A few weeks ago, a friend shared an essay from the Philadelphia Magazine that I’ve now reread more than once. It was all about bravery in times of American crisis--not, as the author explained, the personal courage that people display running into burning buildings and in similar exploits, but civic bravery, which she describes as
directly related to being a citizen, and it requires both personal courage and a bigger-picture, idealistic, long-game sort of mind-set. That strain of bravery, birthed in Philly in 1776, is what Americans both great and unknown would tap into in years to come, and what propelled most everything we think of as progress in this country: women’s suffrage, the New Deal, the Freedom Riders and so forth.
The article goes on to hone in on an aspect of American society that has been the focus of much punditry, not to mention a number of comments to this blog–the pervasiveness of an unbecoming fear that is both self-serving and disproportionate to the objects that trigger it:
The troublesome part about all of this is that so many of us seem unable or unwilling nowadays to accept fear as part of being alive in tumultuous times, or to push for the greater good despite personal risk (or perceived personal risk) the way our best countrymen have through the ages. How else to explain why our elected politicians can’t get past reelection concerns to pass even the basic gun legislation when most Americans clamor for it? Why else are so many unarmed young black men, one after the next after the next, dying at the hands of police officers? How to reconcile otherwise compassionate, charitable people scared to welcome refugees fleeing certain death (yearning to breathe free, just like your great-grandparents)?
After quoting former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski for the proposition that fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and paves the way for demagogues, she says the obvious: “Hey Mr. Brzezinski, meet Mr. Trump.”
The essay ends on a hopeful note, citing signs that might portend a revival of civic bravery. Some–like substituting Harriet Tubman for Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill–don’t seem particularly brave to me, but at a time when the Presidential candidate of a major American political party has enabled and normalized bigotry (with, it must be noted, the enthusiastic approval of a majority of that party’s members), Black Lives Matter certainly fits the bill. As she notes,
The time I spent writing this overlapped with the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by police officers, followed by a sniper attack that killed five officers guarding otherwise peaceful protests. It seems there is no end to the fear and the hateful fruit it bears. But then: Black Lives Matter, a movement started mostly by millennials, is gaining momentum across all generations. This movement begun by blacks is roiling across races, as more people are finding that the essential nubs — life, liberty, innocents not being shot to death, not allowing fear to ruin lives — are too important to ignore. The movement is facing down threats, counter-protesters, online vitriol, death. But it goes on. Think of that photo from the Baton Rouge protests a few months back: a young black woman, a calm protester, standing wordless and serene in the street, surrounded by faceless police in riot gear. No puppies. No bubbles. Civil Bravery circa 2016, it turns out, looks an awful lot like Civil Bravery circa 1965.
The entire essay is worth a read–and some sober consideration.
Last Thursday, statewide Americorp volunteers met in Indianapolis for a day of workshops and training. I was honored to keynote the day’s activities, and I’m sharing those remarks below. (Regular readers will recognize “themes”…..)
_____________________________________
Americans talk a lot about civic engagement. We don’t talk as much about what we mean by that term, or the different forms such engagement can take. And we talk even less about the different, important roles of the public and voluntary sectors, and why genuine, productiveengagement requires that we understand and support the proper functioning of both government and what we call civil society.
Most of you here today are just beginning your term of service. During that service, you will learn new skills, recognize new values, and come in contact with volunteers motivated by a variety of life experiences and beliefs. If relevant research is to be believed, that experience will keep you civically engaged long after you have completed your service.
What Americorp volunteers do for Hoosier communities is impressive and beneficial; your efforts will improve communities across the state and the nation. Your willingness to engage with your communities is commendable.
But I’m not here to commend you.
I am here to suggest that the efficacy of your volunteerism, the effectiveness of your efforts, depends to a considerable extent upon two underappreciated aspects of American culture that are in dangerously short supply: an understanding of America’s constitution and governing system—what I call civic literacy–and that old-fashioned but essential virtue we call civility.
Let me start with civility.
