A little over two weeks after the election, I continue to hear from many of my friends and neighbors a kind of stunned unknowing as to how to think about what has happened or what to do about it.  I’m very far from having anything like a comprehensive answer, but as someone who has been presumptuous enough to write a book and an occasional blog about healing democracy, I feel obligated at least to say what I’m thinking and feeling these days.

I feel somewhat fortunate in not having been as surprised by the election results as many of my friends.  That just meant that my grief had been getting a head start on itself; it hasn’t made it any less grievous.  But from the moment that I began working on Citizens Uniting until now, I think I’ve been shielded against some of the deepest pangs by having adopted a stubbornly long-term view of political events.

One potential benefit of taking a longer view is that it can help us put any particular election in a broader historical context.  I made an effort to do that with both the 2016 and the 2020 elections in the Citizens Uniting to Restore Our Democracy introduction, where I wrote during the 2020 campaign:

“Those most distressed by the Trump phenomenon therefore found their political attention focused almost exclusively on electing a new president.  Regardless of the outcome of the 2020 election, however, we were still going to have to confront the backlog of problems that had so thoroughly beset our democracy before 2016.  The real issue, from this point of view, was not so much Donald Trump, but us.  The real issue was what we had allowed to become of our democracy – and what we were going to do about it.”

Balancing a long-range perspective with more immediate concerns is decidedly not an either-or choice.  I am not suggesting that any of us should ignore what immediately confronts us.  We Missoulians, for example, will have another mayoral election in 2025, and I expect to be doing whatever I can to support the re-election of our excellent mayor.  The midterm congressional elections of 2026 will present the first major opportunity to provide a check to whatever harmful policies may emerge from the 2024 election.  And the beginning of the 2028 presidential election will be on us before we know it.  In short, there will soon be more than enough political activity to absorb all of anyone’s attention or available resources.

Without in any way minimizing the importance of these kinds of responses to the present situation, I urge us all to accompany that response with one aiming further down the road.  Everyone can and should choose their own timeframe for any such longer-term work, but I’ll offer mine to help nudge your own thinking.

My youngest grandchild will celebrate her first birthday next month.  That means that she will participate in her first presidential election in 2044.  So I ask myself, “How could I wish that our political culture or its institutions would have changed by then so that she and her neighbors might have a decent shot at being a genuinely self-governing people?  And what could we do, starting today, to move toward that change?”

Any reader who takes a few minutes to think about what you yourself would hope to see altered in our political culture for the benefit of future democratic citizens will likely come up with several suggestions.  I’d be interested to hear some of them.  Meanwhile, here are two overlapping features of our current situation that seem to me to pose serious threats to the long-term vitality of American democracy:

  • Vast inequalities of wealth and income which leave so many of the underprivileged all too subject to demagogic appeals to their anger and resentment.
  • Our longstanding inattention to the hard work of educating democratic citizens.

Neither of these problems is subject to a quick fix, and any meaningful address to either will be hindered by the ideological polarization of our politics.  There are, however, possibilities for slow, marginal progress on both these fronts.  For now, I am going to defer an examination of the economic inequality problem and offer a few observations about how we might immediately begin the long-term work of repairing our civic education infrastructure.

First, it’s clear that we have a problem here – a problem that has been worsening for the past several decades, and a problem that has contributed directly to the weakening of our democratic culture.  As the cross-partisan coalition Civxnow puts it,  “A cause of our current levels of polarization, increasing lack of faith in democracy among younger generations, dearth of civic knowledge, susceptibility to false information, and waning trust is the lack of meaningful, culturally relevant and engaging civic education in our schools.”

Our failure to invest in this vital element of any thriving democracy is breathtaking. As the Carnegie Corporation puts it, “Funding for civic learning, both from philanthropy and government, is woefully inadequate. The United States invests just 5 cents in civic education for every 50 dollars that goes to education in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects.”

A 2022 article in the American Bar Association journal traces the public policy roots of this imbalance: “This neglect of social studies and civics is directly linked to decades-long education policies at the state and federal levels mandating testing of basic literacy (English Language Arts and math) through funding incentives. Specifically, and as a direct consequence of education policy, civic education has been chronically underfunded, both federally and locally.”

The good news is that a problem that has been created by misguided public policy can be corrected by intelligently informed policy initiatives.  This reform is already underway.  As the Carnegie Foundation reports:

  • Massachusetts, which led the way in 2018 with bipartisan legislation mandating an eighth-grade civics class, recently increased its annual public investment in civics from $2 million to $2.5 million.

  • Indiana and New Jersey adopted middle school civics course requirements, and Oregon and Rhode Island adopted new high school requirements.

  • Utah passed legislation to fund experiential civic learning pilots at the district level, while Georgia and Indiana passed bills creating permanent civic education commissions.

This is one arena where there exists the credible possibility of genuinely bipartisan and broadly popular policy-making.  The  Democracy Project (supported by the George W. Bush Institute) found that “the most popular (89% support) initiative tested as a way to bolster democracy was to ensure that schools make civic education a bigger part of curriculum. This high level of support remained true across all age, gender, racial, political, socioeconomic, and geographic demographics.” The ABA article cited earlier reports that: “In 2020, pollster Frank Luntz surveyed more than 1,000 Americans and asked what they felt could heal this country’s divides. Among seven solutions, including “less money in politics” and “ranked-choice voting,” civic education was the number one choice by a majority across political leanings.”

For those who are wondering what is to be done now, and who are open to investing some of their time and attention (and perhaps resources) in long-term democracy healing work, here is one good possibility.  Watch for any efforts in your state legislature or the nonprofit sector to strengthen civic education.  Pitch in and help.  My granddaughter will thank you for it.

Daniel Kemmis is the author of Citizens Uniting to Restore Our Democracy.