About Civic Life
Civic Life aims to help ignite a social movement to strengthen republican citizenship in its time testing. We envision an America in which growing majorities of our citizens have the character, competence, and desire to sustain the American experiment in ordered liberty.
The Challenge We Face
American civic life is decaying owing to four overlapping trends:
Deepening affective polarization.
Weakening of civil society institutions.
Disappearance of a shared moral canopy.
Rise of illiberalism on both left and right.
Together, these forces can destroy our most important public office: that of the citizen.
At stake is the survival of our democratic republic.
We won’t fix what’s broken by tinkering around the edges, focusing on only one trend, or hoping that someone different wins the next election.
What’s required is a broad social movement for civic renewal seeking ethical, intellectual, behavioral, and policy changes across society.
The Strategy We Need
A civil society coalition
— empowered by media
— can scale grassroots learning
— giving birth to mobilizations
— seeking policy and institutional reforms.
Each of these five activities is designed to reinforce and amplify the others.
The strategic objective is to challenge today’s vicious downward civic spiral, in which negative developments are mutually reinforcing, and replace it with a virtuous upward spiral.
What Makes Civic Life Distinctive?
Holistically addresses underlying causes.
Depends on volunteer-led growth rooted in civil society institutions.
Unites a grassroots ground game with a media air game.
Connects individual (hearts and minds) change to efforts for institutional and policy change.
Seeks not just to run programs, but to spark a citizen-led movement.
Revives the tradition of grassroots adult learning as a tool for civic renewal.
Leadership
Civic Life’s founder and president is David Blankenhorn, who has a long track record of success in creating and leading civil society initiatives. Joining him on the founding board of directors are four distinguished colleagues. Hunter Baker is provost and professor of political science at North Greenville University and a prominent leader in the Southern Baptist Convention. Marína Gálisová is the managing editor of .tyzden (“The Week”) in Bratislava, Slovakia, and a widely known writer on civic life in Central Europe. JoAnn Luehring directs a family foundation and is a former partner at the law firm of Roberts & Holland in New York City, where she specialized in laws affecting nonprofit organizations and advised public charities and private foundations. Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and one of the nation’s most distinguished public intellectuals.
Senior advisors (in formation) include Samuel Abrams, professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; Paul Edwards, director of the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University; Francis Fukuyama, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for International Studies and professor of political science; William Galston, Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution; Micheal Ignatieff, scholar and public intellectual who has held senior academic posts at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Toronto, and Central European University; Liz Joyner, founder and president of the Village Square in Tallahassee, Florida; Jennifer McCoy, professor of political science at Georgia State University; Linda Malone-Colon, dean of the school of liberal arts at Hampton University; Lawrence Mead, professor of politics and public policy at New York University; Amy Olberding, professor of philosophy at the University of Oklahoma; and Martina Šmuclerová, senior lecturer at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and Ambis University in Prague, Czech Republic.
Conclusion
If not this, what? If not now, when?
We welcome and need – our country needs – your help.
Please subscribe to Civic Life.