A year or so ago, I came across the proceedings of a symposium on political civility. The contributors wrestled with difficult questions: what is the difference between the necessary arguments that illuminate differences and help us resolve them, and rhetoric that “crosses the line”?
The consensus seemed to be that incivility is rudeness or impoliteness that violates an agreed social standard. I’m not sure we have any agreed social standards left in this age of invective—certainly, no such standard has been evident during this election season, which has featured a real “race to the bottom.” We have been assailed with rhetoric that focuses on, and disrespects, persons rather than positions, substitutes name-calling for reasoned debate, and elevates bigotry over the fundamental American values of inclusion and community that have led each of you to join Americorp.
When I first became “civically engaged,” the political environment was very different. I always appreciated Dick Lugar’s often-repeated phrase recognizing “matters about which reasonable people can differ.” That phrase was an acknowledgment of the equal status of citizens who might hold different opinions on matters of public concern. It was civil, and it encouraged civic engagement because it recognized the legitimacy of people with whom we might not share positions or backgrounds.
A trenchant observation in that symposium attributed the gridlock in Washington and elsewhere to “partisan one-upmanship expressed in ways that do not show respect for those with differing views.” In other words, if your motivation is simply to beat the other guys–to win an election, or prevail in a matter of public debate–and if that need to win outweighs any concern for the public good, civility is absent and both governing and civic service become impossible.
And he made those observations before the current, dispiriting campaign season.
The reason politicians and civic leaders no longer begin arguments by saying that they “respectfully disagree” is that they do not in fact respect their opponents.
When political discourse is so nasty, and regard for truth so minimal–when the enterprise of government has more in common with a barroom brawl than a lofty exercise in statesmanship–is it any wonder that so many of our “best and brightest” shun not only politics, but civic engagement of any sort? Who wants to go to work for a government agency the very existence of which is regarded as illegitimate by a substantial percentage of one’s fellow-citizens? Who wants to work with a nonprofit organization co-operating with that agency? Who cares about that abstract concept called “the public good”?
One reason for our current cynicism and lack of mutual respect is that America has developed a troubling disregard for fact and truth. That disregard has been enabled by partisan television, talk radio and the internet. Survey after survey shows that people on the left and right alike get their “news” from sources that validate their biases. Meanwhile, we have lost much of the real news, the mainstream, objective journalism that fact-checks, that confronts us with inconvenient realities and demands that we attend to the substance of arguments rather than the personalities of those making the arguments. In this environment, it becomes easier to characterize those with whom we disagree as unworthy of our respect.
It is easier still if we lack even an elementary grounding in the origins and philosophy of American government, which brings me to the second impediment to all civic engagement, whether political or through civil society: civic ignorance.
Americans have spent the last thirty plus years denigrating both government and public service to an audience increasingly ill-equipped to evaluate those arguments. Now we are paying the price for our neglect of civic education and our reluctance to defend the worth of both the public sector and the common good.
You know, we Americans tend to have a bipolar approach to most things: they’re either all good or all bad. But our polyglot communities and policies are rarely all good or all bad. We don’t have to abandon critical evaluation of the performance of our common institutions, we don’t have to close our eyes to their faults–but we do need to remind citizens of their importance and value. We have to rebuild civic trust. In a very real sense, your servicewill be part of that effort.
Political scientists have accumulated a significant amount of data suggesting that over the past decades, Americans have become less trusting of each other. This erosion of interpersonal social trust—sometimes called social capital—has very negative implications for our ability to govern ourselves.
In 2009, I wrote a book titled Distrust, American Style, in which I examined the research on declining social trust, and argued that the “generalized social trust” our society requires depends upon our ability to trust our social and governing institutions.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but fish rot from the head. When we no longer trust the integrity of our social and governing institutions, that distrust infects everything else. And when we don’t understand what government is supposed to do and how it is supposed to operate, we lose the ability to evaluate its performance. That makes us vulnerable to all sorts of claims of mischief and malfeasance.
Many people are currently blaming America’s growing diversity for the erosion of social trust. It’s those immigrants, those “Black Lives Matter” agitators, the troublemakers pushing the “Gay Agenda.” The “Other.” Those of you who are on the front lines in your communities, working with a variety of Hoosiers, know better.
