What Happened to American Civics?
Charles Krblich
August 12, 2024
Photo by trongnguyen
My son’s school assigned a civics project for summer vacation. The project’s scope is expansive and spans from explaining the history and functions of the three branches of government to creating a flip book of landmark Supreme Court cases like Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v Board of Education. One of the tasks is a minor level of civic participation, either through community service or writing a letter to his Congressman. My assistance has often been required, and I’ve been given a chance to revisit my own civics education against the anti-democratic themes of the recent world, including pandemic lockdowns and political coronations.
The civics project starts with having the students research and document the basic foundations of democracy. The text of the project begins whimsically: “Once upon a time…The Magna Carta was the first document created to limit the ‘Evil King’ John’s power in Britain (the year 1215).”
It continues through the English Bill of Rights, and the Mayflower Compact, and finishes right before the US Revolution with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the philosophies of the Enlightenment thinkers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Montesquieu. From this history, the philosophies of the social contract, natural rights, and the separation of powers became the foundations of our US Constitution.
This historical foundation was followed by a topic on Citizenship. My son had to outline the ways a person could become a citizen, but more importantly, detail the obligations and responsibilities of a citizen. Obligations consist of things that would find us facing prison time if we ignored or rejected; things like not paying taxes or not following the law. Responsibilities are things like community service or voting.
As I’ve assisted my son with this project, I’ve found my train of thought drifting off, and I find myself thinking about all of the things I’ve recently been wrong about.
I suppose that my understanding of a Citizen’s duties and the presumed preference for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has created a bias in me that is no longer all that relevant.
For example, I expected a widespread rejection of lockdowns. I could not have predicted a forced-masking regime to occur, much less thrive, in a free country. I was sure the history of racial segregation in the US would prevent something like vaccine segregation from ever developing. Despite all the talk of “Threats to Democracy,” I did not expect a major party to sacrifice their primary candidate, whatever that candidate’s flaws, and simply appoint a new one; the alleged appointment occurring only a month before the nomination process and in lieu of holding any democratic primary.
Since the Ron Paul days of 2007, I have been far more inclined to view the two major parties as functionally similar; that there is only one larger party in control of things which many refer to as the Administrative State. They are neither elected nor fired, and the peaceful transition of power may rearrange the deck chairs, but otherwise, it doesn’t present any challenge to their status or power.
This aspect of things is not mentioned in Civics education. My son’s project does not have a topic addressing the three-lettered-bureaucracies. There is certainly no textbook ever produced that would explain how the CDC was granted the power to forbear rent, mortgage, and student loan repayments. I have yet to find in the texts of the US or State Constitutions enumerated powers to shut down gyms and schools among other businesses.
I was wrong, I think, because I still retain many of the default presumptions from my own civics education: in particular the concepts of the Rule of Law and the many lessons from history.
Without common ideas, there is no common action, and without common action men still exist, but a social body does not. Thus in order that there be society, and all the more, that this society prosper, it is necessary that all the minds of the citizens always be brought together and held together by some principle ideas.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Shared ideals are the foundation of any society, and we can observe a recent example of a shared idea constituting itself into a social body and then prospering. Social Distancing — a term that no one had ever heard before — was an idea that spread faster than the disease it was meant to slay. The rise of this idea created all sorts of new social orders and even superseded the prior social contract.
The purpose of my son’s civics education is to instill basic common ideals of what a citizen is, what the basic process of government is, and the philosophy of why those things are important. So, what happens when those rules no longer seem to apply?
Maybe East Berlin presents a relevant example. If an East German citizen was born at the right time, our citizen could have lived through the regimes of a monarchy, a republic, national socialism (Nazis), communism, and again a republic.
Anna Funder, in her book Stasiland, demonstrates the power of propaganda on a citizenry. Immediately after the communists took control of East Berlin and East Germany, the citizens were no longer Nazis. They never were. They were always Communists. It was the West Germans who were the Nazis. This message flooded the airwaves and the newspapers and people eventually came to believe it, just as the duties of their citizenship changed in distinct ways under each of the various regimes they had lived under.
I can’t help but think that, to a degree, this is what we are living through. The ostensible forms of our government are all still present. There is a congress, judiciary, and president, but everything else is different; all the rules have changed.
A citizen’s duties are therefore malleable and directed not by common shared ideals, but by directions handed down from above; directions that determine proper social etiquette and expected behavior. In this way, tens of millions of people can come to believe that freedom and democracy mean backroom appointments and good citizenship means wearing a mask.
Tocqueville says it better than I:
Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people…
By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
The old, aristocratic colors of government may be breaking through. Certainly, when the news media advances along a particular track, their influence becomes almost irresistible, and public opinion will eventually yield to it. In yielding, the duties of the citizenry are transformed as well.
For now, though, I help my son. I recite off the expected answers to his civics project and point out where he is wrong. I probably bore him by discussing the philosophies and history in more detail. At the very least, he learns the old rules; Rules that were created by thinking men at the height of the Enlightenment period, and not the new rules — which might more closely resemble the more ancient rules — created by men concerned with the acquisition of power.
The civics lessons are not unimportant. The central doctrines of individual liberty and tolerance resulted in more than 200 years of both — yes, turmoil — but more importantly, immense prosperity.
In our own turbulent time, categorized by many popular delusions, will we return to the Enlightenment ideals of natural rights, separation of powers, limited government, and liberty? Liberty — above all — the value that precedes all of the others.
This article is reprinted from Brownstone Institute where it appeared under a Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0). It first appeared on the author’s Substack.
intellectualtakeout.org/2024/08/what-happened-to-american-civics
