Franke: New Year’s Resolutions for the Nation
by Mark Franke
January 1 means most of us will spend too much time developing a list of resolutions for improving our lives in the new year. And most of us, myself included, will spend more time creating the list than actually executing it.
Exercising more and losing weight are the old standbys but I won’t be adding them to my list this year. I have become quite faithful in getting 10,000 steps every day and that’s enough exercise for me. I don’t know why 10,000 is the magic number but it is easier to remember than a daily goal of 9,826 steps.
Throughout most of my adult life, my doctor exhorted me to lose weight but now that I am a senior citizen, he told me to stop losing weight. I don’t know where the cutoff point was for this change in medical advice, but I am thankful for it. Ain’t geezerdom wonderful!
New Year resolutions may or may not work for any specific person but could they be useful when a whole group of people adopted a list with overarching goals for all?
What would happen if, instead of everybody making their own personal list of resolutions, we came together as a nation and developed a single, common list? This list must be at the highest level of purpose on which we could all agree to make America a better place.
While I was pondering this theoretically, I came across a new book by Yuval Levin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation – And Could Again” expands on that very idea of American unity, with the Constitution as the vehicle for accomplishing it.
The key is to understand the Constitution’s intent to establish a format for achieving agreement on the important issues of the day. Too many times we use the Constitution as a club to hammer our opponents rather than a structure to find a solution. Levin reminds us that the Constitution was built to “forge a space, not occupy it.” In other words the Constitution was not meant to provide all the answers but the structure to arrive at these answers. Interesting perspective, that.
Unity is the goal but that does not mean unanimity. Levin’s dialectic is to take healthy competition in the marketplace of ideas and to subject this productive tension to negotiated discourse. It is thinking together, not thinking alike. The aspirational outcome is not to disagree less but to disagree better. Or, as that great twentieth century philosopher Yogi Berra said, “We just agree different.”
Levin used nearly 300 pages of carefully constructed text to describe where we have gone wrong and how we can aright our polity. The book was not a quick read but a thoughtful one. It is ambitious and probably overly optimistic in proposing that we can affect a substantive change in our manner of public interaction.
Levin reminds us that both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution speak in the plural. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” and “We, the People, in Order to form a more perfect Union” are the leads in each document. Our nation was conceived with the premise that we could and would act as one united people.
The Founding Fathers understood this ideal to be aspirational but possible. James Madison in the Federalist Papers cautioned against the insidious influence of factions on public discourse but had faith enough to believe that recognition of the common good would prevail. They were idealists, the Founders, but having experienced the give and take necessary at the constitutional convention to arrive at the best possible governing document to unify the new nation.
The key to disagreeing better is to begin with the common ground on any issue. Surely we can find this, if only in agreeing on the problem statement prior to jumping to solutions. Maybe it is nothing more than an appeal to our better nature, that which genuinely wants things to improve for everyone. It is not just during the Christmas season that a spirit of goodwill can be mined in our national psyche.
St. Paul had some good advice for us today. “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:8 ESV)
If I do that in 2025, my life will be even more joy-filled than it is now. If we all do that, America will be a much more pleasant place in which to live and to raise families.
Although it would probably put several cable news channels out of business. And that would not be a Bad Thing.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
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