What happens when we don't trust democracy?

Generations of Americans were not taught how to live in a democracy. That, ultimately, is what civic education is about. So what happens when we lose that knowledge? Where are we today and why should we care? Where do we go from here? In partnership with iCivics we're bringing you conversations with the people who are paying attention and doing something about it. Civics can have a future in this democracy -- in fact, civics is how this democracy will have a future. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

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• 1:16Hannah McCarthy?

  Nick, I have a confession to make.

• 1:19Nick Capodice?

  I knew you ate those plums, Hannah.

• 1:21Hannah McCarthy?

  No.

• 1:22Nick Capodice?

  I was saving them for breakfast, you know?

• 1:24Hannah McCarthy?

  It's not the plums. It is worse than the plums.

• 1:28Nick Capodice?

  Worse than the plums?

• 1:34Hannah McCarthy?

  Alright, here we go. Before I was a journalist, I never, and I mean never, did any research before I voted.

• 1:45Nick Capodice?

  Alright, grand scheme of things, Hannah.

• 1:48Hannah McCarthy?

  There's more.

• 1:49Nick Capodice?

  Uh-oh.

• 1:51Hannah McCarthy?

  The chances of my knowing who my congressional representatives were at any given time was quite slim. I could not have told you the real difference between the House and the Senate. If the president was writing executive orders, I wouldn't have known. Nick, I probably could have told you two out of the 27 amendments. The amendments, Nick.

• 2:15Nick Capodice?

  It's a grim picture, Hannah, I'm not gonna lie. But, we, as in you and I, we do have an outsized investment in these things. You're a different person now.

• 2:27Hannah McCarthy?

  I am. And Nick, the reason I call this a confession, it's not just because I'm the host of a civics podcast. I feel genuinely vulnerable, admitting how vulnerable I once was. Because now, I've got my armor. I know what is going on around here. I know when something goes wrong around here. I know what I can do about it. That is protection. That's strength. And why should I be safer and stronger than other people? Why should I know where I am, what I am capable of, what I have the power to do, while other people don't?

• 3:07Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, that doesn't make a lick of sense, McCarthy.

• 3:10Hannah McCarthy?

  I agree.

• 3:12Hannah McCarthy?

  The stuff that I know, Nick, that isn't an indulgence. It's the safety and security and strength that we all need. And I'm not the only one who thinks so.

• 3:25Speaker 06

  We need to commit to every American citizen, starting at a young age, to understand our system of democracy.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Give them a sense of what is the positive value of democracy? And then, what is the alternative? We need to teach you about what it is to live under a tyrant.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  You need to have an informed group of citizens so that they can actually contribute to their democracy, right? And so that way, they can make decisions about what policies and what type of leaders they want to represent then. We need state legislatures to prioritize civic education, to pass laws and course requirements for more instructional time.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  We need an educated public, and it has to start young. And we haven't done a great job of that over the past 30 or 40 years.

• 4:08Hannah McCarthy?

  I think we need to do more to help people realize that democracy is larger than politics, and politics is larger than our partisanship.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  We need to teach the practice of civics and the practice of democracy anew to every generation. We need your voice. We need your engagement. We need your willingness to work across difference, to empathize and understand different perspectives. We need more people on this boat, and we need to be Organized, we need to be all in one direction. And we need to elevate the power of this movement.

• 4:40Hannah McCarthy?

  So who are all of these people, you may be wondering?

• 4:44Nick Capodice?

  And that's not even all the people, by the way.

• 4:46Hannah McCarthy?

  It is not. In March, Nick and I went to California, specifically to Stanford University, where the Civic Learning Week National Forum was on the West Coast for the first time.

• 4:57Nick Capodice?

  A bunch of educators and policymakers and leaders from all these organizations, all there to talk about civics education. All these people agreeing on one thing. And that thing is that we need it, and we need more of it.

• 5:13Hannah McCarthy?

  And Nick and I sat upstairs in a small conference room, waiting. Is that better or worse?

• 5:19Nick Capodice?

  It's better, but it just needs a touch more because it's not really having any effect all the way over there. And we weren't alone. We were there with our friends from iCivics, partnering up with a pretty simple goal: to ask government leaders, heads of foundations, teachers, even a former Secretary of State, what they thought, what they believed needed to be done. We interviewed over 30 people.

• 5:42Hannah McCarthy?

  We did. And you will not be hearing from all of them today because that would be a little much. And the thing is, everyone we spoke to said versions of the same thing. We need civics education. We don't have enough of it. And very troubling things are happening because of that.

