A comment of mine that drew a sudden, spontaneous applause from the three dozen people attending a forum at the prestigious Women’s National Democratic Club mansion in Washington D.C. last week had to do with the role of civility in the political process.

I commented about how in my newspaper’s online edition a few years back, I had stopped allowing people to anonymously post comments on the site. The comments were being posted hot and heavy and mostly were foul mouthed egregious insults of one kind or another. I shifted to a policy that required anyone wishing to comment on the site to identify who they were.

The number of comments we received dropped dramatically the minute I did that, including all the foul mouthed ones.

I noted how the Founding Fathers, as elucidated by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, authors of the Federalist Papers, asserted that a commitment to virtue and civility was a precondition for a democracy. I said that enemies of democracy undoubtedly understand this, and that is why so much of their discourse aims at the lowest possible range of human speech, not the least being the systematic filth that has been spewed out of countless Russian bot postings.

Calling for a return to civility in the face of what’s being done to it on the Internet is what drew the spontaneous and loud applause. Obviously, others feel this way, too.

Recently, Hal Lippman, a former Falls Church, Virginia, vice mayor and head of a local civic organization, the Citizens for a Better City, recalled to me a project that he headed during the bicentennial celebration of the U.S. 50 years ago, run through the League of Women Voters Educational Fund called “The Federalist Papers Reexamined.”

It was an exhaustive project that involved the publication of six study guides, each about 36 pages in length, that offered Q and A and debate points to help educate the public about the main issues the Founding Fathers grappled with in forging the young nation and its Constitution.

The world of 1976 was much different than this one, as the nation now celebrates its 250th birthday, and especially as it pertains to matters of respect and civility. It was in the midst of a transition that was occurring at the time from a national identity associated with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s aspirational assertions in his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 to one associated with the Wall Street movie’s “Greed is good” speech in 1987.

That gradual paradigm shift has brought us to these terrible days of debased Trumpian thuggery. If we are to recover from this, a very concerted effort to go back to the values that our Founding Fathers shared is critical. Let me add that with regard to anything associated with this period, including whether there will even be midterm elections this year, be advised that efforts are going to have to be remarkably strident, determined and forceful to be effective.

Notably, toward the beginning of the first of the study guides, entitled “Past as Prologue: Present Perspectives,” it is pointed out plainly that “a republic could not exist without a virtuous people.” John Adams is quoted, “Virtue is the sine qua non of the republic. If its people give way to luxury, to any form of corruption, to lassitude, apathy or complacency, to riot and rebellion…then the republic couldn’t survive.”

“There are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend,” Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Paper No. 31. That is a fundamental standpoint at odds with the kind of moral relativism that was being advanced in the 1970s in the world where greed and what evolved into today’s Trumpism as primary values, or the lack thereof, were being cultivated, as the study guide recognizes.

The question, Hamilton wrote in an introduction to the first of the Federalist Papers, is “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.”

How prescient. This is our choice today.