What We Can Learn from George Washington Today

February 22nd marked the 293rd anniversary of George Washington’s birth. It seems that few Americans, however, really know the man or understand what makes him important.

Some accounts of Washington are hagiographic and instructive, after the fashion of a fable. Parson Weems, for example, invented the tale about him chopping down a cherry tree. In contrast, others have attempted to cut a tall man down to size by emphasizing Washington’s moral shortcomings, most importantly his ownership of slaves, which he himself admitted was an immoral trade.

Washington has much more to offer us, however, than simple morality tales about his virtues and vices. He was a man of extraordinary depth and complexity. He was in tight control of himself, and his life was always choreographed to the rhythms of propriety and morality as he understood them.

Washington held himself to the highest standard and inspired others to meet it as well.

His private life, well known to us through his contracts, travels, and investments, is nonetheless hidden from us by his wish that Martha, his wife, burn their personal correspondence, which she fulfilled. Penetrating to the heart of the man beyond the image he wished to portray can be difficult.

To recover the real Washington, we should start with what he cherished beyond all else – his country. To understand the character of his patriotism is to understand what he believed America to be.

For Washington, America is defined by liberty, which he spoke about in his Farewell Address. Liberty, he said, is “interwoven … with every ligament” of the American heart.

The Constitution, he believed, was based upon the “fundamental maxims of true Liberty” and the great principle of “the power and the right of the People to establish Government.” It is because of the Constitution’s liberal and democratic character that we should show “respect for its authority, compliance with its Laws, acquiescence in its measures.” Only the people have the right to alter the Constitution, said Washington, and “’till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole People, [it] is sacredly obligatory upon all.”

It is in this context that Washington warns Americans, “in the most solemn manner,” of the dangers of partisanship and what we today call polarization. He argues that while parties and factions “may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, and to usurp for themselves the reins of Government.” Partisanship, in other words, is a danger to liberty and constitutional government. For this reason it is “the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.”

Washington’s preferred phrase to describe partisanship is “the spirit of Party.” This spirit, he says, “agitates the Community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”

Partisanship makes countrymen into enemies, silencing what Abraham Lincoln would later call the “better angels of our nature.” As we look within for enemies, Washington feared we would ignore the real enemies outside our borders. He warns us that the spirit of party “opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.”

Partisanship, in other words, distracts us from our true self-interest, divides us, and weakens us before our enemies. Washington, even after two terms as president, was still a military man at heart.

What must we do to prevent these dangers, especially since partisanship is “inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human Mind”? For Washington, it all comes down to our fidelity to the Constitution and the system of checks and balances it prescribes.

Public servants, he states, must “confine themselves within their respective Constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the Powers of one department to encroach upon another.” Congress must let the president enforce the law, and the president must allow Congress to decide what that law is.

If we do not follow Washington’s advice, he is very clear about the outcome: “The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.”

The overriding importance of Washington for America today is not so much that he was a moral exemplar, nor that he bears the moral failure of not seeking ways to free his slaves prior to his death, though both claims are, in different ways, true. Rather, it is that Washington understood this country as a father understands his children, knowing their strengths and their weaknesses.

Washington can teach us something about how to be Americans, but only if we see him as more than a proxy for our own partisan fights. It is long past time that we returned to the actual political teachings of our founders, for it is in these that true civic education can be found.

This article was first published by RealClear Public Affairs on March 3, 2025.