• 6:01Nick Capodice?

  Despite the best efforts of teachers across the country.

• 6:05Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, yeah. The fact that I was a sorry excuse for a civics student, that was not the fault of my teachers. I had spectacular teachers throughout my years in school. But that armor that I have now, knowing what this country is, how it works, what I can do and have in it, it just wasn't on the curriculum docket in the way that it could have been.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  The challenge we're facing now is that we now have more than a generation of people who did not get strong civic education.

• 6:36Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Donna Phillips.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  I'm the president and CEO at the Center for Civic Education.

• 6:40Hannah McCarthy?

  The Center for Civic Education, by the way, is there to help students learn the skills they need to be meaningful members of our citizenry.

• 6:48Nick Capodice?

  The exact thing Donna is saying a lot of adults never learned.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  The first thing that I think gets lost is our empathy and our caring about our civic health. If you don't understand your country, your government, and your role in it, you can't care about it, nor can you understand when things could be better, or how to make things better.

• 7:12Hannah McCarthy?

  I love this point because this was me. You know, I might have said, "Yeah, of course I care about my country." But did I? You have to understand something to really care about it. There was a time when I didn't know where and when I needed to show up. What I could have done if I did show up, how I could talk about what matters with other people. It's one thing to say you care. It's quite another to understand what you care about and how you can safeguard it.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  If you don't have civic education, then you don't have that empathy. Democracy is active, so you don't have that knowledge for how to continue to be part of the active process of democracy.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  So here's where we are in the United States.

• 8:00Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Brandis Caines-Rone.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  I'm the director of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions at the Hoover Institution. I'm a senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution. I'm also a professor of political science here at Stanford.

• 8:14Nick Capodice?

  The Hoover Institution, by the way, is where we were doing all of these interviews. But to be clear, we were not partnered with them.

• 8:20Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. They are a public policy think tank. And you know, every time I say the words "think tank" on this show, I am reminded that we need to make an episode explaining what they are. But for now, all you gotta know is they do research and make policy recommendations. So, back to where we are in the United States.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  We have very low trust in the federal government. It's very hard to trust something you don't understand. And you don't know that much about. We have higher and higher, what you might call, effective polarization, which is a term that scholars use, but basically just means what you think of the other party, of members of the other party. And basically, Americans think less and less. So it's not simply that they just disagree. They actually have very negative feelings towards those individuals, which is quite a different thing than simply saying, "I like that individual, but we disagree on some things." And in fact, we have, I think, even the most disturbing, although those are disturbing enough,

• 9:22Speaker 00

  we have an increasing number of people who do not have trust in the system of democracy itself. And that's particularly the case among younger adults, which is the most concerning trend. So this lack of trust is increasing with generations.

• 9:42Hannah McCarthy?

  You know what's really tricky, Nick? Telling people they should trust something that they already do not trust. And not just that, that it is vitally important they trust the thing they do not trust.

• 9:57Nick Capodice?

  Because then they might be like, "Well, now I don't trust you either, ya toady."

• 10:02Hannah McCarthy?

  So let's zoom out. The path here is education to understanding to care to trust. So Nick, what's trust?

• 10:14Nick Capodice?

  Oh, I feel that trust means you believe another person will do what they say they're gonna do. It means they care about you. They have your interests at heart. They will protect you.

• 10:30Hannah McCarthy?

  I would take that even further. I would say trust is all of those things. I agree with that. I think it's also about reliance. Relying on the faithfulness of something. Relying on the fact that it cares for you. So when we trust in a system, when we trust in democracy itself, it means we will do what we can and in fact, what we are empowered to do by that system to keep that system functioning.

• 11:03Hannah McCarthy?

  Why? Because that system is designed to keep us in power, to ensure that we have choices. That system lets us make our own lives better if we so choose.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Well, then you're going to have citizens who are able to hold their leaders accountable, who aren't going to be as susceptible to the claims of the sorts of people who would be tyrants. You're going to have citizens who are more engaged, right? And who are participating. And you're also going to have citizens who understand how government functions.

