For Citizenship in Troubled Times
Why this new organization?
We’re a new nonprofit civil society organization.
Our goal is to help launch a citizenship movement. Our strategies are mobilizing civil society organizations, grassroots seminars, a subscriber-based media network, a public Call to Citizenship, and an annual Convention. Our vision is an America in which large and growing majorities of citizens are equipped with the character, competence, and desire to sustain the American experiment in ordered liberty.
Why are we doing this? Why now?
Because America’s most important public office is in disrepair.
In most times and places, the most important public office is that of the ruler. In a monarchy, for example, the king rules and subjects obey.
But in a republic, a remarkable thing occurs. The king is broken into many pieces, with each citizen getting a piece to carry inside themselves. This change revolutionizes civic life. Subjects need only do what they’re told. But self-governing citizens, each in some measure a king, are required to possess virtue.
Which is why, here in America, the most important public office is that of the citizen.
The American founders, breaking away from a monarchy to establish a republic, stressed this point repeatedly. 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.”
At the close 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 citizens with “sufficient virtue" so that "you can keep it."
Keeping it is no longer something we can count on. Our civic life is failing in fundamental ways. We’re steadily degrading our most important public office.
The loss of our civic bearings didn’t just happen. It’s closely connected – partly as a result and partly as a contributing cause – to three interconnected social trends. The first is the steady weakening of key institutions in our civil society. The second is the rise of toxic political polarization, such that we not only disagree with our political adversaries, but also mistrust them and even hold them in contempt. And the third is the rise of illiberal values and conduct on both the left and right of the political spectrum – an illiberalism that is inimical to the principles the founders bequeathed and on which the success of our republican form of government decisively depend.
We’re in a perilous moment. Our fundamental civic logic is in jeopardy. A generations-long era of persuasion in our politics 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? At the core of our new enterprise is the conviction that today’s civic crisis does not come from Trump, or Biden, or the man behind the tree. It comes from “We, the People.” It may sound difficult, and it is, but the surest and likely only way out of the mess we’re in is the remaking of our most important public office.
That’s what we’ll seek to do. We’re just getting started, and we need you. Please subscribe.