When Marjorie Taylor Greene starts talking about bipartisanship, you know something in American politics has slipped its moorings.
During the recent 43-day government shutdown, Greene—whose brand was built on viral confrontations and absolutist loyalty to Trump—went on TV in Atlanta to call for “bipartisan cooperation” to end the stalemate, blaming both parties and urging Congress to “end the political drama” and fix health-care and cost-of-living crises. A few weeks later, after backing extensions of Obamacare tax credits and fretting on national TV about kitchen-table economics, Joy Behar half-jokingly suggested she consider becoming a Democrat on “The View.” Now Greene is resigning from Congress altogether, her exit wrapped up in threats, Trumpworld drama, and—somewhat amazingly—a bipartisan push for term limits that flared in the wake of her announcement.
If the country feels upside down, that’s the point, says Chris Gibson. The former Republican congressman from the Hudson Valley thinks our political vertigo isn’t just about one firebrand or one shutdown. It’s about the slow collapse of a shared philosophy that once allowed Americans to fight like hell over policy while still agreeing on the basic rules of the game.
Gibson’s new book, The Spirit of Philadelphia: A Call to Recover the Founding Principles (Routledge), lands squarely in this moment of Greene-era whiplash. A decorated Army colonel who served seven tours in places like Iraq and Kosovo, Gibson went on to represent New York’s 20th and then 19th Congressional Districts from 2011 to 2017, earning a reputation as one of the House’s most bipartisan members. The Lugar Center’s Bipartisan Index ranked him third in the entire chamber in the 114th Congress.
After honoring a self-imposed term-limits pledge and stepping away from electoral politics, he came home to his alma mater as Siena College’s president from 2020 to 2023, steering the small Franciscan school through Covid. Now back in Kinderhook, where he grew up, Gibson is trying something harder than another deployment or another campaign: persuading Americans that they still have more in common than they think.
Liberty and Obligation, Not Either/Or
When we spoke recently, Gibson doesn’t begin with polling crosstabs or the latest outrage cycle. He starts with what he calls the country’s “existential angst”—the rising levels of alienation, isolation, and despair that somehow coexist with unprecedented material wealth and digital connection. “I’m basically saying we must recognize that the existential angst is directly attributed to the lack of a unifying political philosophy,” he says. “Strangely, we have maneuvered ourselves into the intellectual space where we believe that somehow individual liberty and community can survive by themselves without each other. And I say that as a fiction.”
We want, he says, to live in a country that sees us as “the authors of our own lives, rising to our own potential.” But we also have obligations: to neighbors, future generations, the “greater good of society.” Those two impulses—self-authorship and responsibility to others—are supposed to be in productive tension, not mortal combat. “It’s a healthy tension,” Gibson says, “and it is an interplay that is essential to a flourishing life.”
The work of The Spirit of Philadelphia is to name and rehabilitate the philosophy he thinks once held those forces together.
Common Sense, American Style
The phrase he hangs it on—common sense realism—sounds almost suspiciously modest, like something you’d find on a cable news chyron. Philosophers usually trace it to 18th-century Scots like Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid. Gibson is arguing that the Americans took that framework and made it their own.
“We actually adopted it, owned it, and frankly evolved it,” he says. In his version, American common sense realism has three interlocking dimensions:
- Knowledge: The shared facts and expertise that help a species that “dropped from trees two million years ago” survive and climb.
- Moral philosophy: The “mystery” you run into when you try to obey the old commandment to know yourself and discover there are aspects of your humanity—call it soul, conscience, or just the “very constitution of our nature”—that can’t be reduced to data.
- Political philosophy: The way you design institutions once you accept that humans are both capable of great love and prone to abuse power.
“What we’re missing today is an integrated sense of our humanity and where we stand in relation to existence,” Gibson says. Common sense realism, for all its blind spots, treated people as mind, body, and spirit, and insisted that any serious politics had to account for all three.
At the founding of the Republic, Gibson argues, that realism about human nature—the line between good and evil running through every heart—translated directly into its architecture: separation of powers, checks and balances, and a Constitution designed not to stamp out disagreement but to give it someplace safe to go. The goal wasn’t unanimity; it was a dispute-resolution mechanism sturdy enough to let citizens “think differently, speak differently,” and still resolve conflicts without killing each other.
Slavery, Lincoln, and the “Games of Thrones” Problem
So where did we lose that thread?
