The events of September 11 have evoked an outpouring of patriotism, not least among young Americans. Scholars, pundits, and young people themselves are wondering whether the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon represent a defining event for this new generation, much as Vietnam did for their parents and Pearl Harbor for their grandparents. If so, it would represent a huge shift of outlook for a group whose detachment from civic life before September 11 was unprecedented and troubling.
To be sure, anxiety about the civic attitudes and activities of young American adults is nothing new. As far back as solid evidence can be found, it appears that young adults have been less attached to civic life than their parents and grandparents. Civic attachment is linked to factors such as professional interests, stable residential location, home ownership, marriage, and parenthood, all of which are statistically less characteristic of younger adults. Not surprisingly, the simple passage of time has brought each generation more fully into the circle of civic life.
Against this backdrop, were today’s young adults at all distinctive on the eve of the terrorist attacks? The answer, I believe, is yes. The key is to be found in the demographic distinction between “cohort” effects and “generational” effects. Cohorts represent a snapshot of different age groups at the same historical moment, while generations represent the same age groups at different historical moments. If we compare generations rather than cohorts -- that is, if we compare today’s young adults not with today’s older adults, but with young adults of the past -- we find evidence of diminished civic attachment.
Some of the basic facts are well known. In the early 1970s, about one-half of 18-to 29-year-olds voted in presidential elections. By 2000, fewer than one-third did. The same pattern holds for congressional elections -- about one-third in the 1970s, compared with fewer than one-fifth in 1998.
Less well known are the trends charted by the remarkable University of California at Los Angeles study involving more than a quarter of a million matriculating college freshmen each year from 434 of the nation’s baccalaureate colleges and universities, conducted since the mid-1960s. Over this period, every significant indicator of political engagement fell by at least half. By last year, only 28 percent of freshmen felt that keeping up with politics was important, down from 60.3 percent in 1966. Only 16.4 percent said they frequently discussed politics, down from 33.6 percent. Not surprisingly, acquisition of political knowledge from traditional media sources is way down, and relatively few young people are using the Internet to replace newspapers and network-TV news as sources of political information.
Freshmen did report significantly increased levels of volunteering in their last year of high school, a trend that seems to be carrying over to their early college years. But it should be noted that many high schools make volunteer work a requirement for graduation, and only a third of today’s young volunteers thought that they would continue this practice once they entered the paid work force. Also, there is no evidence that it was leading to wider civic engagement.
On the contrary, in numerous surveys, focus groups, and studies, young people characterized their volunteering as an alternative to politics, which they saw as corrupt, untrustworthy, and unrelated to their deeper ideals. They had limited knowledge of government’s impact, either on themselves or on those they sought to assist. They understood why it matters to feed a hungry person at a soup kitchen; they did not understand why it matters where government sets eligibility levels for food stamps or payment levels for the Earned Income Tax Credit. They displayed confidence in personal acts with consequences they could see for themselves; they had no such confidence in collective actions (especially those undertaken through public institutions) with consequences they viewed as remote, opaque, and impossible to control.
For many reasons, the civic detachment of today’s youth should not be regarded with equanimity. Let me begin with a truism about representative democracy: Political engagement is not sufficient for political effectiveness, but it is necessary. If young adults have legitimate generational interests that do not wholly coincide with the interests of their elders, those interests cannot help shape public decisions unless they are forcefully articulated. The withdrawal of a cohort of citizens from public affairs disturbs the balance of public deliberation -- to the detriment of those who withdraw, but of the rest of us as well.
Second, political scientists have found that civic attitudes and patterns of behavior formed when young tend to persist throughout adult life. The young Americans who banded together to battle the Great Depression and fight in World War II became what the political scientist Robert Putnam has called the “civic generation,” unabashedly patriotic and pervasively participatory. The young Americans who came of age during Vietnam and Watergate cannot shed their deep suspicion of politicians and political power. If today’s young Americans continue to regard civic affairs as irrelevant, they are likely to abstain from political involvement throughout their lives.
Third, the relationship between citizenship and self-development, although much debated of late among political theorists, should at least be considered. Even if we agree (and we may not) on the activities that constitute good citizenship, one may still wonder why it is good to be a good citizen. It is possible, I believe, for many individuals to realize their good in ways that do not involve the active exercise of citizenship. A private life is not necessarily an impoverished life.
