The book Why Americans Hate Politics, by E.J. Dionne, is aptly named.
What millions of Americans hate is that today’s politics isn’t theirs. They feel forced out by a professional political class; that is why they march under the banner “Take The System Back.”
Americans marched to the polls last November to vote for candidates who promised change and who dealt directly with them on talk shows and in electronic town meetings. Troubled by problems in every system -- economic, health-care, criminal-justice -- people stayed close to the issues in the campaign. They wanted politics to address the problems that invade their lives and dim their children’s future.
Students dislike politics even more than other Americans do. Despite the welcome increase in the number voting last fall, students are tempted to be more than cynical about the political system. Because they think that politics will never change, they easily become pessimistic, according to a recent study, “Citizens and Politics: A View From Main Street America,” done for the Kettering Foundation by the Harwood Group, a public-issues research and consulting company.
The good news is that students care deeply about the issues of the day, and they wish that politics gave them a way to act on their concerns. Colleges could help them by offering a different kind of political education -- not just an education about politics but an education for politics, for the practice of democratic citizenship. For that to happen, colleges will have to broaden their definition of politics. Citizens have a larger role to play than voting and trying to influence their officials. We have to present political life in its larger dimensions so that students can find a variety of roles to play.
Undoubtedly, some students like politics as it is and see a personal future in it. That, however, was not the way that most participants in our study felt. Although it was based on focus-group research that does not claim to report what all students think, the study was carried out on 10 campuses over 18 months, with participants representing a cross section of students based on race, gender, grade-point level, academic major, and level of participation in campus life. The students in the study had no trouble describing what they did not like about politics. They focused on the political dialogue: The debates they hear, on and off campus, appall them.
One student complained, “People are very opinionated in my classes. There is no moderation at all and [the discussion] gets totally out of bounds.” Students say those with extreme views dominate discussions -- even to the point of criticizing others for not being zealots. They see the same thing in political campaigns, which one student said are “just back and forth arguing and putting down the other person.”
Students did not believe that this sort of political exchange could solve the problems that they cared about. On one campus, students worried about environmental problems; on another, state appropriations for higher education; and on another, race relations at the institution. Whatever the issue, students said politics as usual cannot solve the problems because the dialogue is “all rhetoric” and too partisan to get down to real answers.
After saying what they disliked about politics, the question of what should happen in politics was difficult for students to answer. They noted, with regret, that they didn’t have a common language with a broad-enough political vocabulary to share what was on their minds. Yet during the course of the focus-group discussions, they warmed to the opportunity to imagine what politics could be.
Above all, students desired forums where people listened as well as talked. They wanted more moderation, more appreciation of what they called the “gray” or indeterminate nature of political issues. They wanted discussions that included a greater diversity of viewpoints and that respected divergent opinions. The students weren’t just urging greater tolerance; they said they needed this diversity of opinion to understand issues in all their complexity.
The students also wanted to know more about tradeoffs in the “solutions” they heard touted, noting that political dialogue typically focuses on grand plans for solving problems, with little mention of the costs and consequences that flow from all “solutions.”
Students could identify the skills that they needed to practice the kind of politics they desired -- the ability to keep an open mind, to stand in another person’s shoes, to make decisions with others, to make compromises while maintaining integrity.
One implication of what students are saying is that the character of politics largely is determined by the character of the political dialogue. Politics may end in action, but it begins in conversation. Political talk will inevitably be expressive, with individuals sounding off in various ways, but it must also be shared, civil, and exploratory. A democratic country has to have a political dialogue that is public -- in which people engage one another and not just their leaders. That is the only way that the public can refine its opinions and goals and define its interests in a way that can give sound direction to government officials.
While the idea of the public’s deciding the public interest may be dismissed as a comfortable platitude, and the process by which the public forms its opinions may seem amorphous, we should remember that our political history began in public forums. Colonial towns were governing themselves through deliberative meetings 150 years before the Constitution created the elaborate machinery for our system of federal government. Various forms of such early town meetings are now found throughout the country in countless settings. Unfortunately, however, wherever political questions are discussed, they tend to be debated in negative, adversarial, and extreme ways. (An excellent study on the role that public deliberation has played in the formation of public policy in the past -- and a sober warning about its imminent decline -- can be found in Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro’s The Rational Public, University of Chicago Press, 1992.)
For higher education, the key implication of our study is that we must find ways to teach students deliberative skills -- particularly the skills of reasoning, alone and together. We have the opportunity to establish “town meetings” in classrooms, residence halls, and student unions. Some undergraduates are already leading the way.
For example, a pre-med student at the Pennsylvania State University reacted to a polemical abortion debate by creating a campus organization called “Pro Solution.” He and fellow students organized a forum designed to focus on a major issue each semester. Their underlying objective, he said, was “to show how politics should be done,” to create another way of talking together and acting together.
Colleges and universities can encourage such students. They also can encourage faculty members who want to design new courses around deliberative politics. Scholars such as James Fishkin, a political philosopher, and Michael and Suzanne Osborn, experts in speech communications, are writing and teaching about ways to promote deliberation in the political process. And teaching such skills has already become a part of college courses in such fields as business problem solving and public-policy studies.
On several campuses, faculty members use the books on public issues put out by the National Issues Forums (prepared jointly by the Public Agenda Foundation and the Kettering Foundation) to bring deliberation into their classrooms. Students are encouraged to confront the difficult choices that come with every policy question and to work through the emotional resistance and intellectual inconsistencies that stand in the way of reasoned and shared public judgment. Students in these courses learn political skills the way that students in a clinic learn the skills of physicians or students in a studio learn the skills of performing artists. They learn politics from practice.
Some institutions now have community-service programs that could, in addition to their other benefits, provide an introduction to politics. When the students in the study discussed service programs, they gave them high marks for broadening their personal experience. As one student said, “You are helping people with different problems from your own.” Yet they didn’t see a strong connection between this kind of service and politics. Alleviating the symptoms of social problems isn’t the same as trying to solve those problems. It doesn’t take students many visits to a soup kitchen to realize that soup isn’t enough; it doesn’t get at the problems that make soup kitchens necessary.
We miss an opportunity when we don’t link service to programs for teaching students political skills. Students in service programs, for example, might conduct a forum on a policy issue related to their service, such as welfare or crime, in tandem with a neighborhood forum on the same issue. That would give them insights into the policies behind programs and into the way citizens (rather than experts) approach the issues. It would provide insights into the conflicts that make all policy choices difficult.
Higher education teaches politics whether it intends to or not. That is, our institutions affect the way that students define politics, the kind of political language at their disposal, and their attitudes toward politics. The danger is not that our colleges and universities will teach a politics that is too much to the right or the left. The danger is that institutions will teach politics as usual. By teaching a different kind of political dialogue, colleges and universities can help students envision a different kind of politics -- one that has a place for them.
David Mathews, former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and former president of the University of Alabama, is president of the Kettering Foundation.