When Congress Remembered How to Be Friends
A forgotten weekend in 1997 shows how trust and friendship once restored Congress—and why they must again.
I’m Alexandra Hudson, author of The Soul of Civility and founder of Civic Renaissance, a movement to renew our culture through beauty, wisdom, and civility. Here, we take part in the Great Conversation—the ongoing dialogue among seekers across time and place about what it means to live well, to belong, and to flourish together. Civic Renaissance exists to help us remember what is most worth loving—beauty, goodness, and truth—and to live those truths in the work of restoring civility, meaning, and grace in our daily lives.
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Gracious reader,
As the federal government shutdown enters its second month, Americans are paying the price for leaders who are governed by passion rather than principle. Revenge has replaced restraint. Both parties are betraying their own professed ideals. Republicans, the party of fiscal responsibility, are presiding over a shutdown that wastes billions on furloughed workers who will still be paid for weeks they did not work. Democrats, who champion the vulnerable, are watching benefits like SNAP expire for families in need.
When civic friendship fails, democracy becomes impossible.
The current impasse is more than a budget dispute. It reflects a deeper collapse of trust — the connective tissue that allows democratic institutions to function. The same cynicism and suspicion that divide Congress are eroding confidence in nearly every institution that binds Americans together.
Thirty years ago, Congress faced a similar crisis of distrust. After two shutdowns in one year and years of bitter gridlock, nearly half its members fled Washington for chocolate-scented Hershey, Pennsylvania. They brought their spouses, played games with their children, grilled out, and, for a weekend, tried to remember what it felt like to enjoy one another’s company.
That forgotten experiment became known as the 1997 Congressional Civility Retreat. The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Aspen Institute funded it, and lawmakers from both parties attended with their families for several days of meals and conversation. The aim was not to erase disagreement but to recover a basic sense of trust — a recognition that opponents could also be colleagues, neighbors, and friends.
It worked. Old animosities softened. Lawmakers found they could debate without contempt. Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed making the retreat an annual tradition. For a moment, democracy seemed to recover its footing.
Then scandal intervened. When the Monica Lewinsky affair broke, those fragile bonds of goodwill shattered almost overnight. The lesson was not that friendship fails, but that trust decays when neglected.
The story of Hershey is one of repair and fracture — proof that civic friendship can be rebuilt, but that it must be sustained through habit and care.
Civic friendship is not sentimental. It is the willingness to see those we oppose as moral equals — human beings with innate dignity and worth, deserving of respect by virtue of our shared personhood. It is the discipline that keeps free people from turning into factions. It is, in short, the human foundation of self-government.
Even if the government reopens tomorrow, nothing prevents the same paralysis from returning next season. A one-time compromise cannot fix what has become a chronic condition. The deeper problem is relational, not procedural. A Congress that cannot trust one another cannot govern for the common good.
The way forward is not another temporary deal, but a renewal of trust. Congress should again invest in the relationships that make governance possible. A new Congressional Civility Retreat, supported by philanthropy and civil society, could be one step. So could an ongoing Civic Friendship Caucus — a bipartisan group devoted not to policy negotiation but to the ongoing formation of trust. Members might meet regularly for meals and conversation without cameras or talking points, and occasionally bring their families together for weekend retreats.
The nineteenth-century British statesman Sir William Harcourt put it best when he observed that democracy depends on constant dining with the opposition. Shared meals and genuine relationships are not luxuries in a republic; they are its guardrails. They turn disagreement from a battle into a conversation and make trust possible again.
Civility is not politeness. Politeness smooths over tension. Civility is a disposition that sees others as our moral equals — human beings with innate dignity and worth, worthy of a bare minimum of respect by virtue of our shared personhood. It makes cooperation possible even when consensus is not.
Self-government begins, quite literally, at the table. At the end of the day, our institutions are only as strong as the people who inhabit them and the disposition they have toward one another. Civic friendship once made self-government possible. It can again.
Warmly,
Lexi
You are invited!
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Civility in Congress will be fleeting so long as the "loon" wing of the party of Perpetually Offended controls the narrative.