Still, there is something to the proposition that under appropriate circumstances, political engagement helps develop important human capacities. I have in mind the sorts of intellectual and moral qualities that Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill emphasized -- among them, enlarged interests, a wider human sympathy, a sense of active responsibility for oneself, the skills needed to work with others toward goods that can only be obtained or created through collective action, and the powers of sympathetic understanding needed to build bridges of persuasive words to those with whom one must act.
It may well be that even as civic engagement has declined, it has become not less, but more necessary for the development of the human capacities that I’ve just sketched. Underlying this conjecture is the suspicion that, as the market has become more pervasive during the past generation as organizing metaphor and as daily experience, the range of opportunities to develop nonmarket skills and dispositions has narrowed. For various reasons, the solidary organizations that dominated the American landscape from the 1930s through the early 1960s -- men’s clubs, unions, and hierarchical religious organizations, for example -- have weakened, and the principle of individual choice has emerged as our central value.
Indeed, citizenship itself has become optional, as the sense of civic obligation to vote -- or for that matter to do anything else of civic consequence -- has faded and as the military draft has been replaced by all-volunteer armed forces. When the chips are down, we prefer exit to voice, and any sense of loyalty to something larger than ourselves has all but disappeared. In this context, the experience of collective action directed toward common purposes is one of the few conceivable counterweights to today’s hyperextended principle of individual choice.
Finally, I would offer an old-fashioned argument for civic engagement based on obligation. Most young Americans derive great benefits from their membership in a stable, prosperous, and free society. These goods do not fall like manna from heaven; they must be produced, and renewed, by each generation. When all the subtleties are stripped away, there remains the injunction to do one’s fair share to uphold the institutions that help secure these advantages. Absent this principle of reciprocity, young people are likely to live not only selfishly but also heedlessly. It is hard to see how they can build good and satisfying lives on this basis.
If civic engagement is more necessary than ever, our failure to encourage it among young adults looms all the larger. We have allowed our politics to degenerate into an unedifying spectator sport that breeds cynicism, especially among the young. We have presided over the erosion of institutions, such as political parties, that once invited young people into civic life. We have abolished the civic experiences shared by previous generations of young Americans -- for instance, the military draft -- without putting anything much in their place.
Although we should get to work right away on these sources of civic disengagement, they will be hard to fix, at least in the short run. Another problem, however, would be easier to solve, if we put our minds to it -- namely, our failure to transmit basic civic knowledge and skills to the next generation of citizens.
The evidence of this failure is now incontrovertible. In our decentralized system of public education, the closest thing we have to a national examination is the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The results of the most recent NAEP of civic knowledge, administered in 1998, were discouraging. About three-quarters of all students scored below the level of proficiency. Thirty-five percent of high-school seniors tested below basic, indicating near-total civic ignorance. Another 39 percent were only at the basic level, a level of working knowledge below what they need to function competently as citizens.
When we combine these results with other data from the past decade of survey research, we are driven to a gloomy conclusion: Whether we are concerned with the rules of the political game, political players, domestic policy, foreign policy, or political geography, student mastery is startlingly low.
This raises a puzzle. The level of formal schooling in the United States is much higher than it was 50 years ago. But the civic knowledge of today’s students is, at best, no higher than that of their parents and grandparents. We have made a major investment in formal education, without any discernible payoff in increased civic knowledge.
It is easy to dismiss these findings as irrelevant. Who cares whether young people master the boring content of civics courses? Why does it matter whether they can identify their congressman or name the branches of government?
But, surprisingly, recent research ably analyzed by Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter in What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters documents important links between basic civic information and civic attributes that we have good reason to care about. Other things being equal, civic knowledge enhances support for democratic values, promotes political participation, helps citizens to understand better the impact of public policy on their interests, gives citizens the framework they need to learn more about civic affairs, and reduces generalized mistrust and fear of public life.
The terrible events of September 11, and their aftermath, have created a surge of patriotism and a new sense of connection between young Americans and their public institutions. For many, it is their first experience of public service as meaningful; of national leaders, local leaders, police of-ficers, firemen, and their fellow citizens as virtuous, even heroic. But no civic invisible hand guarantees that these effects will endure.
At best, we have an opportunity -- which may prove fleeting -- to solidify this new civic sense. If we clean up our politics, rebuild the institutions that ask citizens to participate, multiply opportunities for national and community service, and restore the civic mission of our educational institutions, we have a chance to reverse the cynicism evoked by the politics of the past three decades. If we squander this opportunity, the civic outpouring we’ve seen this autumn is likely to fade, leaving young Americans with only a dim memory of what might have been.
William A. Galston is a professor at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland at College Park. He also directs the university’s Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy and is founding director of its Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement.
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