Citizenship in Troubled Times

In our American form of government, the most important office that of citizen.

Called by many the father of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison in The Federalist asks whether Americans in the future will act with “sufficient virtue,” since “Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”

On the last day of our Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, someone asked Benjamin Franklin whether the new nation would be a republic or a monarchy. “A republic,” Franklin said, “if you can keep it.”

In these troubled times, Civic Life seeks to form citizen-leaders with “sufficient virtue” so that “you can keep it.”

Today we are failing in our most important office. Indeed, the decline of of citizenship explains each of the three mutually reinforcing dimensions of what now ails us — affective polarization, elite illiberalism, and populist illiberalism.

Our crisis of citizenship has brought us to a dangerous moment. A generations-long era of persuasion is waning, and one of coercion is succeeding, and a democratic way of life whose core promise is the supremacy of persuasion over coercion now faces its time of testing.

What is to be done? The first and most important fact we must face is that our problem does not come from Trump, or Biden, or the man behind the tree. It comes from us. It may sound grand, but it’s true that the surest and perhaps only way out of the mess we’re in is a renewal of civic competence and virtue.