The connection between Jay’s day and ours is clear: “In our age,” Roberts wrote, “when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale,” there is even greater danger that political passions can turn us against one another, or against constitutional government itself. He emphasized judges’ particular role as “a key source of national unity and stability,” but his deeper point was that those values are needed among more than just judges.

Jane Chong: This is not the Senate the Framers imagined

His letter invoked Jay, Hamilton, Madison, and John Marshall, but his ideas called to mind another Founding Father: Benjamin Franklin, who, on leaving the constitutional convention of 1787, supposedly told a curious passerby that the Framers had produced “a republic, if you can keep it.”

What does it take to “keep a republic”? Nearly two and a half centuries into this experiment in self-governance, Americans tend to think that they keep their republic by relying on constitutional structure: separated powers, federalism, checks and balances. But constitutional structure, like any structure, does not maintain itself. Each generation has to maintain its institutions and repair any damage that its predecessors inflicted or allowed. This task begins with civic education, so that Americans know how their government works, and thus what to expect from their constitutional institutions.

Yet civic education alone, though necessary, is not sufficient. For civic education to take root and produce its desired fruit, the people themselves must have certain qualities of self-restraint, goodwill, and moderation. Because those virtues are necessary for the functioning of a constitutional republic, they are often called civic virtue, or republican virtue. This is not morality writ large, but something more limited and practical. As the late Irving Kristol argued in an essay 45 years ago, republican virtue is fundamentally the virtue of public-spiritedness as the Founding Fathers knew it:

It means curbing one’s passions and moderating one’s opinions in order to achieve a large consensus that will ensure domestic tranquility. We think of public-spiritedness as a form of self-expression, an exercise in self-righteousness. The Founders thought of it as a form of self-control, an exercise in self-government.

Kristol further described this in terms of “probity, truthfulness, self-reliance, diligence, prudence, and a disinterested concern for the welfare of the republic.” A cofounder of the policy journal The Public Interest, he understood that in a republic there is such a thing as the public interest apart from—and perhaps at odds with—one’s own personal interests, and thus it requires citizens to restrain themselves in the slow, deliberative workings of constitutional and civic institutions, and even in their interactions with one another, as Roberts emphasized in his letter.