civic engagement – Page 2

Public Affairs Month

April 24, 2018

IU Northwest sponsored several lectures during its recent Public Affairs Month. I was asked to participate; here is the talk I gave, slightly edited for length. (Regular readers will notice considerable repetition of themes I revisit often.)

Americans talk a lot about civic engagement. What we don’t talk much about is civic literacy, and why effective engagement requires that we understand how our government is supposed to function.

In fact, in the wake of the last election, we are just beginning to understand the extent to which civic engagement depends upon two characteristics of the American polity that are currently in dangerously short supply: a basic understanding of the American constitution and legal system—what I call civic literacy—and the old-fashioned but essential virtue of civility.

Over the past several years, America’s political environment has become steadily more toxic. Partisan passions and previously suppressed bigotries have erupted, overwhelming reasoned analysis. Cable television and the Internet allow people to choose their news; it encourages citizens to indulge in confirmation bias and construct their own preferred realities. During the 2016 election cycle, voters often seemed more interested in scoring points than engaging in substantive conversation. Civility was scorned as “political correctness” and racist and misogynist expression was excused as “telling it like it is.”

As discouraging as today’s incivility is, I am firmly convinced that a significant amount of the rancor and partisan nastiness we see comes less from actual differences of opinion and more from a tribalism that is abetted by civic illiteracy—widespread ignorance of the history and basic premises of American government. Clearly, in our age of high-stakes testing, schools are shortchanging civic education.

Why does civic literacy matter?

For one thing, when citizens don’t understand America’s foundational values and legal system, they don’t share a standard by which to evaluate the promises of candidates or the performance of public officials. During Donald Trump’s campaign for President, for example, he promised to uphold “Article 12” of the Constitution—an article that doesn’t exist. He said he would “make all Muslims register,” which would be a blatant violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. He was going to institute a national “stop and frisk” program that would have violated the 4^thAmendment, and he accused Clinton of planning to unilaterally “get rid of” the Second Amendment—something she couldn’t legally do. (There’s a constitutionally-prescribed process for changing the constitution.) Since the election, his ignorance of such constitutional basics as separation of powers, Executive pardons, and freedom of the press have become even more obvious. Recently, he suggested that Congress could pass a law to overturn a Supreme Court decision that the line-item veto was unconstitutional.

Competent citizens would recognize situations in which a public official is betraying a total lack of familiarity with the Constitution and legal system he is sworn to uphold. Clearly, millions of Americans didn’t recognize that incongruity and unfamiliarity. Citizens’ ignorance is especially corrosive in a country as diverse as the U.S., because commitment to our Constitutional system is what unites us—it is what makes us Americans, rather than a collection of constituencies contending for power.

Only 26 percent of Americans can name the three branches of government. Fewer than half of 12th graders can describe federalism. Only 35% can identify “We the People” as the first three words of the Constitution. Only five percent of high school seniors can identify or explain checks on presidential power.

We can’t fix what we don’t understand.

Productive civic engagement is based on a basic but accurate understanding of the “rules of the game,” especially but not exclusively the Constitution and Bill of Rights– the documents that frame and constrain policy choices in the American system.

Pundits and politicians have spent the last thirty plus years denigrating both government and public service to citizens who are increasingly ill-equipped to evaluate those criticisms. With the current administration, we are paying the price for our neglect of civic education—not to mention our unwillingness to defend the importance and legitimacy of government and collective action supporting the common good.

The American Constitution was a product of the 18^thCentury cultural, intellectual and philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. Many people know that the Enlightenment gave us science, empirical inquiry, and the “natural rights” and “social contract” theories of government, but what is less appreciated is that the Enlightenment also changed the way we understand and define human rights and individual liberty. Very few students—even graduate students—enter my classroom with any knowledge of the ways in which this enormously consequential period of intellectual history shaped the United States.

