1/13/2025

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal starts off with an essay from Jack Miller Center President Hans Zeiger in the latest issue of National Affairs. Noting that most Americans have disdain for our political leaders, Zeiger argues that what is missing in our institutions of education is a focus on forming citizens. “Instead of providing an education in the intellectual foundations of leadership for a constitutional republic,” he writes, disciplines like civics and history “have turned their attention — and their professional rewards and incentives – toward ever-narrowing research agendas.” Americans must return to lionizing and joining civic institutions that can mediate between the state and the citizen. And he contends that we must begin seeing vocation as more important than holding credentials. Zeiger concludes by noting, “Scholars, teachers, higher-education administrators, journalists, philanthropists, and political leaders themselves must all do their part, as we near America's 250th birthday, to renew the teaching of political leadership.”

At The Federalist, Jeffrey Anderson and John Fonte argue that our quarter-millennial celebration (a better term in their eyes than semiquincentennial) must be a celebration of America. This sounds obvious but it is not, they argue. The country needs to mirror the celebration of America’s 200th birthday in 1976, which they describe as “a unifying show of gratitude.” Our culture and politics are in a similar state, they say, with crime, riots, and anti-American ideology seeping into our nation’s schools. Instead, Anderson and Fonte state that Americans should look to American heroes like Washington and Lincoln, the Wright Brothers and Walt Disney. The celebrations “must remind our citizenry that the Declaration of Independence is a document of universal truths and that, in Lincoln’s words, all Americans ‘have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration.’” As they conclude, “In short, the Quarter-Millennial is the best opportunity in 50 years to reorient the citizenry toward the American Founding, and we shouldn’t squander it.”