Advice From the Balcony: Don’t Abandon the Rule of Law

Is the Rule of Law one thread that might draw Americans together? Here is a perspective drawn from recent conversations among four elders from different backgrounds—one over 90, two in their early 80s, one in his mid-70s.

We are at present a divided nation, although an elder account might identify many divisions that have been overcome, some against great odds. The advantages of being old are distance from the demands of public life and the privilege of looking at it with a wide lens. Elders can take the long view, sitting in the balcony, looking at a story unfolding on stage now. No dispute, it is one that causes much sorrow and concern.

Each of us has loved ones in intense disagreement, in some cases having cut off contact. In perhaps a grandfatherly way, we feel a responsibility to do what we can to help heal relationships that are off course.

When our promises are broken and are no longer deemed trustworthy, everything collapses: government, marriages, friendships, work relationships.

Every play has a stage setting, an agreed upon backdrop against which the story is played out. When the drama becomes heated and intense, with new and surprising events unfolding moment by moment, it can be easy to lose sight of the shared agreements that make the story possible.

From our balcony perspective, the Rule of Law is one of those core shared agreements. Ours is a story of a 250-year-old experiment in self-governance. Never perfect, always in need of improvement, ours is nevertheless an extraordinary tale of how vast differences can be safely managed.

Promises made and promises kept. That’s how healthy marriages, families, and institutions work. Let’s keep our promises to each other. We can disagree passionately, reform and repeal laws that no longer serve, vote officials out of office who have lost our trust, and elect new ones that earn it. But let’s not give up on the Rule of Law. It anchors our relationships with each other. That’s the governing story we inherited from our nation’s founders and that our ancestors struggled and died for. That’s the promise that we’ve made to each other.

Faithfulness to our covenant with each other codified in law, from the Constitution to safe driving laws, as well as other measures, mostly implicit but followed 99% of the time. These must govern our actions. They are the promises we make to each other and they form the core assumption underlying the functioning of this nation.

When our promises are broken and are no longer deemed trustworthy, everything collapses: government, marriages, friendships, work relationships. Trust in that covenant with each other is the glue, the “be all and end all,” the heart of the matter, the centerpiece of our society.

That’s how it looks to us, elders with a balcony perspective. We see a family in pain, living out a drama, a family that is dangerously close to abandoning the script. Let’s honor the Rule of Law and the democratic structures we’ve worked so hard to build. Let’s listen to our better angels as Abe Lincoln advised us to do at an earlier time of crisis.

The time is now to cast our eyes upward toward a unifying cause rather than downward toward divisiveness, mutual recrimination, and disabling antagonism. We have come this far. It would be a devastating blow to all in this country, and in fact to all the world, if we can’t find a path we can walk together.