As a sophomore in college, I approached politics with the same apathy as most of my peers. I loved to talk about the world’s problems but did little about them. I had voted in one presidential election, in 2012, and had never attended a political rally or town-hall meeting. Although Harvard College’s mission was to “educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society,” I wasn’t much of a citizen.
Fortunately, in the autumn of my sophomore year, a friend persuaded me to take David Moss’s “History of American Democracy.” I admit that I was skeptical. Majoring in history and literature, I didn’t think a course taught with the case method at Harvard Business School could shed much light on the subject. But within minutes of the first class — a case on whether the secret ballot was beneficial for democracy — I knew I’d been wrong.
From my perspective, the class’s brilliance was in the way it combined its pedagogy with its intellectual foundation: that democracy is an organism that depends on its citizens’ engagement. We learned how to be citizens as we read about citizens’ importance. We discussed democracy as we practiced it.
“We’ve been so scared of appearing partisan or political that we’re really not educating for democracy,” says Nancy Thomas, director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, at Tufts University. Colleges are trying to change that, honing students’ political and rhetorical reasoning, and broadening their experiences beyond the campus gates.
No class session better captured this approach’s effectiveness than a conversation about race, jury rights, and states’ rights in post-Civil War Virginia. We read about how black men didn’t serve on juries in postbellum Virginia, and so black defendants did not have “juries of their peers.” In response, a federal judge, Alexander Rives, brought Virginia’s state judges before grand juries. Fourteen judges were indicted, and two black defendants were transferred from state jails into federal custody.
There were tense moments as we discussed whether Rives had had the right, even the duty, to convene the grand juries. We never came to agreement on that. However, the importance of fair juries and committed jurors had been memorably impressed on all of us.
By the time the course ended, in December 2014, I had changed. I began attending political events, served as a fifth-grade civics teacher, and wrote my senior thesis on civics education.
But those pursuits were secondary to the fundamental ethic of citizenship that the course had instilled in me. The cases and the classroom conversations showed us that listening and discussion are key to democracy. They enabled what Professor Moss called productive conflict and a shared faith in democracy. Among left-leaning students, I had a tendency to dismiss ideas that challenged my own. For me, as for many people, the 2016 election demonstrated that such dismissiveness could have real, and dire, consequences.
In hopes of finding productive conflicts and democratic debates like the ones Professor Moss inspired, I decided to travel around the country last fall talking with people about citizenship. For three months, I drove through the Midwest, the Northwest, the Sun Belt, the South, and Appalachia asking people what it means to be a good citizen.
Although America’s democracy faces many challenges, my conversations restored my faith that most people have the good will toward one another and the trust in democracy that Professor Moss’s class embodied. Two conversations in particular — with people who could not be more different from each other — stood out because they touched on this ethic of citizenship.
Adriel Thornton, an African-American Democrat and lifelong resident of Detroit, told me his metaphor for engaging people across the aisle: “Americans should be having a family spat at the backyard barbecue. You say what you have to say, I say what I have to say, and even if we can’t agree, we agree to disagree. Either way, someone still has to go turn over the steak.”
Terri Stine, of Waukesha, Wis., is a self-described “Christian woman” who is white and voted for Donald Trump. Yet her thoughts echoed Adriel’s. When we talked about the aftermath of the 2016 election, she said, “I told my prayer group, ‘People who didn’t vote for Trump are upset, they’re angry. We have to take that seriously. We can’t be judging them or saying, ‘Ha ha, we won.’ We need to sit down and ask, ‘Why are you upset?’ "
From the Rosebud Reservation, in South Dakota to Fort Rucker, in Alabama, from liberal Detroit to conservative Waukesha, people consistently talked about this need to listen, understand, and learn from disagreement.
As I prepare for my next steps, I hope to encourage this attitude. My plan is first to turn my conversations into a book, so that people can have the chance to think about what citizenship means to them. From there I want to become a teacher, so that I can inspire the ethic of citizenship in young people, just as Professor Moss did in me.
