Limited Civic Skills

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

One of the biggest problems facing American democracy is the lack of civic skills of many American citizens.  Most people think that their civic responsibility, if there is any such thing, amounts to voting, and a shocking number do not even do that. For example, while 245 million Americans were eligible to vote in the 2024 general election, close to 90 million people did not vote — in what might be the most consequential election of the last several decades at least. 

Many more people do not engage as citizens in any other way. They don't pay attention to issues, they don't express their views to their representatives, they don't attend civic meetings or contribute to their communities in any meaningful way.  Nor do they know how to.

We recently did an interview with Harry Boyte who talked about his youth citizenship program called "Public Achievement." Through that, Harry and colleagues interviewed 300 teenagers about their concerns, and then asked them what they thought they could do to fix the things they were unhappy about.  Most responded "nothing." They had no idea what to do to fix those things — "they never had a class in that," they said. (And this project was done when students still had "government" or "civics" classes, which are rare now, as they became contentious, and school boards decided it was easier to cut those classes than to deal with the conflicts.

Not surprisingly, American adults don't know how to fix things either.  They don't understand how our government is structured or how it works; they don't understand what rights they have and don't have. And they certainly don't understand how they might be able to influence policy, other than (maybe) voting once every two or four years. If American democracy is to survive, we need to do better than this!

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