civic illiteracy
can we recover it?
Over the past six months, I have alluded to civic illiteracy several, if not many, times. What am I talking about, you may wonder?
How can we have a Congress unaware of the branches of government holding specific responsibilities under the U.S. Constitution?
How much of the public understands that our system is federalism, vesting certain powers in the Federal level of government versus those at the state or even local levels?
How many people understand that freedom of the press means that the federal government does not mandate protections for private media organisations?
How many people have actually ever read that beautiful document with seven Articles and twenty-seven Amendments?
How many people consider that taxes are the basis to fund everything the government does—whether each person likes or dislikes an activity—for 340,000,000 people?
The list goes on and on. The assertions of counterfactual nonsense hurt my head but we all should be used to it because Americans for more than four hundred years have had a love and hate relationship with civics and government and governing and this country.
I fervently support that discussing regularly the provisions of that wonderful Constitution in as many public settings as possible. Let’s make it a living document for people rather than for them to find on their own as that may overwhelm many folks, odd as that sounds. I am not sure kids learn much about it in school as social sciences and history, in particular, are declining in interest as we boost studies in STEM which make us more competitive. It wouldn’t hurt to make the Constitutional discussions sexy again but I need your help thinking quite how to do that. Interjecting the word sexy probably is a start….lol.
Unless we start recognising the increasing damage that illiteracy is bringing, however, we risk falling further into an abyss from which representational government may never emerge. Dictatorships are brutal, horrible and pernicious places that make our flaws right now look pretty small. The irony is that those most vocally whining about government because they don’t really understand why/what/how our government is supposed to work will lose the most things deteriorate further. And they certainly won’t like that, either.
Those who understand the Constitutional system but seek to turn it to their benefit through manipulating ignorance are a pretty scary bunch. Can we keep them a minority?FIN
The United States Constitution, retrieved AND AVAILABLE TO YOU at https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/