In 1897, the philosopher William James honored Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment—one of the first African American regiments to fight in the Civil War—by urging Americans to recommit to the ethos those soldiers embodied: “civic courage.”

James wasn’t glorifying war. He was pointing to the peaceable, constructive politics Shaw and his men fought to preserve: a politics in which “the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties.” Such nations, James said, “have no need of wars to save them.”

The heroism of Shaw, a white man, and his Black comrades lay not just in their martial valor but in their willingness to work together, at great risk, to test whether the ancient American ideal of unity amid diversity could survive their riven nation. That ideal embodied a distinctive tradition in American democracy: not just majority rule or the protection of rights, but the ongoing, often arduous effort of diverse citizens to build what Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and many other founders often described as a “commonwealth”: a polity authorized and governed by the people, in the interest of the common good. 

Today, we are again in urgent need of that tradition. But to renew it, we first need to recover it, and to tell a more complete story of what American democracy has always meant.

The standard story of American origins centers on rights: the rights of Englishmen claimed against the Crown, the natural rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, and the constitutional rights codified in the late 1780s. 

That story is important, but it is incomplete. Alongside the language of fixed rights ran a robust tradition of creative common work.

The New England town meeting is the earliest example. From the founding of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay in the 1620s, settlers organized their communities around collective deliberation and shared labor as much as private property and individual conscience. Roads were built, schools funded, and disputes adjudicated through processes requiring citizens to listen, reason together, and accept outcomes they had helped shape. 

The founders gave this tradition a sophisticated articulation. John Adams defined the body politic as a “social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.” Jefferson held that realizing democracy required a culture in which every man “would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.” 

Similarly, the Constitutional Convention itself was an act of courageous collaboration. Delegates of radically divergent interests and philosophies produced, through painful compromise, a framework none of them could have imagined alone—one designed, as James Madison explained, not only to constrain factionalism but to channel diverse visions of the common good into creative national policy.

When the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he found this tradition flourishing. Americans, he observed, banded together in voluntary associations to achieve what Europeans left to aristocrats or the state, driven by what he called “self-interest rightly understood”—the recognition that one’s long-term interests are inseparable from the well-being of one’s neighbors. 

Presciently, however, Tocqueville also warned of democracy’s besetting temptation: an atomistic individualism that bred not just selfishness but withdrawal from civic life, leaving the public world to manage itself and opening the door to what he called “soft despotism.”

Since Tocqueville’s day, the Civil Rights movement is perhaps the richest example of the collaborative tradition and the civic courage it demands and inspires. In popular memory, it is primarily a story of rights. But it was also, and perhaps primarily, a story of citizens building power together across differences of race, class, religion, and ideology to create political possibilities none of them could have achieved alone. 

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) practiced a form of community organizing with roots in hundreds of Black communities, which had built thousands of schools and libraries in the segregated South. In this approach, SNCC organizers—Black and white, Northern and Southern—sought first to understand local people’s knowledge and aspirations, then help them develop their own capacity for collective action.

The Freedom Schools of Mississippi taught Black Mississippians to read and to think critically, articulate their values, and imagine new futures for their communities. Ella Baker insisted on “group-centered leadership” rather than charismatic saviors, distributing power so that communities could sustain themselves long after any individual leader moved on. 

The March on Washington was organized by Bayard Rustin, a gay Black man marginalized within the movement itself. The legislative coalitions behind the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts required collaboration among liberal Democrats, moderate Republicans, labor unions, and religious bodies of extraordinary diversity.

None of it was comfortable. All of it required exactly the civic courage James had described: the willingness to work with people one distrusted or had been wronged by, in service of a goal that transcended those differences.

That tradition is embattled today. And the problem is not entirely new. Beginning in the 1980s, Americans dramatically reduced their participation in the civic associations and neighborhood organizations that had been democracy’s primary schools. 

Both major parties reinforced this retreat—the right celebrating individual freedom from government, the left emphasizing group rights against majorities—casting democracy as a zero-sum competition rather than a collaborative enterprise. The result was a vicious cycle in which Americans came to treat government as a vending machine: insert preference, receive outcome. 

Many citizens stopped thinking of themselves as agents capable of shaping their common world and began thinking of themselves as consumers of a democracy tailored to (or failing to meet) their personal expectations. Politics became no longer a space for civic inquiry, argument, and creativity, but a place where civic hope goes to die.

But civic hope is not dead. Organizations like the Industrial Areas Foundation build civic power in working-class communities across partisan and racial divides. Braver Angels teaches Americans to engage across genuine differences without surrendering their convictions. Educators across the country are developing civics curricula that engage students in the actual practice of collaborative democracy rather than mere memorization of rights and procedures.

These efforts embody the cardinal virtues of courageous citizenship: the experimental willingness to try new approaches and revise them, the reflective willingness to face history squarely, and the empathic willingness to find public value in the perspectives of those who differ from us. Together they produce a form of power that political science rarely studies, but American history repeatedly demonstrates—a generative power that grows when shared, emerges from collaboration rather than dominance, and is uniquely capable of creating new political possibilities.

As we mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we would do well to remember how its signatories closed: with a mutual pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. 

That pledge was not merely an assertion of rights. It was an act of courageous, collaborative citizenship—the founding gesture of a tradition we urgently need to reclaim.