Last week I wrote about Donald Trump’s theft of the nation’s upcoming 250th birthday, and promised that this week I would describe something better and truer than the exercise in hero-worship he will conduct. In recent days I’ve asked the leaders of the big civic education groups about their own plans. They do have plans. But several of them also wanted to make a point about the nature of the commemoration. Jane Kamensky, the former Harvard historian who now runs the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, wrote, “I don’t think we should be in the business of judging better and worse patriotism. We need many different kinds of engagement with a momentous anniversary for a nation of diverse and contending citizens.”
That’s an important admonition. America is plural: no single story can fully capture our diversity of background, experience and belief. Let there be Donald Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes. But let there also be Monticello’s Declaration Book Club, which offers readings and videos by scholars in order to promote discussion about our founding values. And I take heart from the Civic Star Challenge, a joint effort between the left-leaning organization iCivics and the Bill of Rights Institute, founded by David Bobb, a former leader of Hillsdale College who has forsworn the culture wars. Let the lion lie down with the lamb!
Trump Is Giving Patriotism A Bad Name
Yet it is also true that Donald Trump’s America is monolithic, not plural–real Americans against elites, citizens against aliens, red against blue, America against the world. Our state-sanctioned anniversary will be a vast, nationwide exercise in “patriotic values,” including orchestrated derision for those said not to share them. I would say to Jane Kamensky that there is, in fact, a better and a worse patriotism, though the difference is not a matter of left and right. In “The Lion and The Unicorn,” George Orwell insisted on the distinction between the braying insistence that your country is better than all the other ones, which he called nationalism, and the deep sense of identification with your fellow citizens, which is patriotism. True love of country does not preclude, and indeed embraces, pluralism.
People in the civics world often use the expression “reflective patriotism,” and that is what the various programs I heard about seek to encourage. Monticello also has a program called “Founding Friends, Founding Foes,” about the bitter enmity and ultimate reconciliation between Jefferson and John Adams. The Gilder Lehrman Institute, which offers teacher training and curricular materials in American history, has put together a traveling exhibition of primary document facsimiles called “Declaration 1776: The Big Bang of Modern Democracy.” I hope it helps students ask why democracy is now in retreat worldwide.
I’m impressed by these endeavors in thoughtful ancestor-worship. But collectively they feel a little bit. . .200th. In 1976, when the supremely anodyne Gerald Ford was president, neither our democracy nor our civic identity were in jeopardy; today they are. A world in which those with whom we disagree are enemies to be destroyed–a view shared on both left and right–is not safe from pluralism. I wish we could celebrate, not our ancestors who debated so wisely, but debate itself–informed, civil discussion in which people discover that those with whom they disagree may be as sincerely motivated as themselves.
I recognize, of course, that what may have been at least possible in the far more consensual era of mid-century America has become a fantasy today: put red and blue partisans in the same room and you may wind up with a pile of severed limbs. That’s why the conditions of debate matter so much.
Let Us Deliberate
I have written before about something called deliberative polling or–the term I prefer–deliberative debate. The chief author of this innovation, a Stanford professor of political science named James Fishkin, has just come out with a new book, Can Deliberation Cure The Ills of Democracy? You are unlikely to read it if you are not a political scientist. (Sorry, Jim.) But Fishkin’s essential point is that, under certain conditions, people will listen to each other and sometimes become persuaded by one another. Deliberative debate creates those conditions by supplying participants with readings that reflect both sides of an issue, building in pauses in which they can consult experts on both sides, and keeping the discussion civil–through an AI-enabled moderator when carried out online.
The reason that Fishkin calls this exercise a “poll” is because he selects participants in order to provide a representative sample of the larger population. He regards the outcome of the deliberations as a far more accurate–and thoughtful–accounting of public opinion than actual polls, or than the typical process of “will formation” created by our increasingly violent and demeaning political debate. That may be. But the reason I take seriously the question at the heart of Fishkin’s new book is that these deliberations prove so depolarizing. Follow-up research found that both Republicans and Democrats regarded each other more positively than they had at the outset–something I found in my own conversations–and that participants changed a priori views even on hot-button issues like immigration. Fishkin also notes in the new book that participants were likelier than the average American to vote. Deliberation, he writes, “leads to an awakening of civic capacities.”
So here’s my plan: we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our founding by holding deliberative debates all over America–in schools, public libraries, theaters, hiring halls and above all online. Everyone will discuss some aspect of the question, “What Is America?” Are we exceptional or not, racist or not, war-like or not–or somewhere in between? Each group would be small enough–no more than twenty–to actually talk among themselves. Each would be asked to read short pieces on either side of whatever particular question was posed. Perhaps, since 2026 is an election year, candidates for local and national office will be asked to join one such group and offer their own answers (a thought I borrow from Fishkin). I am of two minds as to whether the participants should vote their views in the end. Participants might find the debate pointless if it didn’t lead to an outcome; but deliberation, and civil disagreement, is itself the point. That’s pluralism in action.
I can hear all the objections. The only people who will sign up will be retirees and the unemployed. Geographical self-sorting means that you’ll mostly wind up with all-red or all-blue panels. People won’t do the reading. Or they will and won’t pay attention to it. Some of these concerns can be addressed by conveying virtual as well as in-person deliberations. But it’s a thought experiment. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I’m open to anything better.
I would join! Provided I am not classed as a retiree.
You rightly point out the existential importance of raising the level of public discourse, and of restoring a healthy circulation of ideas to our starved and toxic information system! This is too often ignored, so thank you! Carrying out Fishkin's plan would of course require long-term marketing and implementation at scale to make much difference. In an ideal world, our society would treat this project as a national priority, and would hire hundreds of thousands of recent graduates with history and other humanities degrees to carry it out, as FDR's Works Projects Administration hired young people in the 1930s.