A Shared Civic Culture Requires Assimilation and Self-Restraint

Victor Hanson does not see constitutional redesign as the answer to America’s civic disorder. Asked what amendment he would make, he said he has no large objection to the constitutional system itself. The problem, as he frames it, lies in cultural habits: whether citizens understand a common political inheritance, regard the country as their primary civic allegiance, and exercise restraints that formal law cannot impose.

That distinction runs through his account of immigration, education, public speech, and the courts. America can absorb cultural difference, he argues, without surrendering what he calls its “core.” Food, fashion, music, art, family background, and local community can enrich the country’s periphery. But its governmental system, civic vocabulary, and political loyalty must remain shared.

For Hanson, this is not a call to erase private identities. He describes his own family as intermarried with Mexican Americans and says he lives in a community he characterizes as 95% Hispanic. He has a Swedish grandfather but says he does not identify politically or socially as Swedish, or as white. Such origins are not meaningless, in his telling; they are simply not the basis on which a plural society can sustain itself.

The governing question is which identity comes first. Hanson objects to what he says students are taught in college: that ethnic, racial, sexual-orientation, or gender identity should command a person’s primary loyalty. He argues that a state cannot hold together on that basis.

“You’re told that your identity, your ethnic or racial or sexual orientation or gender identity is your first loyalty or deserves your first emphasis,” Hanson said. “And I’m just trying to remind you historically that’s a path to perdition for the state.”

His alternative is a demanding civic identity. To be fully assimilated, he says, is to be “fully American”: not merely resident or economically active, but able to participate in a common political culture and to see one’s first public loyalty as belonging to the United States.

Hanson treats civic education as the mechanism by which a country transmits that common identity. He calls education a “zero-sum game” in which a society can fail through omission as well as commission: it can neglect to teach the material citizens need, or teach commitments that displace citizenship as the central public bond.

He says civics has largely ceased to function as a distinct K–12 discipline. The civics education he remembers required students to explain how the judicial, executive, and legislative branches checked one another. It also conveyed a wider shared culture: students learned national songs including “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” “God Bless America,” and “America the Beautiful.” The point was not solely to teach governmental mechanics. It was to give citizens a common body of reference.

That shared knowledge, in Hanson’s formulation, should include both the country’s achievements and its failures. A person who has come from Panama, Belgium, Chad, or elsewhere should be able to explain the significance of Iwo Jima and Gettysburg, he says. But the same person should also be able to discuss Japanese internment and why it happened. Assimilation does not require a sanitized national story; it requires enough common historical knowledge for citizens to argue about that story within the same political frame.

He also includes a shared language, voting, familiarity with the Fourth of July, and knowledge of American literature, poetry, and civic institutions. Hanson acknowledges that assimilation is a process, particularly for people who arrived only a few years earlier. But he is clear about its destination: membership in the national political community, rather than enduring separation into competing primary identities.

His account of language instruction is deliberately uncomfortable. Hanson recalled attending school in a predominantly Mexican-American area, where a teacher made children repeat “I have a stick-shift Chevy” to correct pronunciation. He recognizes that the exercise can sound racist now. But he portrays the teacher as pursuing what she considered a practical obligation: students could retain any accent they wanted at home, while learning what she called “the King’s English” so they could succeed in professional life.

Hanson calls this the “brutal bargain of immigrants.” The bargain is that people who enter the country acquire its language and civic norms; the country does not refashion its political institutions around every culture of origin. “We don’t say we want a judicial system like Bolivia’s,” he said. “We don’t say we want a congress like North Korea’s.”

The tension in that model is central to his argument. Hanson praises immigration as a source of social and cultural enrichment, but only on the condition that enrichment does not alter the governing core. He rejects the idea that this must be chauvinism or triumphalism. In his view, the fact that people seek to come to the United States creates an obligation to make them Americans—and requires confidence that the American system is worth passing on.

Hanson’s case for civic cohesion is not limited to curriculum or immigration. He argues that constitutional liberty and economic abundance can weaken the habits needed to sustain either one.

Drawing on his training as a classicist, he says the fundamental problems of Greece and Rome were not chiefly defects in the Roman Constitution or Athenian political arrangements. They were affluence and leisure—what he calls luxus, the root of “luxury.” Free-market capitalism, Hanson says, is the only system that works and creates enormous wealth. A constitutional society likewise provides broad avenues for liberty. Yet together, wealth and freedom can yield complacency.

He invokes Winston Churchill’s observation that America does the right thing only as a last resort, and Thucydides’ account of Athens after its Sicilian disaster. Hanson’s point is that democracies can recover quickly when citizens become energized and educated toward a common goal. But recovery is not automatic. It requires a citizenry with standards beyond the legal minimum.

Those standards are the “brakes” Hanson believes contemporary culture lacks. The question is not what citizens may legally do, but what they should refrain from doing on moral or ethical grounds. He points to what he sees as increased crassness in popular culture over the past decade or two, including routine profanity by politicians on both the left and the right. He does not advocate censorship. His argument is that citizens and public figures can choose not to make coarseness their default register.