Students are taught in school that the Puritans and Pilgrims who settled the New World came to America for religious liberty; what they aren’t generally taught is how those settlers definedthat liberty. Puritans saw liberty as “freedom to do the right thing”—freedom to worship and obey the rightGod in thetruechurch, and their right to use the power of government to ensure that their neighbors toed the same line. The Founders who crafted our constitution some 150 years later were products of an intervening paradigm shift brought about by the Enlightenment, which ushered in a dramatically different definition of liberty: personal autonomy. Liberty became your right to do your ownthing, free of government interference, so long as you did not harm the person or property of someone else, and so long as you were willing to accord an equal liberty to others.

America’s constitutional system is based on an Enlightenment concept we call “negative liberty.” The Founders believed that fundamental rights are not given to us by government; instead, they believed that rights are “natural,” meaning that we are entitled to certain rights simply by virtue of being human (thus the term “human rights”) and that government has an obligation to respect and protect those inborn, inalienable rights.

Contrary to popular belief, the Bill of Rights does not grant us rights—it protectsthe rights to which we are entitled by virtue of being human against infringement by an overzealous government. The American Bill of Rights is essentially a list of things thatgovernment is forbidden to do.For example, the state can’t dictate our religious or political beliefs, search us without probable cause, or censor our expression—and government is forbidden from doing those things even whenpopular majorities favor such actions.

In our system, those constraints don’t apply to private, non-governmental actors. As I used to tell my kids, the government can’t control what you read, but your mother can. Public school officials can’t tell you to pray, but private or parochial school officials can. If government isn’t involved, neither is the Constitution. Private, non-governmental actors are subject to other laws, like civil rights laws, but since the Bill of Rights only restrains what government can do, only government can violate it. I’m constantly amazed by how many Americans don’t understand that. (It’s quite obvious that Donald Trump doesn’t.)

Unlike the liberties protected against government infringement by the Bill of Rights, civil rights laws represent our somewhat belated recognition that if we care about human rights, just preventing government from discriminating isn’t enough. If private employers can refuse to hire African-Americans or women, if landlords can refuse to rent units in multifamily buildings to LGBTQ folks, if restaurants can refuse to serve Jews or Muslims, then society is not respecting the rights of those citizens and we aren’t fulfilling the obligations of the social contract that was another major contribution of Enlightenment philosophy.

The Enlightenment concept of human rights and John Locke’s theory of a social contract between citizens and their government challenged longtime assumptions about the divine right of the kings. Gradually, people came to be seen as citizens, rather than subjects. This new approach helped to undermine the once-common practice of assigning social status on the basis of group identity. It also implied that citizens have an affirmative responsibility to participate in democratic decision-making.

The once-radical idea that each of us is born with an equal claim to fundamental rights has other consequences. For one thing, it means that governments have to treat their citizens as individuals, not as members of a group. America was the first country to base its concept of citizenship on an individual’s civic behavior,rather than gender, race, religion or other identity or affiliation. So long as we obey the laws, pay our taxes, and generally conduct ourselves in a way that doesn’t endanger or disadvantage others, we are all entitled to full civic equality, no matter what our race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or other identity. When our country has lived up to that guarantee of equal civic rights, we have unleashed the productivity of previously marginalized groups and contributed significantly to American prosperity. And I think it is fair to say that—despite setbacks, and despite the stubborn persistence of racial resentment, religious intolerance and misogyny, we have made substantial progress toward creating a culture that acknowledges the equal humanity of the people who make up our diverse nation.

That brings us back to civic engagement, because in addition to equality before the law, respect for rights also requires democratic equality—an equal right to participate in the enterprise of self-government. We now recognize—or at least give lip service to—the proposition that every citizen’s vote should count, but on this dimension, we not only aren’t making progress, we’re regressing, as anyone who follows the news can attest.

One element of civic literacy that gets short shrift even among educators is the immense influence of systems in a society—an appreciation of the way in which institutions and conventions and laws shape how we understand our environments. Right now, a number of longstanding, systemic practices are obscuring the degree to which American democracy is becoming steadily less democratic—and the extent to which we are denying citizens the right to participate meaningfully in self-government.

