As promised last week, I am heading into summer by thinking about what civility and the “civic” mean today, a period marked by incivility and ignorance in the highest offices of government. I know “civics” is not a very sexy topic, but it’s a necessary one, right? So, as the school year comes to an end, I am giving it some attention. I think we desperately need a better approach to civics education.
In what should (but probably won’t) go down as one of the lower moments in 21st-century American political history to date, Kristi Noem took Know-Nothing politics to a new level. In testimony before the Senate, she revealed that she did not know the definition of one of the most important protections in American law, Habeas Corpus.
Admittedly, Noem did not go to law school. But she got a bachelors in Political Science from South Dakota State University, and it should be required, I would think, for a political science major at any university in the United States to know what Habeas Corpus is.
More importantly, she is Secretary of Homeland Security. It is one thing for ordinary citizens to be sketchy on latinate legal terms, it is another thing entirely for one of the country’s most powerful law-enforcement officials to whiff on this legal beachball.
Something is wrong with American civics education.
Every year, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania conducts a “civics survey” among American citizens. The most recent survey found the following bits of unsettling news (I am quoting here from a summary; if you want to read the whole survey, it can be found here):
Nearly a third of Americans can’t name the three branches of government.
Asked what specific rights are guaranteed by the First Amendment, nearly three-quarters of respondents (74%) name freedom of speech. The other four rights, however, are recalled by far fewer people: the second most-often cited, freedom of religion, is named by just 39%.
Almost half of U.S. adults don’t know which party controls the Senate and which controls the House of Representatives.
Last year, my colleagues at the University of Illinois’ Office of Civic Life conducted a survey among undergraduates in which they were asked to describe briefly how a law is passed. This is basic civics knowledge, of course. While I was not privy to the results, I have it from a good source that the answers were pretty wild and mostly wrong. And this among University of Illinois students—on the whole, a pretty smart bunch.
It appears that Kristi Noem is not alone.
It is disturbing just how little most Americans know about how government works. It no doubt has implications for elections, particularly presidential elections, where, for example, presidential candidates talk as though they will have unilateral and unqualified powers to change the law if elected. Too many people seem to actually believe this. Thus, when the president fails to live up to their campaign promises, some become cynical. Others remain gullible, mistaking a rash of executive orders for effective political governance. Effective long-term policy changes depend on legislation, not fiat.
What to make of the civics deficit? From a macro-level, it says something about the underfunding, inequities, and demands put on K-12 schooling in this country. Public schools are the number one social services institution in the United States. They can struggle to educate because they are saddled with so many other basic tasks: making sure kids are eating, sleeping, and safe; dealing with chronic depression or anxiety among so many students; and fighting with constituencies over matters like school security, test scores, and which books are allowed in the library.
Therefore, civics knowledge, like all forms of more specialized knowledge in the United States today, has become a class privilege. If instead of asking Americans about their civics knowledge according to party affiliation, as the Annenberg Public Policy Center does, they broke respondents into socio-economic groups, I bet we’d see something similar with civics knowledge to what we see in literacy rates or STEM knowledge. Generally speaking, the distribution of knowledge in our society follows class structure. The better off you are, the more you know.
But even among the better educated, money also shapes what knowledge we value. Schools are pressured to value knowledge that begets money. This is true of universities too. I experience it firsthand in my department. Put “work,” “health,” “business,” or “organization” in a course title, and it is sure to fill. Put “civics,” let alone “politics,” and it is likely to struggle. Educators from middle school through college are constantly pressured to prove that their teaching will bring economic benefits to their students.
It puts educators in an impossible situation, trying to fit the keys of knowledge into a narrow economic pinhole (like, as someone said, putting a camel through the eye of a needle). English teachers have a hard enough time explaining the economic payoff of Shakespeare; what hope can there possibly be for a lesson on the procedural rules of the filibuster?
If you step back and think about it, this really is a form of cultural insanity. It implies that government, civics, and politics don’t matter economically when, in fact, they matter more than anything else. The poorest countries are the least functional countries when it comes to government. Even in very rich countries like our own, our major economic crises all have roots in poor governance. A healthy economy depends upon a healthy polity.
I have long been of two minds about justifying civics education in this insane condition. On the one hand, there are exceptionally strong, knock-down arguments that can be used. In general, they would argue what I just said, economic vitality depends upon responsible government. They could cite countless examples of corrupt and broken governments that hurt the bottom line of citizens and businesses. In this vein, I marvel at the stupidity of educational leaders who cannot seem to see just how economically vital civics education is.
But on the other hand, I just don’t want to play this game, because I know it is a game that only a few are meant to actually win. An emphasis on civics is an emphasis on goods that transcend the market: community, cooperation, health, safety, security, happiness, mobility, groundedness, thoughtfulness, care. The goods of civics education explain themselves and should not need to bow at the altar of mammon.
But here, civics education is to blame, not for what it fails to accomplish but for what it fails to even try to accomplish. Looking at various curricular approaches to civics education, one thing stands out: there’s almost no emphasis on the goods our rights, responsibilities, laws, and institutions are supposed to serve. There is no imagination for political life. We teach civics as though it were a body of knowledge rather than what, in fact, it is: an active art meant to achieve certain temporal goods.