Religion has a role in that account, though Hanson does not present conventional belief as a condition of citizenship. He invokes deism, which he says some founders embraced despite not being devout believers: the idea of a transcendent power morally superior to oneself. In his view, belief in such a power encourages better citizenship than a society composed entirely of agnostics or atheists.

He places religion alongside shame culture, family reputation, rootedness in place, and other social restraints that can suppress individual appetites. Without such brakes, he argues, a society becomes crude and nihilistic. His historical comparison is Rome in the first century BC and first century AD, where he says declining birth rates, boredom, sexual excess, and indulgence appeared together. The lesson he draws is a pessimistic one about human nature: it must be preserved or raised up, rather than simply indulged.

That work, Hanson says, is not fundamentally governmental. A constitution can create freedom; it cannot by itself furnish the self-restraint necessary to use freedom well.

Hanson applies the same principle of restraint to political anger. He does not regard the present moment as unprecedented. He recalls the early 1970s, when he says the United States experienced an average of two terrorist bombings a day amid groups such as the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army. He also names Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s and the McCarthy period as earlier eras of acute political conflict and suspicion.

The United States has endured such periods before, he says, and remains resilient. But his prescription is not a broad institutional program. It is individual and unilateral: citizens should lower their own temperature without waiting for opponents to do the same.

Hanson says his podcast prohibits guests from using profanity. The rule is not, in his account, a claim to moral superiority; it is an effort to create a more elevated space in a public culture he considers increasingly crude. He describes relatives who support Bernie Sanders and have stopped speaking to him because he voted for Donald Trump. His response, he says, has been to keep reaching out and to remain soft-spoken.

A confrontation at a Menlo Park Starbucks supplies his more concrete example. Hanson said a man called him a “Zionist bastard,” accused him of supporting genocide and Benjamin Netanyahu, and disrupted other customers. Hanson said he felt an impulse to hit the man, but instead asked him to apologize to the people whose coffee he had interrupted. When the man demanded an apology from Hanson, Hanson replied that they could both apologize: Hanson “for being the victim” and the other man “for being the victimizer.”

The exchange illustrates the form of agency Hanson has in mind. Civility does not depend on an opponent’s good faith. A person can decline to swear, threaten violence, or answer provocation with escalation. Hanson says he uses the same approach in hostile public encounters, trying to defuse them with calmness or humor rather than anger.

“We can all tone it down,” Hanson said. “It can be unilateral; you don’t have to depend on the other person to be the first to do it.”

The qualification is that restraint is not total passivity; Hanson jokes that there are limits, including someone spitting on you. But the larger claim is that public life improves through accumulated personal choices not to make political disagreement more degrading.

The institutional corollary of Hanson’s cultural argument is reciprocal restraint between judges and politicians. Citizens cannot have confidence in judicial independence, he says, if public officials intimidate individual judges. He includes Donald Trump’s criticism of particular judges, Chuck Schumer’s remarks outside the Supreme Court directed at Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, demonstrations outside the homes of Clarence Thomas and Kavanaugh, and the person who, Hanson says, was outside Kavanaugh’s residence after telling his sister he wanted to kill the justice.

Judges, however, have an obligation of their own. Hanson argues that the judiciary must avoid behaving as an overtly political branch, because political conduct from judges encourages opportunistic interference from politicians.

He offers Chief Justice John Roberts as an example. Conservatives often criticize Roberts for not being conservative enough, Hanson says, but he sees Roberts as trying to act as an institutional administrator rather than an overt partisan. Hanson does not claim that every ruling is correct. His point is that a chief justice charged with administering the judiciary may properly resist becoming a straightforward political actor.

His sharper concern is the power of federal district courts. Hanson says that in the first six months of the Trump administration, three or four hundred of the nation’s 750 district judges became exceptionally influential because litigants could select favorable judges and seek regional rulings with nationwide effect. He describes Marc Elias and PAC-funded litigants, in his account, “cherry picking” judges who could halt federal policies, including deportation, for 60 or 70 days before a higher court could reverse them. He says such decisions were almost always reversed, though not always.

The result, in Hanson’s telling, is a self-reinforcing cycle. Politicians who menace judges compromise judicial autonomy. Judges who act as partisan actors make the judiciary look like another political weapon. Civic confidence requires both sides to stop supplying evidence for that belief.

Hanson says Americans can leave the country if they choose, but he is more concerned with another kind of exit: withdrawing from politics while remaining physically present.

He estimates that, out of a population of roughly 340 million and about 280 million adults, fewer than 45% participate politically. Many people neither vote nor follow public affairs because they want to be left alone, he says. In practical terms, they have left the political sphere and turned it over to others.

Hanson notes that disengagement can be temporary. After receiving his PhD in 1980, he says, he became disillusioned with academia and spent five years farming, largely detached from public life. People can withdraw and later return to the body politic.

Still, the argument sits uneasily beside his call for a shared civic culture. Hanson values America precisely because it offers abundant avenues for participation—clubs, activities, sports, and online communities—and because people can form identities outside formal politics. Yet his broader case depends on citizens not treating political membership as optional in substance. A country can give people room to step back, he suggests, but it cannot sustain a common civic inheritance if too many people abandon the work of carrying it.