Vote suppression has been on the rise, especially but not exclusively in Southern states that have not been required to get preclearance from the Justice Department since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Thanks to population shifts, the current operation of the Electoral College gives disproportionate weight to the votes of white, rural voters, and discounts the franchise of urban Americans. (Estimates are that each rural vote is worth 1 1/3 of each urban vote). Unequal resources have always been a political problem, but ever since Buckley v. Valeo, which equated money with speech,and especially since Citizens United, which essentially held that corporations are people, money spent by special interests has overwhelmed the votes and opinions of average citizens. The outsized influence of the NRA is a recently prominent example.

The most pernicious erosion of “one person, one vote” however, has come as a consequence of gerrymandering, or partisan redistricting. There are no “good guys” in this story—gerrymandering is a crime of opportunity, and both parties are guilty.

Those of you in this room know the drill; after each census, state governments redraw state and federal district lines to reflect population changes. The party in control of the state legislature at the time controls the redistricting process, and its legislators draw districts that maximize their own electoral prospects and minimize those of the opposing party. Partisan redistricting goes all the way back to Elbridge Gerry, who gave Gerrymandering its name—and he signed the Declaration of Independence—but the process became far more sophisticated and precise with the advent of computers, leading to a situation which has been aptly described as legislators choosing their voters, rather than the other way around.

Academic researchers and political reformers alike blame gerrymandering for electoral non-competitiveness and political polarization. A 2008 book co-authored by Norman Orenstein and Thomas Mann argued that the decline in competition fostered by gerrymandering has entrenched partisan behavior and diminished incentives for compromise and bipartisanship.

Mann and Orenstein are political scientists who have written extensively about redistricting, and about “packing” (creating districts with supermajorities of the opposing party) “cracking” (distributing members of the opposing party among several districts to ensure that they don’t have a majority in any of them) and “tacking” (expanding the boundaries of a district to include a desirable group from a neighboring district). They have tied redistricting to the advantages of incumbency, and they have also pointed out that the reliance by House candidates upon maps drawn by state-level politicians has reinforced what they call “partisan rigidity” –the increasing nationalization of the political parties.

Interestingly, one study they cited investigated whether representatives elected from districts drawn by independent commissions become less partisan. Contrary to the researchers’ initial expectations, they found that politically independent redistricting did reduce partisanship, and in statistically significant ways. Even when the same party maintained its majority, elected officials were more likely to co-operate across party lines.

Perhaps the most pernicious effect of gerrymandering is the proliferation of safe seats.The perception that some seats are “safe” for one party or another breeds voter apathy and reduces political participation. After all, why should citizens vote, or get involved, if the result is foreordained? Why donate to a sure loser? (For that matter, unless you are trying to buy political influence for some reason, why donate to a sure winner?) What is the incentive to volunteer or vote when it obviously won’t matter? It isn’t only voters who lack incentives for participation, either: it becomes increasingly difficult for the “sure loser” party to recruit credible candidates. As a result, in many of these races, voters are left with no genuine or meaningful choice—the perception of inevitability ends up creating the reality, because if everyone in a safe district were to vote, it probably wouldn’t be safe.

Ironically, the anemic voter turnout that gerrymandering produces leads to handwringing about citizen apathy, usually characterized as a civic or moral deficiency. But voter apathy may instead be a highly rational response to noncompetitive politics. People save their efforts for places where those efforts count, and thanks to the increasing lack of competitiveness in our electoral system, those places often do not include the voting booth.

If the ability to participate meaningfully in self-governance is a bedrock of democracy, partisan game-playing that makes elections meaningless should be seen as an assault on both democracy and the American system.

