Can Political Enemies Be Civic Friends? / Robert George (From the Archives)

Civic friendship is not a nicety. For self-governing people, it is a necessity. What happens to a democracy when citizens stop seeing each other as citizens at all?

Robert P. George is Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions (and known for his enduring friendship with Cornel West) argues that “the collapse of civic friendship is a catastrophic threat to public life.”

In this bonus segment from his November 2020 conversation with Evan Rosa, Robert George presents the difference between civility and mere ‘politesse; the habit of wrapping our emotions so tightly around our convictions that we assume a posture of infallibility; and the intellectual humility it takes to consider that a political enemy might have something to teach us as a civic friend. They also discuss the courage required to break ranks—George recounts how he and West, from opposite political poles, each found themselves treated as heretics in 2016 for declining to back their respective party’s nominee—and why he urges his students and his own children to cultivate humility, open-mindedness, and courage, knowing exactly what it can cost to stand by a conscientious belief.

Episode Highlights

- ”Civic friendship is actually important for all sorts of policies, but for a self-governing people, for a democratic people, civic friendship is really critically important.”

- ”But if we do, as we are prone to do, wrap our emotions too tightly around our convictions, then we become dogmatists. Then we become unwilling to consider the possibility that we might be wrong and that a critic might be right.”

- ”This is hard, but it takes humility to recognize that I might be wrong, not merely about the less important superficial and more trivial things of life, but I might be wrong even about the most important things.”

- ”Civic friendship, civility is not just politesse … Civility is something deeper. It is genuinely listening to the guy who disagrees with you … listening with an openness to learning, considering whether in fact he might be right.”

- ”You can’t have an open mind unless you have intellectual humility.”

- ”You can become a heretic very fast by breaking ranks, even on a single issue, if the issue was even moderately important.”

- ”So I really encourage my young people … to try to develop the virtues of intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and courage, because sometimes courage is going to be needed.”

Abo