Civic Knowledge and Skills That We All Need to Constructively Handle Intractable Conflict

6. Civic Knowledge and Skills

As we have said elsewhere, democracy is not a spectator sport. If the United States is to keep its democracy, all of our citizens need to participate. We can not leave it to our leaders to "make democracy" for us.

Yes, we are also a republic, which means we vote for leaders who are supposed to represent us. But right now, many of our leaders are not doing a very good job of representing us. Rather, they seem to be representing only themselves or at best their party, advocating for and voting for policies and measures that often hurt their constituents, but are intended to increase their own power and get them re-elected. If we really want a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," as Abraham Lincoln promised in the Gettysburg Address, then we need to start participating in governance ourselves.

But to do that, we need both civic knowledge and skills, both of which seem to have been forgotten by many Americans.

Civic knowledge is knowledge about how the American government is structured and how it is supposed to work. For instance, knowledgeable citizens need to understand about our system of checks and balances. We have three branches of government: the administrative, the legislative, and the judicial, and they are all supposed to check and balance each other. If any one of the branches over-reaches its authority, it is the responsibility of the other two to pull it back.

Now that system gets attenuated whenever the President of the United States is of the same party as the legislature, and worse, when the legislature seems to kowtow to every whim of the President. Ideally, the judicial branch (in this case the Supreme Court) should check the excesses of both the executive and legislative branches, but given that the majority of the justices are also of the President's party, it remains to be see how much that will happen. Nevertheless, it is important to understand how this is supposed to happen, and pressure one's representatives to indeed act in that fashion.

Another piece of civic knowledge is to understand what rights citizens have, and what responsibilities go along with those rights. Our rights are set out in the U.S. Constitution, as well as other documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But rights also come with responsibilities. Emma Addams and Jennifer Thomas explained that beautifully when they were describing their "three principles of ethical government." The first principle is rule of law--all governmental actors, they say, must follow the rule of law and avoid even the appearance of corruption. Their second principle is the rights of the citizen:

every human being is endowed with rights that governments are obligated to protect and not violate. And that includes universal human rights, liberty and life, as well as civil rights, and then also equitable political representation and equal protection under the law. And then for each of those, we have a set of sub-principles that we've laid out.

At the same time, however, they balance rights with responsibilities, arguing that

all human beings are mutually accountable to our fellow human beings in our local communities, our countries, and in the world. So, within that would fall our responsibility to be educated voters and to have good media literacy skills and to follow truth and things like that.

Jennifer explained the relationships between rights and responsibilities further:

It's a really important balance to us, because rights are so important in our nation, in its history. They're one of the foundational elements of freedom and people's ability to construct a life as they see fit. But if rights become overbalanced, without people recognizing their responsibility to one another, we get out of step with each other. And so every time I assert my right, I also am required morally, we would argue, to do that in a way that recognizes my responsibility to others around me. I don't just get to move through the world freely saying, "This is Jen's right. This is Jen's right," regardless of whether that causes significant pain and harm to Emma.
One of the things that we ask our women to do, particularly in an election season, is be part of what we call our "Principled Voter Campaign." Here we ask women to go through serious steps to individually interrogate themselves about what they're voting for and why. At the end of every one of those series of questions is a final question, which basically says that "I have an obligation to vote in a way that does not do overt harm to other people or leave them behind. I need to always be voting as what we call a "golden rule voter." And so I certainly should use my vote to assert what I think is right and to create the society that I want. But I also have to be very aware, am I voting for someone who's going to absolutely trample and hurt others? And then I probably need to question whether that's a good choice.

These principles were developed by Mormon women for Mormon women, but they apply equally well to all of us -- we all need to be principled voters, and well-educated citizens. We need to know how to sort through dis- and misinformation to find out (as much as possible) the truth about issues we care about. We need to know how to advocate for our interests and needs in ways that are not only effective, but also don't impinge on other people's interests and needs. To do that, we need to know how to engage in conflict constructively, rather than either pretending the conflict doesn't exist (by going along with what other people say, regardless of whether we believe it), or doing so in hurtful, destructive, and ineffective ways. And lastly, we need to understand enough about how our government works that we know how to engage with it, so that we can get our opinions, interests, and needs noted and, hopefully, responded to.

All of these topics are explored in greater detail below.