Safe districts do more than disenfranchise voters; they are the single greatest driver of governmental dysfunction. In safe districts, conventional wisdom has convinced us that the only way to oppose an incumbent is in the primary–and that almost always means that the challenge will come from the “flank” or extreme. When the primary is, in effect, the general election, the battle takes place among the party faithful, the so-called “base”—and they tend to be the most ideological voters. So Republican incumbents are challenged from the Right and Democratic incumbents are attacked from the Left. Even where those challenges fail, they create a powerful incentive for incumbents to “toe the line” in order to placate the most rigid elements of their respective parties. Instead of the system working as intended, with both parties nominating candidates they think will be able to appeal to the broad middle, the system produces nominees who represent the most extreme voters on each side of the philosophical divide. If you wonder why Republicans in Congress aren’t standing up to President Trump, the answer is that they are in effect being held hostage by that party “base”—a small group of empowered, rigidly ideological voters intent on punishing any deviation from orthodoxy and/or any hint of compromise.

Of course, vote suppression and civic ignorance aren’t the only reasons for a lack of civic engagement. There are other challenges to equal political participation. Poverty is one. A citizen working two or three jobs just to put food on the table doesn’t have much time for civic engagement, and in Indiana, that’s a lot of people.

Poverty and the growing gap between rich and poor threatens social stability and democratic decision-making in a number of ways, but one clear effect is that people engaged in a daily struggle for subsistence are unable to participate fully in the political activities that characterize democratic societies, and as a result, the national political conversation is skewed. The voices of the poor aren’t heard.

Poverty and inequality are huge problems in America right now, but they certainly aren’t our only challenges. Climate change, the loss of jobs to automation, the worrisome tribalism and racism that is tearing at our national fabric, inadequate funding of public education, the multiple, obvious flaws in our justice system…a majority of Americans realize that these and other major problems—far from being solved or even addressed—are being exacerbated by an administration that ranges from inept to corrupt.

Let me end by acknowledging that the 2016 election has also had positive consequences: for one thing, this administration’s bumbling is reminding the American people of the importance of competent government, and the damage that can be done when those in office have no idea what they are doing. The election has also rebutted—pretty conclusively— the widespread belief that any successful businessperson or celebrity can run the government. People who would never go to a dentist who hadn’t gone to dental school or filled a cavity were nevertheless perfectly willing to turn the nation and the nuclear codes over to someone who had absolutely no experience with or knowledge of government. We shouldn’t be surprised by the result.

Most important, however, the election unleashed more civic engagement and political activism than I’ve seen in my adult life.

The question is, can this impressive wave of civic engagement turn the tide? Can engaged Americans reverse the declines in civility and civic literacy, and reinvigorate the American idea?

Reviving America’s democratic norms, turning back the assaults on the rule of law and equal access to the ballot box, fixing the gerrymandering that feeds apathy and makes too many votes meaningless…the list of needed repairs to the system is long, and it will require political action and persistent civic engagement by an informed,civically-literate citizenry.

I’m hopeful, but the jury is still out.

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And Now For Something Positive

December 25, 2017

I know how depressing this blog has been this year. Even my husband–my most reliable cheerleader–tells me it’s been a downer.

My usual response is along the lines of “I calls ’em like I sees ’em”….

But hey! It’s Christmas. (Or at our house, Chrismukkah.) So I’m sharing a news item that reflects the one truly GOOD thing that Donald Trump has accomplished, albeit accidentally–a reinvigoration of civic engagement, aka popular resistance, and excellent snark. This brightened my day, and I hope it will brighten yours.

Enjoy. And Happy Holidays! (Your usual serving of gloom returns tomorrow….)

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Buy–And USE–This App!

October 19, 2017

Okay–indulge me as a proud mother (and #nevertrumper) engages in some shameless promotion….

As many of you will remember from a previous post, one of my sons is a web developer, and following the 2016 election, created the Activism Engine website. That site is being used, but not to the extent he’d hoped, because a site like AE depends in large part on a massive amount of content that is timely and meaningful, which in turn relies on a virtual army of content producers to fulfill the vision of the site and make it as useful as it can be.

