Advice From the Wisest President
George Washington proposed that we live by three ideas: liberty, conscience and tolerance.
By Daniel Henninger
Wandering through the dry desert that is pre-New Year’s television, one encountered hosts and pundits expressing their hopes for the coming year.
A common sentiment seems to have emerged for 2025, summed up in a famous phrase from the 1990s: “Can’t we all just get along?”
More than 30 years later, the answer is: Apparently not.
What’s more, we have no interest in getting along.
Political polarization, once considered a problem, has morphed into a pig wallow.
Throwing mud is more fun than winning a point.
Elon Musk, in a set-to about immigration, made a superb point: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.”
Then of course he added: “Take a big step back and F— YOURSELF in the face.”
The 2024 presidential election was for many a vote against—against not just Kamala Harris or Donald Trump but everything each one conceivably represented.
Despite the alienation, one senses a postelection mood that enough is finally enough.
“Common ground” is generally thought of as political compromise, which presumably is House Speaker Mike Johnson’s crime against humanity with his infinitesimal majority.
But maybe it would be progress to establish as a baseline that we occupy the same plot of earth.
A reader this past week sent a note suggesting that everyone would benefit from reading George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew congregation in Newport, R.I.
He’s right.
The brief, famous letter from the first president—maybe America’s wisest man—is appropriate today:
“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation.
All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”
Worth emphasizing at our polarized remove nearly 235 years on is that Washington is fusing three important ideas—liberty, conscience and tolerance.
“Liberty” was a word used often during the revolutionary period and is generally associated with a population bent on liberty from the British king.
Washington, however, is bringing the idea of protected liberty down to daily living, the most personal level imaginable.
And he is arguing, within a few sentences, that individual liberty’s maintenance requires a shared understanding of tolerance.
The opposite of individual liberty is coercion, which brings me to one of the year’s most significant developments: the decline of the idea called DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, which became a case study in social division.
The idea behind DEI was to put in place formal commitments by government, private companies and nonprofit institutions to favor what proponents called historically underrepresented communities, which is to say blacks, Hispanics, women, Native Americans and various components of the LGBTQ movement.
The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, finding the consideration of race in college admissions unconstitutional, contributed greatly to DEI’s demise inside many corporations.
Legal liabilities aside, the relevant point for our purposes is that in practice DEI became compulsory and individual liberty suppressed.
Add here as well the simultaneous introduction of implicit-bias training.
Whatever provocative claims for justice these movements made, their element of social coercion is inarguable.
Not surprisingly, that had the opposite effect: Uncounted millions of Americans silently pushed back against being lectured about implicit bias and its insistence that they acknowledge their racism.
As Washington suggested, one class’s self-limited tolerance is a form of condescension.
In 2015 the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that gay marriage was constitutionally protected.
What was striking here was how well-tolerated this decision was by the general public.
More striking was how quickly the cultural left insisted that people adopt their ideas of transgenderism and sexual identity.
With no significant dissent, Democrats supported policies, primarily in schools, to institutionalize ideas on which there was nothing resembling a social consensus, for example that teachers couldn’t tell parents of their children’s desire to change their identity.
Tolerance of opinion in academia was once the fountainhead of progress.
Decades of turning away from that authentic diversity degraded finally into the embarrassing antisemitic outbreaks across U.S. campuses.
The Democrats’ internal discussion now about what went wrong is said to be driven in part by a turning away from so-called wokeism.
More accurately, it’s a turn away from decades of a political moralism that over time relied on compulsion to ensure its adoption.
A possibility Democrats should think about is that a reason for Donald Trump’s gains among voters of every class and color is that he makes them feel they can think or say whatever they want again.
No, the Trump lion isn’t going to lie down with the liberal lambs.
But it would be better for the American future if the two agreed to coexist in what George Washington believed was a nation worthy of imitation.
That should include a common commitment to liberty of conscience.
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