To put this bluntly, we should care less about whether a majority of Americans can name the four rights protected by the First Amendment—speech, religion, the press, and the right to assemble—than whether people are exercising public speech, feel free to worship (or not) in safety, can read and engage with a free press, and take advantage of the pleasures and privileges of assembly. The point of the Bill of Rights, after all, is not to educate us but to empower us, and not just as individuals but as a polity: a large group of people locked in a political life together.
Civics, in this sense, has something important to teach us about the deficits of our political culture. “Empowerment” today evokes rights. To say “I have the right to do something” has been conflated with “I have the power to do something.” But the fact is that many people in this country have rights but little power. Thinking about power in terms of rights is extremely reductive.
Actual political power is a form of agency, the ability to do something. But it is not just any form of agency, but the agency to do something with other people. Otherwise, it is not actual political power. Rights alone tell us very little about what to do with them. The belief that rights are the prize jewel of political power teaches us that the most important thing is to hold and possess them rather than exercise them.
Rights have been abstracted from the goods to which they are supposed to contribute. Many have forgotten altogether what rights are for. Hence, our biggest crisis today is a crisis of goods, not rights. What are all these rights for?
Know your rights, but more important is knowing the goods your rights are supposed to serve.
As I wrote last week, I think the roots of all the incivility in contemporary political culture are in the political economy of media: the shift from “mainstream” networks to fragmented cable and social media networks.
And yet, on an ethical level, I think the main culprit is the cult of rights without goods. We live in a culture where many are concerned to exercise their rights, but few are asking what goods those rights are supposed to serve. This leads to a culture where saying whatever you’d like, regardless of whether it is good to say, becomes its own kind of perverse cultural virtue.
In this regard, civics education needs to be about much more than learning the crucial nuts and bolts of government and citizenship. It needs to be Homeric: that is, it needs to be about story and imagination. I’d vote for movies, plays, poems, speeches, and songs to be put alongside the Constitution in our civics classes. We might even think of civics as not a stand-alone subject at all, but a topic that permeates the curriculum of our schools and lives.
Civic Fields put the “s” on field for just this reason. The concept and conviction was that civics needed to be pulled out of the suffocating silo of an academic subject and seen in all its many-colored dimensions. This newsletter will not alone do that, not even close. But the hope is that it might spark some talking, some thinking, and some imagining about our current civic state and its remedies. Thanks for giving it your attention. It matters more than mammon.
Field Notes:
On the them of knowledge and ignorance, I remain quite troubled by the revelations about just how cognitively limited Joe Biden was in much of his presidency, and by the way in which his staff kept so many others in government—let alone the public—from knowing about it. I think it is fair to say that Biden, his family, and his staff betrayed the country. Still, while I worry about the long-term effects of Biden’s betrayal on national politics, what’s happening before our very eyes these days is far more dangerous long term. Trump has learned that it is better to betray in the country in full view than to try to cover it up. He cashes in daily on “authenticity.” While the Biden cover up confirms the very loud suspicion that people have that politicians are duplicitous and untrustworthy, Trump says, by contrast, “You can trust me to be double-dealing. I am doing it right in front of you.” Really, how sick is it that we are in a position where we have a choice not between duty and betrayal, but between betrayal in the open and betrayal hidden behind closed doors? The typical response to betrayal is grievance. A while back I wrote here about grievance capitalism. As bad as a grievance-based political culture can be, worse yet is a cynically complacent one. I worry that the very open betrayals of the Trump administration are pushing us into even this darker complacency. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her magisterial book on totalitarianism, “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements.” Gullibility is a liability the ignorant face; cynicism a danger particular to the informed.
One of the central animating spirits behind Civic Fields is the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last week. I hope to write about him at some point here in this newsletter. There’s just so very much I have learned from him, mostly from works he published after his most famous book, After Virtue (1981). One of the many admirable traits of MacIntyre was that for all of his brilliant insights—he is among a few contemporary philosophers who could have legitimately said that he transformed whole fields of inquiry—he was never convinced he had gotten it “right.” This took humility, courage, conviction, and—well—more humility. His work was iconoclastic: it tore down reigning paradigms in moral thought, epistemology, and social theory. And yet it was not destructive in spirit. To the contrary, for every brick MacIntyre knocked down he laid two or three others. One result of his commitment to reconstruction is that his work found appreciative readers among conservatives and leftists. With conservatives, he was committed to tradition and virtue. Aristotle and Aquinas were guiding lights. With leftists, he remained a strong critic of centralized state-capitalism. He never “abandoned” Marx, but only concluded that the Marxist tradition had been exhausted. He reminded his readers that Marx himself was a heavy reader of Aristotle and MacIntyre saw in the fusion of Aristotle and Marx the possibility of a more just, humane, and rational society. If you've caught me writing about “red republicanism” in these pages, MacIntyre was goading me along.