America Must Face Its Civic Crisis

Americans are losing hope: that distinctive, civic hope that their own choices and actions can meaningfully and positively shape their communities’ futures.

As the 2024 election approaches, some lament the travesty of a democracy reduced to a choice between bad and worse.

The future of our democracy depends on the return of the citizen: the conceptual and practical restoration of everyday Americans to the center of self-government.

Aaron Carroll : 9 of 10 Americans surveyed were willing to earn less money to do work with a “collective, shared purpose” Carroll: Millennials were especially eager to build the civic capacity of communities through their work.

Carroll: In a time when schools are often seen as centers of polarization over curriculum, communities are revising curricula to give students a complex but practical civic education, fit for work of constructive patriotism.

“Democracy,” as William James wrote in 1897 , reflecting on the US Civil War amid the upheavals of the Gilded Age, “is still upon its trial.

The civic genius of the people is its only bulwark.

It is a great word, whose history remains unwritten. It is we, the people, who must write it.”.