• 11:36Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, real quick, while we're all here, I wonder if we could just remind everyone how this all started.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Okay. The framers saw civic education as essential for a well-functioning democracy, and particularly as a protection against tyranny. So if you think, what was the big risk that the founders were worried about? Well, they were worried that, very quickly, we'd go back to having some form of, if not a monarchy, some sort of dictatorial system. Because that was the system that was the natural system to most societies around the world. Or if not natural, the in fact system by force. They were also worried about populism, which you could consider a twin threat. But they were most worried about tyranny. And so I'm going to not have it exactly verbatim,

• 12:26Speaker 00

  but James Madison, for instance, quoted in a letter around the time of the founding, and of course, he's the architect of our Constitution, that having, that one needed to arm oneself, and he uses that word "arm," that is a direct quote, "with knowledge." That this is what a democracy needed. And that if you had popular government but not popular knowledge, you were at risk of a farce or tragedy, or perhaps both.

• 12:55Hannah McCarthy?

  First three words, "we the people." We are the ones who are responsible. So if you don't know what's in the Constitution, you are not doing your due diligence to being a safeguard to our constitutional duty to prolong our country's democratic spirit. This is Kimberly Huffman. I am a government teacher at the Wayne County Schools Career Center. It is a county career tech school that feeds from 10 public schools, three private home school students. I am also the social studies department chair. I also teach political science for a local community. I'm the Student Leadership Advisor and I had, there's about 125 students that I serve yearly. Kimberly also, by the way, belongs to a bunch of civics and teacher organizations.

• 13:37Nick Capodice?

  You know, the next time I think I don't have time to do something, I shall think of Kimberly.

• 13:42Hannah McCarthy?

  In my beginning years of teaching, they came with a certain knowledge base. They knew the three branches of government, the four levels of government. I think everybody would understand that that is a need to know. I am finding that since they've removed in Ohio, testing for social studies out of the elementary, that is no longer the case. So the last time that they've had a civic class is probably eighth grade. They take American history their freshman year, they take world history their sophomore year, and they have basically forgotten the period of the constitutional framework, time zone. And so it's like starting over. And they don't, they come to me without that basic knowledge. For Kimberly, civics is way more than the basics. So it starts with having citizens who read, who understand, who can think, who

• 14:27Hannah McCarthy?

  can be activated into good causes and in community as well, not just for your individual own vice or your ego or what it would profit you, but it's a virtue that is for the betterment of your entire community. So if you have a nation that is thriving, you have a state that is thriving, and then your communities can thrive. And then the people, if you're eating, you know, basic nutritional, you're thinking, you're sleeping, then you can concentrate on how to expand that and how to make your neighbors, make sure that they're fed, make sure that they're safe, and make sure that they're educated, that they can read and they can think. And all those things help you reflect on what you want in your government, and then that helps promote democracy and keeps our country growing, the way it's supposed to.

• 15:11Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, I really appreciated this, Hannah, because I think a lot of people hear the words civics or curriculum.

• 15:19Nick Capodice?

  And they maybe just tune out.

• 15:21Hannah McCarthy?

  Education Department, community engagement, standards. It reminds me of that episode of Parks and Recreation where they're trying to get fluoride in the drinking water, so they rebrand fluoride "Tea Dazzle," and it works. Maybe we need that to talk to non-civics people.

• 15:42Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, like maybe call it National Guard or something. Well, okay, not that. But anyway, Kimberly's point about people who are fed, safe, who can read, who can think, that that, that is what leads to helping other people, and then to asking our government to take care of us. So you talked about civics knowledge as a kind of armor, Hannah, a safety and a strength. And it literally is, when you think about how that leads to physical and emotional safety and strength.

• 16:15Hannah McCarthy?

  One of the things, why I'm so passionate about teaching students about the Constitution, about what the Constitution says, I believe that if they know what the Constitution says, like we can agree what we want the government to do, but we should be able to focus on what the Constitution says they can do. And there is a lot of misinformation, and there's a lot of information that is just false that is out there. And people no longer look to the truth, where the truth is in our Constitution. And I always tell my students, you have to know this stuff because you don't know your rights are being violated if you don't know where your rights are listed. You don't know if the president has the power to do it unless you see the power to do it in the Constitution. And if you allow the government to do these things in which they don't have the power

• 16:57Hannah McCarthy?

  to do, and you let them do it, they continue to do it, and before long, it's like the frog in the boiling water, it is dead. And you look back and you're like, how did that happen? Well, you incrementally let it happen.

• 17:13Hannah McCarthy?

  You know, Nick, I do not see this as a depressing sentiment. I see it as an empowering one. What a wonderful thing it is to know that democracy will only die on our watch, or lack thereof. So we need to keep our eyes open and stay in charge of the water temperature.

• 17:33Nick Capodice?

  Democracy only takes a break if we let it. And speaking of, we're gonna take a quick break.