The cure for what ails us doesn’t lie in building a wall between the United States and Mexico, discriminating against Muslims or LGBT folks, or recasting America as a White Christian Nation. Looking for someone to blame for our problems, retreating into an “us versus them” tribal worldview doesn’t fix anything; it doesn’t make our communities happier or richer or safer.
It’s people like you, who are willing to serve those communities, who care about what happens in them, that make them better.
The remedy for what ails us really is civic engagement; a broad effort to make our governmental, religious and civic institutions trustworthy again. And we can’t do that without recognizing the pre-eminent role of government, which is an essential “umpire,” enforcing the rules of fair play and setting the standard for our other institutions, both private and nonprofit.
If I am correct–if understanding and supporting government is an important part of building the trust and social capital that our private and nonprofit organizations require in order to flourish —then Houston, we have a problem.
In the years since Distrust, American Style was published, the situation has gotten much worse. We have had Citizens United and its progeny, we have had a Great Recession brought about by inadequate regulation of venal and greedy financial institutions, and we have seen daily reports of government corruption and incompetence—some true, many not. Which brings me to today’s media environment.
It is always tempting to assert that we live in times that are radically unlike past eras—that somehow, the challenges we face are not only fundamentally different than the problems that confronted our forebears, but worse; to worry that children growing up today are subject to more pernicious influences than children of prior generations. (In Stephanie Coontz’ felicitous phrase, there is a great deal of nostalgia for “the way we never were.”) I grew up in the 1950s, and can personally attest to the fact that all of our contemporary, misty-eyed evocations of that time are revisionist nonsense. Ask the African-Americans who were still struggling under Jim Crow, or the women who couldn’t get equal pay for equal work or a credit rating separate from their husbands, for starters.
Nevertheless—even conceding our human tendency to overstate the effects of social change for good or ill—it is impossible to understand the current cynicism about government and the civic enterprise without recognizing the profound social changes that have been wrought by communication technologies, most prominently the Internet.
Even in the smallest communities you will serve, people today are inundated with information. Some of that information is transmitted through hundreds of cable and broadcast television stations, increasing numbers of which are devoted to news and commentary twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But the Web has had the greatest impact on the way we live our daily lives. We read news and commentary from all over the world on line, we shop for goods and services, we communicate with our friends and families, and we consult web-based sources for everything from medical advice to housekeeping hints to comedy routines. When we don’t know something, we Google it. The web is rapidly becoming a repository of all human knowledge—not to mention human rumors, hatreds, gossip, trivia and paranoid fantasies. Picking our way through this landscape requires new skills, new ways of accessing, sorting and evaluating the credibility and value of what we see and hear—and most of us have yet to develop those skills.
Today, anyone with access to the internet can hire a few reporters or “content providers” and create her own media outlet. One result is that the previously hierarchical nature of public knowledge is rapidly diminishing. The “gatekeeper” function of the press—when journalists decided what constituted news and verified information before publishing it—is a thing of the past.
But it is the Web’s redefinition of community and engagement that may prove to be most significant. The Web allows like-minded people to connect with each other and form communities that span traditional geographical and political boundaries. It has encouraged—and enabled—a wide array of political and civic activism, and that’s great, but it has also created and facilitated what Eli Pariser calls “the filter bubble”–the ability to live within our preferred “realities,” in contact only with those who share our beliefs and biases.
The information revolution is particularly pertinent to the issue of trust in—and understanding of—our civic and governing institutions. At no time in human history have citizens been as aware of every failure of competence, every allegation of corruption or malfeasance. At no time have we been as swamped with propaganda and ideological spin. Even the most detached American citizen cannot escape hearing about institutional failures on a daily basis, whether those failures are true or not. Corruption and ineptitude are probably no worse than they ever were, but it is certainly the case that information and misinformation about public wrongdoing or incompetence is infinitely more widespread in today’s wired and connected world than it ever was before.
