Americans have lost confidence in their ability to persuade each other. The beginning of wisdom, or at least a foothold on that mountain, is returning to faith in persuasion. If we encounter closemindedness – and we all do – the remedy is an intellectual can-opener, patience offering light until seen, not returning the favor of a closed mind. This – believe it or not – is the key to America’s future.
The Founding Fathers were resolute in their beliefs, and many clashed, but they shared one, a belief in persuasion. They believed a combination of logic, emotion, and ethics – the old Greek logos, pathos, and ethos – would get them, and every succeeding generation of Americans, to truth.
Their first testament to this belief in persuasion was the Declaration of Independence, which used all three means to convey their convictions to the King, other colonists, and world – classic persuasion.
If fidelity to truth – everyone seeking it, accepting it when found, reminding each other to seek it – was the magic elixir for keeping the Republic, for preventing a drift toward mindlessness and tyranny, then an openness to persuasion was the way truth got preserved.
Follow me, and you will – I think – be persuaded. Why would our Founders have placed freedoms of religion and speech at the front of the line, in the First Amendment, and first line of that Amendment?
Obvious, is it not? The future of the nation depended more on preserving those two freedoms than any other, and then a Second Amendment, “right to keep and bear arms,” to preserve the First, and others.
If faith guided most lives, why did they elevate speech to position one? Because only through openness to new and controversial ideas, opinions, discoveries, perspectives, and understandings of truth – could they assure a timeless right to criticize government and persuade others of the truth.
Without free speech, the other identified freedoms all went silent, just as without arms all freedoms in the Bill of Rights were suddenly placed in jeopardy. But the speech part was more than theoretical, or some “pie in the sky” idea that truth would emerge, in some future wonderland, with persuasion.
They lived this conviction. Nowhere is this more obvious than in they way they battled – and they did battle – over ideas, including the shape, limits, and powers of government. At the Constitutional Convention, which lasted three tight-lipped months, Madison’s persona notes tell us a great deal.
Want they tell us above all is that these hard-bitten, fight to the death, believe in the future revolutionaries – all believed firmly in the power, efficacy, and almost sanctity of persuasion.
How? In all that time, battling over every possible issue around life, they never once – according to Madison’s notes – criticized any other member of the gnarly, independence-focused, truth-seeking group…for changing their mind.
Think on that. What does that mean? What could possibly sideline such a standard, petty, human emotion – one we see surfacing all the time in politics and media today – and make them all respect a change of mind, a phenomenon which occurred often in shaping the founding documents?
Answer: Respect for pursuit of truth, through the process of speaking and listening, all the while being open to the idea of persuasion. They knew they were not God, did not have a monopoly on wisdom, but did have a way to scale that mountain together – batting ideas back and forth, until they got closer.
The process they used was recourse to persuasion, an openness to hearing, pondering, and offering statements that drew on their shared respect for logic, understood emotion, and ethics – or use of their minds, hearts, and consciences – to figure out the problem, troubleshoot it together.
That is how we got the Constitution and Bill of Rights – not just consensus on the Declaration of Independence, but agreement on the complex configuration, interbranch and interstate balance of powers, and exact wording for the “must have” limits on the federal government by the people.
So, where does this leave us today? In a state of muddle, or a state of curmudgeonly frustration and disagreement over just about every aspect of life, including how best to limit government. Why? Because we have forgotten the importance of persuasion – and even how to persuade.
How much easier it is to declare oneself right, and just close the door, hang up the phone, delete the email, ignore or disfavor or unfriend or disavow the opinion we know, or we think we know for sure, is wrong. But here is the rub – that is not what the Founders did, not early or late.
Did they disagree fervently on just about everything? Yes. On the role of each branch, role of the states versus federal government, role of the people, which of 60 amendments should be axed, whey, when, how, with what urgency to ratify the Constitution, whether and how to end slavery? Yes.
They worked each of these issues to exhaustion, resolved most of them through persuasion. Look at the notes, their heartfelt letters – filled with persuasion – to each other, their speeches, the Federalist Papers, arguments before state legislatures, Congress, the Courts, and in private.
The only one they could not resolve was slavery, and that one – in the end – the nation came to blows over, but for most of this nation’s history we have figured out that the institutions framed and rights contained in the Constitution got there – and will only stay there – if we believe in persuasion. We need – as one nation – to rediscover our confidence in the past and present. Best way? Still persuasion.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