Here Gibson gets historical. The short version is that the intellectual framework was strong, but the framers made a catastrophic moral miscalculation about slavery. They persuaded themselves, he says, that by ending the transatlantic slave trade after 1808 and opening a vast free territory in the Northwest Ordinance, they had put slavery “on a path to extinction.” James Madison writes in Federalist 42 as if they’ve struck a great blow for humanity. Jefferson, watching the Missouri Compromise roll through in 1820, suddenly hears the “fire bell in the night” and realizes the thing is not dying on schedule.
When that flawed assumption meets a system built for compromise, the machinery does what it was designed to do: produce more compromises. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas–Nebraska Act—they’re all outputs of a machine intended to keep a diverse republic talking. Eventually, talk fails and the country turns its guns on itself.
Gibson sees Abraham Lincoln as the last great embodiment of what he calls “the Spirit of Philadelphia”: self-educated, steeped in the founding documents, stubbornly committed to the Union, and almost perversely disinterested in vengeance. He lingers on the instructions Lincoln gives at Appomattox—“let ’em up easy”—and on that second inaugural promise “with malice toward none, with charity for all” as the mature expression of American common sense realism in power.
Lincoln’s assassination, in this telling, doesn’t just wreck Reconstruction. It blows a hole in the country’s shared philosophy. “What happens to America after the Civil War is in some ways like ‘Game of Thrones’,” Gibson says. The driving question becomes: Who is the rightful heir to the old creed?
For early 20th-century progressives like Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson, the answer is: We are. In an industrial, urban, technologically complex society, they argue, the founders’ suspicion of concentrated power is not realism but dead weight. If human nature is improvable and the state can do good, why shackle it with 18th-century guardrails?
On the other end, radical individualists and libertarians insist the heir is the unfettered self, pushed to the edge of social obligation. The old balance between “author of your own life” and “obligations to others” splits apart. The country spends the 20th century oscillating between collectivist projects and laissez-faire retrenchment, with less and less agreement about the underlying philosophy.
“How can it be in the same century that we can have Wilsonian ideas and Barry Goldwater?” Gibson asks. For him, that wild swing is the symptom of a deeper loss: a drift away from the founders’ realism about human nature and the need to limit power whoever holds it.
Personal Self-Governance
Gibson is not unaware that “recover the founding principles” sounds, in certain ears, like a restoration fantasy. He pushes hard against that.
“Please do not construe that to mean going back,” he says. “That’s a fiction. You can never go back.” The project, as he sees it, is more like rehab: admitting the country is out of balance—between present and future, individual and community, material and spiritual—and doing unglamorous work to rebuild basic capabilities.
The final section of The Spirit of Philadelphia is his programmatic answer. Some of it reads like a checklist now floating around Washington in the wake of Greene’s resignation: term limits, independent redistricting, and campaign-finance changes designed to make members more accountable to actual voters and less captive to donor ecosystems and gerrymandered primaries.
Other parts are more Hudson Valley-specific in spirit, if not geography: a rethinking of “human development” that doesn’t treat a four-year degree as the sole ticket to dignity in a country where roughly 70 percent of adults don’t have one; trade and tax reforms that take the working class seriously; a cultural reset that asks citizens to relearn the pairing of rights and responsibilities.
“Our founders knew this wouldn’t work if we weren’t self-governing in our own lives,” he says. “They fully knew we would work to advance our interests. They wanted us to balance that with the obligations we have to others and to the greater good.”
The Indirect Approach
Gibson keeps circling back to that Philadelphia summer of 1787, when a failing confederation somehow produced a durable republic. The common wisdom then was that the American experiment had already blown it. States were coining their own money, flirting with foreign alliances, and the existing Articles of Confederation were essentially unamendable. The delegates in Philadelphia did something radical not just in substance but in method: they stepped back from the food fight and re-examined their first principles.
He calls it “the indirect approach.” When direct efforts to fix polarization—gangs of eight, problem-solver caucuses, cable-friendly centrism—have fizzled, he thinks the next move is not more tactical ingenuity but deeper reflection: What do we think human beings are like? What do we believe about power? What kind of institutions match those beliefs? And can we, across our many ideological differences, still agree on at least those basics?
That might sound like the stuff of seminars, not shutdowns. But in a moment when even Marjorie Taylor Greene has been caught using the word “bipartisan” unironically, it’s worth noting that the country’s most durable moments of cooperation—Truman integrating the military, Eisenhower cooling McCarthyism, Kennedy’s “ask not”—all rested on a shared, if often unspoken, philosophy about who we are and what we owe each other.
Gibson’s bet in The Spirit of Philadelphia is that we can still recover enough of that realism to matter—not to go back, but to go forward with a sturdier sense of ourselves. In a political climate where the word “unity” is mostly used as a cudgel or a punchline, that’s either hopelessly naïve or a shrewd way forward.