• 17:39Hannah McCarthy?

  Nice transition. We'll be right back.

• 17:56Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. We're talking about the state of things in the United States. We're talking about what makes us a United States, what is straining those United States, and what we need to do to keep us strong. And we have not come up with the teedazzle version of civics, so civics is the word.

• 18:15Speaker 06

  There has been a complete collapse in civic education in this country, and the polling is frankly frightening. Students, A, lack of knowledge, but B, lack of trust in our institutions and in our democracy is something we worry about.

• 18:32Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Dame Louise Richardson.

• 18:34Speaker 06

  I'm the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

• 18:37Nick Capodice?

  I do believe, Hannah, this is the first time we have ever interviewed a dame.

• 18:42Hannah McCarthy?

  Did you know that only knights get dubbed with the sword, like the sword tap on their shoulders? Dames do not get the sword tap.

• 18:50Nick Capodice?

  I wish we had asked Louise what she thought about that.

• 18:52Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, we have other things to talk about.

• 18:54Speaker 06

  And now we're looking around us and see that this decline of trust in institutions has got to be linked to the decline in knowledge. So it is part of our general approach to trying to mitigate the political polarization of this country that we want to invest in civic education in our schools. I would add that I'm a naturalized American, so I had to take a citizenship test in order to become an American. So I would have thought at an absolute minimum to graduate from high school. One should have to pass the same test as we require our immigrants to pass. But there's so much more to it than than simply passing a test.

• 19:34Speaker 06

  It's about understanding community, participating in one's community, understanding how democracy works and what the alternatives are and how ideally how it is such a better system than the alternatives, but that it only works if people participate in it.

• 19:55Nick Capodice?

  And we should add that about a third of high school students in the United States do have to pass the citizenship test to graduate. And, you know, I've read a lot of criticism about that test. People who say, "Well, that's just memorization. It doesn't mean anything." But to Louise's point, she's looking at a test as the absolute bare minimum. Pass the test, sure, but also genuinely understand what it means to be in this country.

• 20:27Speaker 06

  The democracy at the moment is is under severe strain. And when you look at polling for trust in institutions and democracy depends on functioning institutions, that's really quite frightening. So our interest in civics education is part of a broader interest in trying to redress this polarization. So we're also very keen on national service initiatives, for example. And we see those as being quite closely linked to civics. I mean, a kid who understands their community is more likely to want to contribute to it. Somebody who has contributed to their community is more likely to want to engage in in making it better, engage in in the politics that are required to to make this country work.

• 21:12Hannah McCarthy?

  You know what kept coming up in so many conversations we had that day? Younger people who are not invested in democracy, one way or another. And Louise, as she said, is an immigrant herself. And she basically said, you know, think about all of the people who are trying to get in to this country. Why do you think that is?

• 21:34Speaker 06

  Well, the first thing is that students have to understand what democracy is and what the alternatives are and what the great benefits, individual benefits in terms of one's rights are as a citizen of a democracy, as opposed to any of the alternatives. That's why it's so enormously attractive. That's why we have so many people from around the world wanting to be here, wanting to escape the autocracies, monarchies, and assorted other forms of government under which they live.

• 22:03Nick Capodice?

  You know, what really stood out to me in the conversation we had with Louise was that she said, even if we do have that understanding, even if we do know, there are still going to be people who are dissatisfied with this country. And rightfully so.

• 22:22Speaker 06

  You know, our young people are not stupid. It isn't just because they're uneducated that they don't like democracy. They have seen the spiraling growth of inequality. They have seen, they've witnessed the inadequacies of our government and how it has failed many, many parts of this country. And that, I think, is what's breeding their cynicism. They see the devastation wrought by the financial crisis and how the cost of that was disproportionately borne by the most vulnerable. They've seen how globalization was welcomed and celebrated by elites like me, and yet people in various parts of this country paid a heavy cost for that globalization because

• 23:07Speaker 06

  those benefiting from it didn't think through what the broader implications were. So there's a reason for the distrust of democracy. And it's not just that they need to be better educated.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  If you think about the age group that I work with, which is 10 to 24-year-olds, what have they experienced all their life? What they are seeing is fundamental existential issues in front of them, right? From climate change to gun control to what does even the economy look like in the future?

• 23:40Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Raj Venakoda. If you're a Civics 101 regular, then you already know him.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  I'm president at the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.

• 23:48Hannah McCarthy?