When people do not respect the enterprise that is government, when they suspect their lawmakers have been bought and paid for, it’s no wonder they remain detached from it. But that detachment, that withdrawal, isn’t simply from government activities; cynicism promotes disengagement from civic activities generally.
Research confirms a strong correlation between civic knowledge and civic participation, so it matters that Americans overall are civically illiterate. And they are.
In one study, only 36 percent of Americans could correctly name the three branches of government. Civic ignorance isn’t a new phenomenon: in a 1998 survey, nearly 94% of teenagers could name the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but only 2.2 percent could name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Most Americans (58%) are unable to identify even a single department in the United States Cabinet. In a 2006 study, only 43% of high school seniors could even name the two major political parties; only 11% knew the length of a Senator’s term; and only 23% could name the first President of the United States.
We can’t fix what we don’t understand.
Here’s the bottom line: when citizens do not understand the most basic structure and purpose of their governing institutions, we shouldn’t be surprised if they fail to recognize the multiple ways that structure affects them, let alone their obligations to their fellow citizens.
When citizens don’t understand the foundations of America’s legal system, they can’t evaluate the likelihood that candidates for public office will honor those foundations. When a candidate for President of the United States promises to uphold “Article 12” of the Constitution—an article that doesn’t exist—or “make all Muslims register” in blatant violation of the First Amendment, or institute a national “stop and frisk” program in violation of the 4th Amendment, or suggests that his opponent could unilaterally “get rid of” the Second Amendment even if she wanted to–we have a right to expect most citizens to recognize that such positions betray a total lack of familiarity with our Constitution and legal system and a truly frightening ignorance of how our government works. And that’s terrifying, because commitment to our Constitutional system is what makes us Americans.
The underlying premise of organizations like Americorp is that we are all, ultimately, a national community. We Americans may be composed of diverse and different elements, but when push comes to shove, we look out for each other. We respect each other. We interact with civility, and work together to protect essential American values and extend American liberties and largesse to those who are struggling. People don’t engage with what they don’t understand, and vitriol and insults don’t forge bonds of community. If we are going to foster civic engagement, we have to encourage understanding of and trust in the communities with which we are engaging.
Those of you involved in Americorp are doing yeoman work, but you can’t do it alone. If we want your numbers and effectiveness to increase, we have to get serious about encouraging and rewarding civility and serious about efforts to foster and improve Americans’ civic knowledge.
During your service, you will demonstrate the value of engagement to the communities you serve. You will reap the rewards that come from knowing you have made a real difference, a real contribution to the public good. You will be role models encouraging others to commit to public service, civility and informed civic and political engagement.
This Presidential campaign has been like turning over a rock and seeing the cockroaches scamper out. I really didn’t think it could get any worse.
And I never, ever expected to agree with Charles Krauthammer about, well, anything. But even he was appropriately appalled by Trump’s “lock her up” descent into banana Republicanism–and the hypocrisy of denouncing him only when the “groping” tape emerged.
His views on women have been on open display for years. And he’d offered a dazzling array of other reasons for disqualification: habitual mendacity, pathological narcissism, profound ignorance and an astonishing dearth of basic human empathy.
Donald Trump has indulged in conspiracy theories about President Obama’s birthplace, the FBI’s “rigged” probe of Hillary Clinton, the Federal Reserve’s “political” agenda and whether Ted Cruz’s father was linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
With his presidential campaign in full-blown crisis on Thursday, Trump was at it again, putting a new spin on a familiar tactic.
This time, there was a bigger, badder villain — “a global power structure” of corporate interests, the media and Clinton engaging in subterfuge.
As I read reports of his bizarre speech to a rally in West Palm Beach, I remembered a friend’s wry comment from our days in the Hudnut Administration. A neighborhood group had accused the administration of a conspiracy of some sort; after noting that we really weren’t capable of pulling off sophisticated plots, he remarked that simple incompetence explains so much more than complicated conspiracies.
Unless, of course, you are a bat-shit insane megalomaniac absolutely incapable of accepting responsibility for your own behavior.
