This article was originally posted at The American Spectator.

VENICE, Italy — When Gasparo Contarini surveyed the political chaos of Italy’s city-states in the 1500s, he grew somber: “It is evident that almost every city in Italy, whether it is governed by a popular order or even by one of its own patrician citizens, eventually falls into the tyranny of some faction of its citizens.” Nevertheless, for Contarini, a lawmaker and diplomat, his beloved Republic of Venice offered an alternative: a dazzling and enduring model of self-government. “For this reason,” he said, “our ancestors decided that they had to try with all their might to prevent their Republic, splendidly organized and governed by excellent laws, from being afflicted by some such monster.”

The monster of political factions is stalking the American republic, as the Founders feared. Writing in The Federalist Papers, James Madison regarded the threat of factions — what we call tribalism — as “the mortal disease” of self-government.

Not since the era of the Vietnam War and the violence following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has the nation been so deeply and angrily divided. Never have Americans registered such levels of distrust — and disgust — with the core institutions shaping public life. “Trust in all of these institutions, all the pillars that hold up the edifice of American democracy and society, is crumbling,” writes Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker in American Breakdown. The collapse of trust, Baker observes, is fueling social unrest and political violence.

It was precisely this outcome that the Founders sought to avoid. Why do most forms of government collapse into social chaos, violence, and tyranny — and why do others endure? These were the questions that occupied the Founders in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

As Alexander Hamilton neatly framed the issue in The Federalist Papers, the American people were uniquely positioned “to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Answering that question became urgent not only because of the failings of the Articles of Confederation. In 1776, Edward Gibbon began releasing volumes of his magisterial work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The fearsome story of Rome was near the forefront of their minds.

For more than a thousand years, throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Venice distinguished itself as a durable and prosperous republic in an era of monarchs, despots, powerful families, and political assassinations.

No American political thinker studied the history of republics more carefully than John Adams. In Thoughts on Government, Adams notes the longevity of the Venetian republic, “longer than any other that is known in history.” He was characteristically frank about its difficult journey toward republicanism, noting that factions arose early in its development. “For a long course of years after this,” he wrote, “the Venetian history discloses scenes of tyranny, revolt, cruelty, and assassination, which excite horror.”

They avoided the kind of moral cynicism that Machiavelli later endorsed. But they confronted, with sober realism, an ancient problem: what Friedrich Nietzsche would call the Will to Power. They were pragmatists. They took stock of their difficulties and created different and distinct sources of political authority: the “mixed” constitution described by Aristotle.

Executive power resided in a single individual, the Doge, who functioned like a monarch and symbolically represented the state — most laws were published under his name. His massive palace, the Palazzo Ducale, is a breathtaking display of opulence put toward a political purpose. The courtyards, corridors, and council halls (not to mention its hidden chambers) made it the physical powerhouse of government. Nevertheless, the Doge never became an absolute monarch — or he was removed or assassinated for trying.

“There has been an uncommon solicitude all along to restrain his power,” observed Adams. Indeed, the Doge was constrained by the city’s aristocratic class, exclusively men of noble birth and of education and virtue, presumably. These patricians constituted the Senate, which included a collegio, a kind of steering committee that helped to set the legislative agenda. Senators openly debated all the major issues facing the republic, with strict rules of debate: no personal insults against political opponents. “The whole business of governing the Republic,” wrote Contarini, “belongs to the Senate.”

Yet the Doge and the Senate were also held in check by the Great Council, the sovereign assembly of the Republic. It was the Great Council that elected the Doge and members of the Senate and approved legislation. It was a republican body in that its members — open to all patricians over the age of 25 — had equal voting power. They voted in silence, a procedure described by foreign visitors as “a spectacle of majesty.”

The Great Council theoretically represented the vast majority of Venetians, the popolo, who could not directly participate in political life. Nevertheless, membership in the Council gradually expanded, and by 1300 A.D. it had more than 1,100 members — or about 1 percent of the Venetian population (compared to the U.S. government with a representation of .0002 percent of the population). Thus, the Great Council emerged as the most representative political body in the world.

“The fact is that the greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity,” Aristotle wrote in Politics. “Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold.” The Venetians embraced this sober view of human nature. They designed a government whose constituent parts deliberated and determined all domestic and foreign policy issues. Yet none had absolute power, but rather were held in check by the other.

No wonder contemporary observers praised Venice for surpassing Athens, Sparta, and Rome as a model of a just and stable government. As Contarini expressed it in The Republic of Venice: “With this balance of government, our Republic has been able to achieve what none of the ancient ones did, however illustrious they were.” Adams agreed with that assessment: “Great care is taken in Venice to balance one court against another and render their powers mutual checks to each other.” As Harvard historian James Hankins summarizes it: “Venice became the prime example of the capacity of modern societies to surpass the ancients in political wisdom.”

In the stifling summer of 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention needed all the political wisdom they could get. The 13 newly independent states already were at odds over issues — including slavery, the nature of the presidency, and the power of the federal government — that threatened to extinguish their experiment in democratic freedom before it began.

They relied not only on the insights of the ancients, or the Italian city-states such as Venice. The Founders were determined to design a Constitution that enshrined the rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence: a government based upon a belief in universal, unalienable, and natural rights. And in this, like no other political revolution in history, they grounded these rights in the concept of a just and loving God. “God who gave us life gave us liberty,” Thomas Jefferson declared. “Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”

It was the Doge who insisted that the body of Mark the Evangelist, smuggled into the city in 828 A.D., be placed in a chapel adjacent to his palace. Mark’s chapel became a great basilica, the Basilica di San Marco, as grand a church as any in Christendom. Its proximity to the seat of political power sent an unmistakable message: The concept of the republic — a government antithetical to despots and tyrants — had the moral authority of the Catholic Church behind it.

“We pray God the Almighty to preserve it safely for a long time,” wrote Contarini. “For, if one can believe that anything good for men derives from God the Immortal, it must be considered more certain that this has happened to the city of Venice by divine intervention.”

In the United States, however, many Americans have lost all respect for their governmental institutions. The presidency, Congress, the administrative state, and the intelligence community: Their moral authority has been decimated by their abuse of power, deception, partisanship, and contempt for the common good.

Meanwhile, like no other period in its history, the United States is putting Jefferson’s political maxim to the test. The erosion of belief in God — and in the Moral Law that originates in God — is surely one of the sources of the divisions and hatreds that threaten to tear the republic apart.

The moment is ripe to recall the vigilance of the Venetians to safeguard their political unity. “In their view,” Contarini explained, “they should fear nothing so much as an internal enemy and hostility between citizens.”

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Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.