It was foreseeable that building such a content network (consisting of 12 issue categories in 3 approach areas spread across 50 states) was never going to be quick or easy. In the meantime, as my son put it, he “wanted to take what I thought was most interesting about the site, and package it in a way that could be immediately useful to potential activists and people who would like to get involved and make the world a better place.”

He is his mother’s child….

Anyway, out of this desire was born a new app, Take Action (takeaction.me). It shares a user database with Activism Engine, so people who already have an account on AE can login directly to the takeaction.me app. But takeaction.me differs in that the content is created by the app users for their own use, although they are able to share actions with friends (a feature that should make it particularly useful to the new groups springing up in advance of the 2018 midterm elections, or just as a “buddy system” to help keep motivation high).

With the takeaction.me app, users can:

Add, edit, and review actions in any of a variety of categories
Share those actions with friends, and copy or follow friend’s actions
See charts and graphs and tables to help make sense of the actions they are taking
See a list (based on address or just a zip code) of all their representatives, and be able to call or email them directly from the app (and have those calls or emails added automatically to their actions list) This is my personal favorite feature! It makes it unbelievably simple to contact everyone from your City-County Counselor to the President.
Search for and connect with friends, see and share their issues and actions, and decide what to share with them.
last, but not least, there is an option when adding an action to also submit it for review to Activism Engine. The hope is that takeaction.me and activismengine.org will provide each other with motivation and content, so he has made it easy to share activity between the two.

The app is available at the iTunes Store and an Android version is available at Google Play.
Trust me — it’s worth the 99 cents! (But only if you USE it!)

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Community and Service

October 16, 2016

^{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”…..)}

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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, productive engagement 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 service will 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 4^th 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.

No pressure… but…

We’re all depending on you!

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The Sunday Sermon–Civic Health Edition

February 22, 2015

I was supposed to keynote the League of Women Voters’ state meeting yesterday, but the event was cancelled due to the weather. I do hate to waste a good rant, so here–for those willing to wade through a longer-than-usual post–are the (slightly edited) observations I’d planned to share.

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The news—you will be unsurprised to learn—is not good. At the end of March, the Center for Civic Literacy, which I direct, will join the Indiana Bar Foundation and IU Northwest to release data from the latest Civic Health Index. I don’t intend to step on that release, but I will tell you that Indiana’s civic health is not good. If Indiana was a person, she’d be on life support.

Indiana had one of the lowest turnout rates in the last midterm elections. And although Hoosiers are rarely in the vanguard of anything, we do remain on the cutting edge when it comes to voter suppression tactics—to begin with, we were among the very first states to pass a so-called “voter ID” law. The legal challenge to that law was unsuccessful largely because its actual operation was speculative at that point; since the Seventh Circuit rejected that challenge, it has become clear even to the Judges who voted to uphold the law that its sole purpose was to discourage voting by poor and minority voters who might be expected to vote for Democrats. Voter ID laws were a “remedy” for a non-existent problem—in-person voter fraud.

But the World’s Worst Legislature certainly isn’t resting on its laurels: this session, lawmakers have voted down efforts to change the time the polls close to 8:00—Indiana’s polls close at 6:00, much earlier than most states. This makes it much more difficult for non-professional working people to vote. Lawmakers have also left in place the ability of a single member of a county election board to prevent the establishment of a voting center. Wouldn’t want to make voting more convenient!

Laws making voting more onerous are only one reason among many for low voter turnout and disappointing citizen engagement. I am going to suggest three others that combine to depress interest in government and the electoral process: gerrrymandering, widespread and growing distrust of government, and low levels of civic literacy.

Let’s start with gerrymandering.

The goal of partisan redistricting is to draw as many “safe” seats as possible—more for the party in charge, of course, but also for the minority party, because in order to retain control, the winners need to cram as many of the losers into as few districts as possible, and those districts are safer still. While we have engaged in this effort since Vice-President Gerry’s time (and he signed the Declaration of Independence!), the advent of computers has made the process far, far more efficient.