“For those who control the levers of power in Washington, and for the global special interests, they partner with these people that don’t have your good in mind. Our campaign represents a true existential threat like they haven’t seen before,” Trump said…
A day earlier, Trump appeared to allege, without evidence, that House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) and other GOP elected officials who distanced themselves from him were involved in a mass scheme to undermine him.
“There’s a whole deal going on — we’re going to figure it out. I always figure things out. But there’s a whole sinister deal going on,” he said.
Trump charged that Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special-interest friends and her donors.” As Martin Longman put it, at Washington Monthly,
Yesterday, he might as well have put the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his teleprompter for all the subtlety he used in going after the media and international bankers. He will be the new Father Coughlin and he’ll make plenty of money.
“International bankers” thus joins the racism of Trump’s “birtherism,” the xenophobia of his rancid anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and his “Alpha male” misogyny. His anti-Semitism–previously a bit more subtle–has now become more overt.
Donald Trump’s supporters in the white nationalist movement have found who is to blame for the tape in which the Republican nominee brags about sexually assaulting women: “The Jews.” Trump’s racist supporters are claiming that Republican consultant Dan Senor leaked the tape, and are responding with anti-Semitic attacks.
Members of the “alt-right” and white nationalist movement have been heavily supporting Trump’s campaign, and the candidate and his team have been courting members of the movement, including by appearing in white nationalist media, refusing to denounce them, and retweeting their messages.
The Daily Stormer is a virulently anti-Semitic website that celebrates Nazism, purports to document the “Jewish Problem,” and attacks “kikes.” Editor Andrew Anglin wrote an October 11 post claiming that “we knew whoever leaked the tape was a Jew. And a #NeverTrump Jew advisor to Paul Ryan is currently being pointed at as being responsible. Dan Senor.” He called Senor “a #NeverTrump kike” and concluded:
If we lose this election, it is going to be because of this pussy-grabbing tape. And having it be known that it was a Jew is extremely important. One of the GOP’s Jews being responsible makes it all the better.
Because if we lose, this country is going to enter a new age of anti-Semitism.
The 35% or so of the country that is hardcore pro-Trump is going to know that it wasn’t “liberals” that defeated Trump, but traitors within the party who abandoned him. And they are going to want to know why that happened.
And there is only one answer:
The Jews did it.
Yes, we Jews–in league with the Clintons, the banks, the Republican establishment, the media, the Kenyan Muslim in the White House (and probably the aliens wholanded at Roswell)….all of whom are expertly and covertly co-ordinating a conspiracy to destroy America by defeating Donald Trump.
We do not have enough mental health professionals in this country.
We go on endlessly about how “untrustworthy” she is, while fact checkers rank her as the second-most honest prominent politician in the country. (And her opponent as by far the least.)
We say that she has trouble with transparency, while her opponent refuses to release his taxes and the current administration sets records for secrecy.
We decry her ties to corporations and the financial industry, while supporting a walking tax shelter or mourning the exit of a president whose re-election was funded by a record-shattering Wall Street haul.
We list so very many explanations, all of them complete bullshit.
The remainder of the article (okay, rant) points out that for every accusation leveled at Clinton, similar or far worse behaviors have been exhibited by male politicians, many of whom are widely considered to have been excellent public servants.
The truth is, Hillary Clinton is held to a wildly different standard than male politicians–even when you discount the fixation with her clothes (pantsuits!), her voice (annoying!), her laugh (too shrill!) and other attributes that rarely merit mention when the politician is a man.
As the author noted,
When the Bush administration was discovered to have erased millions of emails illegally sent by 22 administration officials through private, RNC-owned accounts, in order to thwart an investigation into the politically motivated firing of eight US attorneys, just one talk show covered it that Sunday.
When Mitt Romney wiped servers, sold government hard drives to his closest aides and spent $100,000 in taxpayer money to destroy his administration’s emails, it was barely an issue.
When Hillary Clinton asked Colin Powell how he managed to use a Blackberry while serving as Secretary of State, he replied by detailing his method of intentionally bypassing federal record-keeping laws.
Gee–I wonder what the difference is….
