Discernment

The Ancient Skill Without Which Our Republic Cannot Survive

There is a word that does not appear in the Constitution, does not trend on social media, and will not be found in the talking points of any cable news segment. It is one of the oldest words in the moral vocabulary of Western civilization, borrowed from the Latin discernere (to separate, to sift, to distinguish). The word is discernment, and it may be the single capacity most urgently needed if the American democratic experiment is to survive its Semiquincentennial Crisis, and endure another 250 years.

We are a nation approaching its 250th birthday; a threshold that invites an ongoing kind of reckoning no mere anniversary can contain. The founders who drafted the Declaration and debated the Constitution were men of robust learning and not a little anxiety. They had read their Thucydides, their Montesquieu, their Locke. They knew what had destroyed Athenian democracy, what had rotted Roman Republic, what had made every prior experiment in popular self-governance collapse, into tyranny or chaos. They were not naïve about human nature. They were, in a word, discerning. And they designed institutions premised on the hope - never the guarantee - that their successors would be discerning too.

That hope is now under extraordinary stress.