Neighborhoods, cities, towns, townships—even precincts—are evaluated solely on the basis of voting history, and then broken up to meet the political needs of mapmakers. Numbers are what drive the results—not compactness of districts, not communities of interest, and certainly not democratic competitiveness. There are several consequences of this effort to retain the political edge, none pretty but some worse than others:

1) The interests of cities, neighborhoods, etc., are less likely to be represented.

2) Safe districts create sloppy legislation: if you are guaranteed victory every election, it is hard to be motivated and interested, easy to become lazy and arrogant.

3) Party preoccupation with gerrymandering consumes an enormous amount of money and energy that could arguably be better directed (although given the Indiana legislature’s fixation on disabling environmental regulations, enabling religious discrimination and privatizing education, maybe not.)

4) Safe seats allow politicians to scuttle popular measures—or sponsor unpopular ones—without fear of retribution: if you doubt me, just take a look at the current General Assembly! The avalanche of truly awful bills has kept me supplied with blogging fodder, but I’d happily find other things to blog about.

5) Lack of competitiveness makes it impossible to trace campaign donations, since unopposed candidates send their unneeded money to those running in the dwindling number of competitive districts. When the folks with “Family Friendly Libraries” send a check to Rep. Censor, who is unopposed, he then sends it to Sen. MeToo, who is in one of the few hot races; but Sen. MeToo’s campaign report shows only a contribution from Rep. Censor.

More important than all of these negative consequences, however, is the fact that lack of competitiveness breeds voter apathy and reduced political participation. Why vote when the result is foreordained? Why donate to a sure loser? For that matter, unless you are trying to buy political influence for some reason, why donate to a sure winner? Why volunteer or put up a yard sign, or attend a political event when those efforts are clearly irrelevant?

It isn’t only voters who lack incentives for participation: it becomes increasingly difficult to recruit credible candidates to run on the ticket of the “sure loser” party. The result is that in many of these races, there is either no candidate running from the minority party, or a token, where voters are left with a choice between the anointed and the annoying—marginal candidates who offer no new ideas, no energy, and no challenge of any sort.

We hear a lot about voter apathy, as if it were a moral deficiency of the voters. Allow me to suggest that it may be a highly rational response to noncompetitive politics. Watch those same “apathetic” folks at the local zoning hearing when a liquor store is trying to locate down the block! I would suggest that people save their efforts for places where those efforts might actually count, and thanks to the increasing lack of competitiveness, those places may NOT include the voting booth.

Gerrymandering has also contributed mightily to the polarization of politics, and the gridlock and disaffection such polarization causes. When a safe district disenfranchizes one party, the only way to oppose an incumbent is in the primary—and that generally means that the challenge will come from the “flank” or extreme. In competitive districts, nominees know that they have to run to the middle in order to win a general election. When the primary is, in effect, the general election, the battle takes place among the party faithful, who also tend to be the most ideological voters. So Republican incumbents will be challenged from the Right and Democratic incumbents will be attacked from the Left. Even where those challenges fail, they are a powerful incentive for the incumbent to toe the line–to placate the most rigid elements of each party. Instead of the system working as intended, with both parties nominating folks they think will be most likely to appeal to the broad middle, we get nominees who play to the base— the most extreme voters on each side of the philosophical divide—because those are the voters who show up at the polls.

In “The Big Sort,” Bill Bishop detailed the increasing tendency of Americans to live in areas where others share their values. We can’t eliminate such residential “self-sorting,” a phenomenon that has given us bright blue cities in very red states, but we can and should eliminate the intentional gerrymandering that exacerbates it. If we don’t, it really won’t matter who wins election, because the winner will encounter the intransigence and gridlock that is such a vivid consequence of the current system. That gridlock adds to the pervasive cynicism about government, which further reduces participation.