  All right. So the path to we the people, the path to our strength, to our safety, to having choices, requires trust. Raj says we need to look at what, beyond lack of civics education, is contributing to mistrust.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  And what they see is a government that is unwilling and unable to be able to actually develop solutions for these existential problems that are hanging over their head. And so we shouldn't be surprised when young people say, "Do you believe in democracy?" And every example that they look at is demonstrating a democracy that doesn't actually solve the problems that they see.

• 24:28Nick Capodice?

  It really is a grim picture, Hannah.

• 24:30Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, but we won't get anywhere if we just stand here and look at it.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Now, the translation of that, to me, is to then turn to young people and say, "Come on in. It's now your responsibility, along with us, to actually make sure that democracy works effectively. We need your voice. We need your engagement. We need your willingness to work across difference, to empathize and understand different perspectives, and help us solve these common existential problems." Now, that's an easy thing to say. It's hard to do because what you're asking is people to take that first step and trust us. And so that's where working locally becomes so important, right? So start doing the work in your school, in your college, in your communities, with your family.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Start working in very simple ways that demonstrate, yes, this can work. And that'll start to build up the trust and get people to engage in bigger and bigger issues.

• 25:32Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, I want to end this episode with the conversation we had with Louise Dubé, who is the CEO of iCivics. And again, we partnered with iCivics to try to get some answers. Where are we now? Are we strong? Are we capable? Are we protected? How do we ensure that there is a "we," the people, now and for generations to come? We have to recognize that it's a two-way street. If we are to teach civics in a competent way and try to explain how this system has delivered for 250 years, we also have to acknowledge that the system itself needs

• 26:13Nick Capodice?

  to be revitalized so that it is responsive to young people, but also to every American in this country, so that when there are problems to solve, common problems to solve, we have institutions that actually do something. Because I think that's why people are frustrated. Right. The idea is to teach civics while acknowledging that things don't necessarily work the way they're supposed to, which is all the more reason for people to understand these systems and join together to repair them.

• 26:47Hannah McCarthy?

  So you and I know, Nick, that civics education and the need for it, you know, it's not just a nonpartisan issue. It is something that tons of people actually agree on. And yet, here we are in a world where even someone with a great education, with committed teachers, may still be disengaged from or disinterested in the remarkable system they exist within. And we know that it is because of a lack of the very thing so many of us agree on. Adults overwhelmingly agree. We have done polling ourselves. You've never seen numbers like this. 70, 80, 90% support.

• 27:32Nick Capodice?

  Across political partisan views. That's unusual. The problem with civics is that it's a long-term investment. It's not an easy pitch, Hannah. I think that's the thing. Long-term means money. It means plans. It means consistency. And not just in schools, like we've been talking about, but out there in the world. We need to wake up every day and keep learning, keep talking, show respect, engage in our communities. This is not a problem that can be solved with a magic bullet.

• 28:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, but you know what, Nick? Anyone who promises a magic bullet is lying to you, including politicians. And if you know how your government works, you know that. And if you know that, you know not to elect those politicians. You know to elect the person who says, "This will take time and effort, and I'm going to give you that time and that effort because that is how this country works." That is the only way it works.

• 28:40Nick Capodice?

  It's impossible to do this work if we don't have the conditions in K-12 classroom, in higher ed, in civil society to actually teach. So if educators are not trained. So we have a simple policy menu that talks about, first, we need time in the classroom. We need requirements at the middle and high school level. We need civil society to pick up the same pluralistic message to teach adults, to teach young children, to teach in boys and girls clubs, everywhere, pre-K to gray. So we need that. And we need a recognition program. We need civic seals.

• 29:23Nick Capodice?

  And we need educators that are trained to do this work. So we have a plan. So we need more people on this boat, and we need to be organized. We need to be all in one direction, and we need to elevate the power of this movement at this particular time. As I said this morning, this is a fluorescent civic moment. It is absolutely our duty to use the crisis to make a lot of progress now.

• 30:19Hannah McCarthy?

  That does it for this episode, but that most certainly does not do it for civics or democracy. If you want to learn more both about our nation itself and what you can do to strengthen your armor and the armor of those around you, head to civics101podcast.org to find everything we have ever made, or vision.icivics.org for everything they make, including their plans to make civics strong in the US. This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, with Nick Capodice. Rebecca Lavoy is our executive producer. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Music in this episode by Alex Lane, Farrell Wooten, Hatami Tsunami, Grided, Kokoru, Just Normal, Jon Runevelt, and Bambi Hayes. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.