John Farmer Jr. writes that it's a not all lost, though. We can still save our democracy.
Editor's note: John Farmer Jr., a university professor and special counsel to the president of Rutgers University, addressed graduating fellows at Rutgers' Eagleton Institute of Politics during a May 12 ceremony helping to celebrate Eagleton's 60th anniversary. Below is an adaptation of his remarks.
By John Farmer Jr.
This may seem an odd year to speak in idealistic terms, as Florence Eagleton did 60 years ago in founding the Eagleton Institute, about "increasing the knowledge of democracy" by "cultivation of civic responsibility and leadership." Indeed, it's been impossible to watch this presidential year's festival of vitriol, slander and outright mendacity without recalling the words of Benjamin Franklin when asked what form of government was adopted by the Constitutional Convention in 1787. "A republic, madam," he reportedly replied, "if we can keep it."
Can we keep it?
That will be the defining question for your generation's public life. For we are in grave danger of losing our way: as a government, as a people, as a culture.
Twenty-five years ago, after the Soviet Union collapsed, the American way of life and government reigned supreme. The former communist regimes all aspired to one form or another of American freedom. Liberated nations throughout the world strove to embrace market economies bolstered by democratic institutions.
But look at us today. Whatever else one might say about the current political climate, this much is clear: Few if any world leaders or societies aspire to emulate America anymore. Indeed, the American version of freedom is under assault virtually all over the world. It isn't just ISIS, or Vladimir Putin, and the critique isn't limited to astonishment at the P.T. Barnum-like excesses of the presidential campaign, but extends to the excesses of American life itself.
Our resistance to restraints on our economic appetites nearly caused the world economy to collapse. Twice.
Our resistance to any limits on the right to carry firearms has resulted in a country flooded with 300 million weapons, where mass shootings have become almost routine.
Our resistance to any limits on speech has led to the normalization of pornography, with its exploitation of women and children.
Our equation of spending with speech has led to a political arena in which a rich person's or corporation's "speech" is necessarily valued more highly than an average or poor person's speech.
Cable news and social media have become engines of extremism, a wasteland in which the pressure always to have something to say -- and to say something that drives up audience share and, with it, profits -- acts as an accelerant to any public argument, driving people further apart.
This, then, is the widely held image of our post-Cold War American culture: a people not fulfilled but deformed by the excesses of our appetites.
The political consequence of this belief that our freedoms are indistinguishable from our appetites has been all too predictable: the death of compromise as a virtue.
Since the end of the Cold War, our government has faced repeated crises of legitimacy. The integrity and legitimacy of the presidency was threatened by the impeachment of Bill Clinton -- the second presidential impeachment in 25 years -- and by the election of 2000, the outcome of which was effectively decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in a decision that called into question both the legitimacy of the election and the legitimacy of the court itself.
The legitimacy of President George W. Bush's tenure was questioned by many throughout his term, and the legitimacy of President Barack Obama's term has also been questioned repeatedly, by the so-called "birthers" casting doubt on his qualifications to serve, and by repeated calls for his impeachment for alleged executive overreaching.
Our federal government has been shut down completely. Twice.
Donald Trump is the product not so much of those politics but of the culture that nourished them; Hilary Clinton, on the other hand, is not so much a product of the culture but of that toxic political environment. Taken together, they are the proof that, ultimately, our politics cannot be separated from a culture that has confused unrestrained appetites for ordered liberty.
In short, we are living our founders' worst nightmare. James Madison warned against what he termed the "mortal disease ... from which popular governments everywhere have perished": "A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points ...have divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress one another than to cooperate for their common good."
Similarly, George Washington warned, as he was leaving office: "The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge ... is itself a frightful despotism." Does anyone doubt that this "alternate domination ... sharpened by the spirit of revenge" is precisely what we have suffered for a generation?
The framers' solution to the emergence of factions, which they viewed as inevitable, "sown into the nature of man," was to structure the American form of government in such a way that factions would be forced by the structure of government itself to compromise.
If history has revealed any flaw in this design, it is our tendency to believe that the system is self-sustaining, a "machine that would go of itself," in historian Michael Kammen's terms.
But the survival of our form of government is not written in the stars, or even in the Constitution. It is written, or not written, in our culture, in a shared understanding and embrace of what it means to be American. But it is precisely this wisdom of the framers -- that because republics are fragile, compromise is essential to our culture -- that has disappeared from our culture and politics.
This, then, is the challenge you face as young people interested in politics: to reject the post-Cold War culture and politics that have mistaken compromise for weakness.
For you see, Florence Eagleton's message has never been more urgent, or more timely: Her mission has now become yours, to "cultivate civic responsibility" and, in doing so, to recover for our culture and politics a lost sense of human decency.
John Farmer Jr. is a former New Jersey attorney general and a former senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission.
Follow NJ.com Opinion on Twitter@NJ_Opinion. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.