These truly nefarious effects of partisan redistricting are a major reason we have seen so much erosion of trust in government, but they are hardly the only reason.

So let’s talk about trust—or more accurately, the lack thereof.

Ever since Ronald Reagan said that government was the problem, not the solution, pundits and politicians have been beating on government. The people who want services but don’t want to pay taxes to pay for those services have crippled government’s ability to do many things we want and expect government to do. That disdain for the collective mechanism we call government is a big part of the problem—but there are other reasons as well for our current cynicism and distrust.

The problem is, that distrust infects other aspects of our communal lives.

Political scientists have accumulated a significant amount of data suggesting that over the past decades, Americans have become less trusting of each other. They warn that 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 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.

Many people get it backwards: they blame America’s growing diversity for the erosion of social trust. I disagree. 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 “Christian Nation.” The remedy is to make our governmental, religious and civic institutions trustworthyagain. 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, and government has an important role in building trust and social capital, we have a problem. There is a widespread perception right now that our governing institutions are not trustworthy—and there is plenty of evidence that American elected officials—even the non-crazy ones—have pursued policies or behaviors that are actually destructive of social trust. I would include in those policies the “privatization” and “reinventing government” ideology that has grown over the past thirty plus years, which has had the unintended consequence of “hollowing out” not just government, but a substantial segment of the nonprofit and voluntary sector. If healthy and functioning government agencies, and a robust civil society are necessary to the maintenance of trustworthy institutions, such “hollowing out” makes their task infinitely more difficult.

Since Distrust, American Style was written, it has gotten 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, some 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. The widespread belief that 50s-era Americans all lived like the characters from shows like “Father Knows Best” or “Leave it to Beaver” is highly inaccurate, to put it mildly. (Ask the African-Americans who were still relegated to separate restrooms and drinking fountains in much of the American South, or the women who couldn’t get equal pay for equal work or a credit rating separate from their husbands.)

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 without recognizing the profound social changes that have been wrought by communication technologies, most prominently the Internet.

We live today in an incessant babble of 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 it’s the Web that 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 time-honored “gatekeeper” function of the press—when journalists decided what constituted news and verified information before publishing it—will soon be a thing of the past, if it isn’t already.

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” with others who share our biases.

The information revolution is particularly pertinent to the issue of trust in 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 partisan spin. Politicians like to talk about “low-information” voters, but even the most detached American citizen cannot escape hearing about institutional failures on a daily basis, whether those failures are true or not. It may be the case that corruption and ineptitude are 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.

When people do not respect the enterprise that is government, when they suspect their lawmakers have been bought and paid for, is it any wonder they remain detached from it?

Finally, there’s our astonishing lack of civic literacy. Research confirms a correlation between civic knowledge and civic participation, and Americans overall are civically illiterate.

Only 36 percent of Americans can correctly name the three branches of government. Fewer than half of 12th grade students can describe the meaning of federalism. Only 35% of teenagers can correctly identify “We the People” as the first three words of the Constitution. This 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. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) 2006 report on civics competencies found that barely a quarter of the nation’s 4th, 8th and 12th graders are proficient in civics, with only five percent of seniors able to identify and explain checks on presidential power. Only 43% of high school seniors could 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. One scholar has reacted to the 2010 NAEP results by worrying that the amount of civic knowledge in this country may be “too low to sustain democratic governance.”

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, as well as their obligations to their fellow citizens.

When you don’t know that there are three branches of government, and you have a zoning problem or a social security issue—you don’t know where to start, where to go to resolve the issue. You find the system unresponsive and intimidating—and you opt out.

If we are going to encourage more people to participate, to vote, to become involved in electing and monitoring our government at all levels, we have to do at least three things: we have to work for laws that will enable rather than discourage voting, beginning with nonpartisan redistricting; we have to start talking about the things that government does well, while working to make it more ethical and accountable; and we have to raise the level of civic knowledge, so people will know how to do those things and why they matter.

Piece of cake, right?

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