Talk about your double standards: as Clinton is expected to walk an impossible line, we learn that, among his other sexist and predatory behaviors, Trump wanted the restaurants at his golf courses to fire women he found insufficiently attractive. If there was any doubt, the recent disclosure of the taped discussion with Billy Bush made it abundantly clear that, in his opinion, females are merely for decoration, sexual gratification and (inconveniently) procreation.
How dare one of us run for President!
As many of the readers of this blog know, I ran for Congress in 1980. Relatively few women had been candidates, even by that time, although the men who ran for public office depended mightily on the women who staffed their campaign offices, stuffed their envelopes (we actually used snail mail back then) and handled the nitty-gritty of campaign work. I can attest to the double standard that was applied, and to the patronizing attitudes even of many who supported me.
That was nearly 40 years ago. You would think we’d have made more progress.
News flash, misogynists: These days, being President or Congressperson or CEO rarely requires the ability to pound your hairy chest after killing large animals or capturing a mate. What today’s political or commercial jobs require are skills that are as– or more– likely to be found among us “weaker sex” females: intelligence, yes, but also a penchant for collaboration and compromise, an ability to learn by listening, and a genuine concern for the well-being of others.
So–all you men who are uncomfortable with a loss of male dominance and privilege–Get over it.
Ralph Reed is currently chairman and founder of the aggressively Christian Faith and Freedom Coalition. He says the 11-year-old recordings of Trump bragging that as a “star,” he could engage in sexual assaults with impunity are “ancient,” and do not change his view of the businessman.”Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson, who also backs Trump, said evangelical leaders frustrated with Trump’s controversies need to “lighten up.”
I guess boys will be boys. (Even when they’re 59, as Trump was at the time the tape was recorded.)
Although a number of Republicans have distanced themselves–once again–from Trump’s language and behavior, only a few have withdrawn their endorsements, and he and his most ardent supporters have retreated to the time-honored tactic of 12-year-olds everywhere: “The Clintons are worse!”
Will this latest eruption by the real Donald Trump be enough to cut into Trump’s base of support? Probably not. They live in cocoons impervious to unwanted facts.
I’ll admit to visiting 538.com–Nate Silver’s blog–on a more than daily basis during this nerve-wracking and bizarre Presidential campaign. On a recent visit, a post by Carl Bialik discussed a new study about how and where Americans get our information — and how our political beliefs affect whether we believe what we read.
Among the findings: About 6 in 10 report being better informed than they were five years ago. One possibility, though, is that our fractured media environment means more Americans are convinced that they are more informed while at the same time retreating into their silos.
Short version: what people believe they know may or may not be accurate. The post reminded me of similar, sobering conclusions reached by Aaron Dusso, a young colleague who is part of the academic “team” at the Center for Civic Literacy.
“While the goal of better education is laudable, as a remedy to the problem of civic ignorance it presupposes that the cause of this problem is a lack of exposure to information. In other words, if people only knew the facts, they would think and behave differently. The problem with this belief is that, at best, it is only partially true. Research in psychology has routinely shown that people do not engage the world with an open mind. They actively avoid information that may contradict what they already believe, interpret ambiguous information so as to fit with their existing beliefs; rationalize and actively reject disconfirming information; are biased when retrieving information from memory; overestimate how much others agree with them; and assume others are more influenced by media than they are.”
I have an acquaintance who is a Facebook Republican. She is a sweet woman and claims to be a Christian, but this is what the cult of Donald Trump is doing to people. I sent her a note this morning that I was going to turn off her feed on my Facebook page until after the election because this crap is unforgivable.
That paragraph was followed by screen shots of tweets sent by the “sweet woman,” a Trump supporter. The first one purported to be a story about Senator Tim Kaine’s “open marriage” and how his “creepiness” was scaring women voters away from Hillary and to Trump. When Juanita responded with a link to Snopes, confirming that the information was false, the “sweet woman” responded with “He looks like a perv. And I just read that Snopes is run by Hillary supporters.”
Translation: if reputable sources–fact-checkers, mainstream media, scientists, experts in a field– provide information inconsistent with my preferred beliefs, they can’t really be reputable.
