The Importance of Civic Virtue
To win, the Democratic Party needs to appeal to our better nature.
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Imagine the following exercise. You are asked to write down the values you wish both your neighbors and your elected officials possessed. You have as much time as you need, but there is a catch: you cannot use AI or any digital crutch. It is just you and a blank page. What do you scribble?
The difficulty of the task reveals a deeper tension in American civic life. Values are not easy to ponder or discuss, in part because the term has been hollowed out by the clichés of stump speeches. Phrases like “middle-class values” or “family values” have become placeholders that can mean almost anything to anyone. Yet the challenge runs deeper. We lack a shared vocabulary for the virtues we expect from one another and from those who govern us.
What, then, do we mean by “values?” Are personal characteristics such as industriousness or integrity values? They are—but they are often treated as private traits rather than civic expectations. One could easily imagine listing honesty, decency, kindness, and courage. There are also values we cherish collectively—liberty, freedom, individual responsibility, privacy—yet these are often invoked as national ideals rather than the qualities we hope to see embodied in individual leaders. They belong on the list as well.
Call it a moral deficit or a societal ethical breach, but candidates who speak meaningfully about civic virtue, and who integrate those virtues into their public commitments, are likely to resonate with a public that yearns for something steadier and more principled. When one looks at our collective lists, I suspect that—once rephrased and refined—what emerges is a shared blueprint for civic virtue.
Wisdom. Decency. Character. Public-spiritedness—the internal drive to seek the good of others. Moderation in temperament. The ability to reason, knowing that others do not share your view. Courage, including the willingness to articulate ideas that are not always popular. These are not small aspirations. It is not easy to be courageous, wise, or unselfish. Civic virtue is both something we occasionally grasp and something we continually strive to attain. It is both discernible and aspirational.
The purpose here is not to catalog every virtue but to raise a broader point. As the Democratic Party looks toward the 2026 congressional elections and the 2028 presidential race, commentators across the ideological spectrum note that it must address a wide range of concrete issues—national security, health care, housing, technology, climate, immigration, inflation, and deficits—and yes, even social issues such as trans rights. But alongside these policy debates lies a deeper need: a conversation about civic virtue and the values we hold, and wish to hold, as a nation.
Can one speak simultaneously to liberals and progressives who will reliably vote Blue, to 2024 Trump voters, and to disengaged non-voters? The answer is yes, but only if the message is grounded in conviction and purpose. Yet the current roster of potential candidates has not articulated a coherent civic-virtue agenda.
Some political figures have embraced a performative, profane vernacular as a way to attract attention and signal authenticity. A recent New York Times headline noted this trend: “Online and on the Stump, Democrats Embrace a Four-Letter Word.” How myopic and unvirtuous. What about appealing to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature?” Being glib or profane—whether in private or on the campaign trail—speaks to one’s character. In an age when clicks and likes are treated as political currency, it is tempting to seek the popular rather than the greater good. Profanity can be funny, even cathartic, but it does little to advance civic virtue.
Candidates of all party affiliations would benefit from revisiting Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s landmark 1963 study The Civic Culture. The authors remind us that a democracy survives not only through the strength of its institutions but through the habits, expectations, and values of its citizens. Our political culture is not created in a vacuum. We the people shape it, as do our leaders. We determine what we discuss, how we sound, and which virtues we elevate or ignore.
Across age, race, and party affiliation, Americans consistently express a desire to be respectful, strong, free, and courageous. Candidates who speak to the better angels of our nature—who appeal to civic virtue rather than to cynicism or spectacle—may find themselves inspiring something larger than a single election cycle. They may help renew our political culture for years to come.
And in doing so, they will remind us why we treasure our Bill of Rights, why we cherish liberty, and why the American experiment continues to serve as a beacon of hope for people around the world.
Robert M. Eisinger is a political scientist. He is the author of several works, including The Evolution of Presidential Polling.
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The problem is that civic virtue is not something a political coalition can simply rediscover rhetorically after years of institutional behavior that has often undermined the very conditions that sustain it.
Civic virtue historically depended on reciprocal obligation, restraint, tolerance of disagreement, shared burden-bearing, and institutions capable of mediating conflict without moralizing every dispute. Many critics would argue that large parts of today’s Democratic institutional culture increasingly operate through symbolic moral positioning, procedural prestige, and therapeutic or identity-based legitimacy instead.
That is why the essay feels disconnected from political reality. It treats civic virtue almost as a tone leaders can adopt rather than as something rooted in institutional behavior and democratic reciprocity.
Even the invocation of Lincoln reveals the gap. Lincoln appealed to the “better angels of our nature” within a political culture that still assumed sacrifice, duty, and tragic responsibility. Contemporary political culture often struggles to describe legitimate authority itself without immediately treating it as morally suspect.
The issue is not merely that civic virtue has weakened. It is that many institutions no longer know how to sustain it. Including I think, the Democratic Party.
Yes. What we need, however, is not hand-wringing about the need for a national conversation about civic virtue, but some concrete ways to hold such a conversation. For instance, in France, when Macron had to back-track on his energy tax in the face of public opposition, he went along with proposals for a Citizen’s Assembly on energy and climate. The Assembly was composed of citizens chosen by lot to represent the public in all its diversity. Their discussions were held publicly, and publicized. There was a national debate. It was encouraged by the example of ordinary citizens grappling with hard issues honestly, patiently, thoughtfully. Let’s try something like that on our big disagreements. But let’s not wait for our President to do it, let’s do it ourselves.