From Cornel West and Robert George
To all of our fellow Citizens:
Honesty and courage alone can save our wounded, disunited country.
We need the honesty and courage to speak the truth—including painful truths that unsettle not only our foes but also our friends and ourselves. 1/

We need the honesty and courage to honor the contributions of the great men and women who have gone before us—those who articulated and defended true principles of justice and the common good, built or helped to preserve worthy institutions, and modeled important virtues. 2/

We need the honesty and courage to recognize the faults, flaws, and failings of even the greatest of our heroes—and to acknowledge our own faults, flaws, and failings. 3/

We need the honesty and courage to recognize the progress towards justice and movement toward the common good that our civilization and nation have made, and the blows against injustice, oppression, and tyranny we’ve struck, sometimes at enormous costs of blood and treasure. 4/

We need the honesty and courage to recognize the blights on our history, the grave wrongs that have been done, reflecting the failure of our leaders and institutions—and our own failures—to honor our principles of liberty and justice for all. 5/

We need the honesty and courage to express dissent—to say, “no, I will not go along”—when conscience tells us that our own ideological or political tribe has gone astray or gone too far or become fanatical and blind to integrity and the dignity of all. 6/

We need the honesty and courage to stand up—standing alone, if necessary—to speak the truth, as God gives us to see the truth, to the politically, economically, and culturally powerful as well as to the relatively powerless. 7/

We need the honesty and courage to think first of the weak, the poor, the vulnerable, and the impact on them of our actions; the actions of institutions--be they economic, social, educational, philanthropic—in which we play a role; and the actions of government at all levels. /8

This will not generate unanimity as to what policies are best—reasonable people of goodwill will often disagree; but it can—and we believe must—be a starting point on which there is common ground. 9/

We need the honesty and courage not to compromise our beliefs or go silent on them out of a desire to be accepted, or out of fear of being ostracized, excluded, or cancelled. 10/

We need the honesty and courage to consider with an open mind and heart points of view that challenge our beliefs—even our deepest, most cherished, identity-forming beliefs. We need the intellectual humility to recognize our own fallibility. 11/

We need the honesty and courage to recognize and acknowledge that there are reasonable people of goodwill who do not share even some of our deepest, most cherished beliefs. This is true for believers and unbelievers; for conservatives as well as progressives. 12/

We need the honesty and courage to treat people with whom we disagree—even on the most consequential questions—as partners in truth-seeking and fellow citizens, not as enemies to be destroyed. We must respect and protect their freedom of speech and other rights and liberties. 13/

We need the honesty and courage to be willing to change our beliefs and stances if evidence, reason, and argument persuade us that they are in need of revision—even at the cost of alienating us from communities we rely on for personal affirmation, solidarity, and support. 14/

We need the honesty and courage to love—to love in the highest and best sense: to will the good of the other for the sake of the other, to treat even our adversaries as precious members of the human family. /15

We need the honesty and courage to resist the hatred that zeal even for good causes can induce in we frail, fallible human beings, and that corrupts the soul and leads to spiritual emptiness and tyranny--even among those who began as sincere advocates of freedom and justice. /16

President Trump and former Vice President Biden: we wish to close, if we may, with words directed to you. We hope you will consider our plea, though both of us, from our different vantage points, have been critical—often vehemently—of both of you. 17/

You must hold yourselves to higher standards. We plead with you to exemplify the honesty and courage that all of us must embody if we're to reunite this nation and rebuild the civic friendship—what Lincoln called the “bonds of affection”--without which no republic can endure. 18/

Where you’ve fallen short, strive with God’s help to do better. Victories can be pyrrhic, destroying the very thing for which the combatants struggle. The loss of our precious American experiment in ordered liberty and republican democracy would be a tragedy beyond reckoning. /19

Honesty and courage could finally give "this nation, under God," the great blessing for which Harriet Tubman struggled and sacrificed and Abraham Lincoln prayed and acted: a new birth of freedom. /20 [end]

PS: Fellow citizens, we can do this. Reach out to each other. Build relationships of mutual respect--even esteem--across the lines of difference. Let's work together where we agree, and conduct ourselves honorably in the forums of democratic debate where we disagree. Join us.