6/19/2023

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal starts off with Hans Zeiger, the President of the Jack Miller Center, arguing that we need to provide younger generations, who “are seeing the coarsest, most cynical aspects of American politics” on social media and the twenty-four hour news cycle, with key lessons on how to preserve our civic inheritance. “If people don’t have a common picture of certain foundational ideas and ideals in a highly pluralistic society like ours,” Zeiger writes, “we are at real risk of fracturing. Indeed, we see signs of fracturing all around us.” He notes that teacher-led “civic renewal efforts” need to target “both the state and local levels”: “The states are ultimately responsible for educating the next generation of citizens; local governments are invested with the power to craft standards and curricula, which is all to the good since they are better positioned to get the buy-in that is needed from taxpaying parents and teachers.” As Zeiger closes, an American civic renewal project is necessary because “the ideas at the heart of the American experiment—self-government, universal human dignity, justice itself—are also at the heart of what it means to be human.” We should be thus providing skilled “civics and history teachers…with as much support and encouragement as we can.”

At RealClearPolicy, Miles Smith argues that examining Abraham Lincoln’s famous "House Divided" speech can help us discover a good understanding of the somewhat slippery term “nationalism.” According to Smith, Lincoln’s idea of nationalism is “conservative and liberal,” “federalist and constitutional.” It calls for enacting “capitalistic reforms across the Union” and finally “removing” the evil of “slavery, the great obstacle to the individualistic equality proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence.” This idea of nationalism is also committed to safeguarding “natural rights and the endurance of the traditional social order wherein humans pursued virtue, good, and truth.” As Smith contends, Lincoln’s understanding of nationalism is worth keeping today.