earpiece: “Jump in now!”

The moment is seared into my memory. Not because of what I said, but because I realized what I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t helping move the conversation forward. No minds were changed. The format didn’t allow for it. Viewers came in with hardened perspectives, and they left with those same points of view reinforced.

This experience came rushing back during a panel I recently moderated with Free Press columnist Eli Lake on the state of American public discourse. One of the panelists, Emily Chamlee-Wright, president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies, captured it perfectly: Learning how to engage in real, rigorous, respectful disagreement requires muscle memory. “It takes a thousand rehearsals,” she said, “to build the habit.”

That’s the problem. We’ve lost the rehearsal spaces.

The Whig and Cliosophic societies that helped prepare Madison, Burr, and others for public life remind us that colleges were once places to grapple with complicated — even uncomfortable — ideas. The college curriculum steeped students in the classics and the study of Latin and Greek, but the literary societies filled them with practical knowledge for civic engagement.

In contrast to the early republic, colleges today have become vicious battlegrounds for identity politics rather than places for meaningful learning and debate. In 2021, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) launched a free speech study on college campuses and found more than 80 percent of students admitted to self-censorship over concerns that students or professors might negatively respond to their perspectives. The trend has since persisted. “At least a quarter of students” report that they self-censor “fairly often” or “very often” with both students and professors. This restraint isn’t the result of contemplation. Rather, it comes from fear of being shamed or shouted down.

Efforts to carve out specific spaces for disagreement — namely debate societies — have deteriorated as well. A Grinnell College student shared that a friend “was cancelled for opening a free speech club.” And, as the Free Press has reported, high school debate opportunities have similarly devolved as judges often arrive “with paradigms tainted by politics and ideology.” The rise in speaker disinvitations — from Condoleezza Rice to Ayaan Hirsi Ali — only underscores the extent to which campuses have traded civic participation for performance and partisanship.

Today, we’re not only missing the unwavering commitment to the liberal values that underpinned our young republic. We’re also missing the guardrails and institutions that helped Americans develop the skills of self-governance: how to ask questions, how to disagree honorably, how to write compelling arguments, how to listen without surrendering conviction. Without these, the very idea of democratic conversation begins to decay. The American experiment decays with it.

On July 3, 1776, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that America’s independence should be celebrated “with Pomp and Parade . . . from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

Every year, my family does just that. We gather at our home in New England for a July Fourth celebration. After a day at the beach, we walk into town for an Independence Day parade: fire trucks, the Lions Club, veterans in folding chairs, the high school band playing “Yankee Doodle.”

I worry, however, that this beautiful tradition is slowly being bled of any real meaning. Do we remember the conviction and sacrifice this parade signifies? Do we know why we wave flags and children dart into the street for candy? Have we lost the drive and the civic thread that holds it all together?

American politics has always been noisy and contentious. But the American experiment in self-governance has endured. It has bent, but not broken. Do we still believe deeply enough in the ideals and institutions that make meaningful debate possible?

Some Americans are already getting to work. Programs like Incubate Debate, which brings students together across backgrounds to engage in civil, structured argument, are reviving the very skills our Founders prized: critical thinking, moral discipline, and respectful disagreement.

It’s a small but growing reminder that the habits of self-government can be relearned. We just have to want it badly enough.