10/30/2023

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal starts with Jeffrey Bloodworth’s latest piece for RealClearPolitics. Bloodworth, a faculty fellow with the Jack Miller Center, notes how the concern for keeping up Congress as an institution, which used to be shared among members of both parties, has fallen by the wayside in recent decades. Unfortunately, politicians today care “little about party, ideology, or the institution,” Bloodworth writes. “Adolescent antics that injure democracy but burnish their ‘brand’ are their first and only priority.” As they use “their perch for a ceaseless pursuit of attention and self-promotion,” at the same time “they undermine public trust in institutions, which are at an all-time low according to polls.” The cause of our current problems extend from a larger “epidemic of narcissism,” which “threatens institutions across society.” This is a grave issue for the future of self-government, because the American “founders understood that character, not ideology, determines the fate of American democracy.”

At The American Conservative, the Heritage Foundation’s Brenda Hafera writes that the current battles over civics education in Virginia, Florida, and elsewhere represent a fundamental “disagreement over how we understand our country.” Hafera argues that the key fight today is over “a matter of civic education" on one hand and “identity activism, of the republican belief in self-government over the politics of resentment" on ther other. These civics battles are imperative in a country that was founded on a fusion of creed and culture, whose success depends upon passing down civic knowledge from generation to generation. Quite simply, “civic education aims to preserve our inheritance.” In conclusion, Hafera contends, “When the solid purpose of civic obligation and American principles are undermined, all that remains is a group struggle for power.”