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Two data points keep me up at night. According to political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa, roughly 70 percent of the generation born before World War II consider it essential to live in a democracy. Among millennials and younger, the number is not quite 30 percent. This is troubling: The simple fact is that you can’t have a democracy if you don’t want it.
We are on the verge of failing to give the next generation what we ourselves inherited: a constitutional democracy. Regardless of what happens in the November elections, we will not ensure that democracy endures unless we can correct that.
Many think the solution is civic education that connects young people to democracy. The Educating for American Democracy coalition, a nationwide, cross-partisan effort, is advancing a new framework for excellence in history and civic learning for K-12 students. An organization that I founded, the Democratic Knowledge Project, is one of hundreds in the coalition.
The answer, however, is bigger than that, because if you encourage people to participate in something broken and dysfunctional, the result just deepens cynicism. We see this in research on the impact of corruption in developing democracies.
To earn the allegiance of rising generations to our form of government, political institutions need to be worthy of their time and effort. Redoubling efforts in civic education must go hand in hand with investments of time, treasure, and talent in renovating our democracy so it can live up to its promise of offering all citizens voice and choice as well as institutions responsive to our participation.
The 2020 “Our Common Purpose” report from the American Academy of Arts and Science lays out 31 recommendations to renovate our democracy. The goal is to deliver responsive governance supported by civil-society organizations that help people build bridges and that deliver a healthy media ecosystem. Those organizations in turn sustain — and are sustained by — a rich and nourishing civic culture.
Recommended structural reforms include: expansion of the U.S. House of Representatives in alignment with the growth and evolution of the population; term limits for U.S. Supreme Court justices to lower the political stakes of those appointments; voter-registration options on Election Day; ranked-choice voting to give candidates incentives to campaign in bridge-building ways instead of negative attacks; independent redistricting commissions that would end gerrymandering; and taxes on social media and revenue to sustain local journalism.
Yet the report left out two important themes: the importance of parties to the American system and the destructive consequences of how they currently operate.
As Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, argues eloquently in his new book, The Primary Solution, reforms to the party primary process in the 20th century have unintentionally radicalized our politics. Party nominating processes were brought out of smoke-filled back rooms and put on the public ballot, courtesy of taxpayer dollars. The goal was laudable — a transparent process. But unintended results followed. Fewer and fewer people vote in those public primaries. Now only small minorities of voters — and mainly those with the most intensely held views — participate.
When combined with gerrymandering that creates congressional districts dominated by one party, this results in very small percentages of voters electing the so-called representatives. Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene won her primary with votes from 8 percent of her district’s electorate. She then faced a noncompetitive general-election race. New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won with support from just 5 percent of the electorate in her district.
As primary winners increasingly reflect the radical views of their party, moderate voters cease participating. Just over half of American voters are now enrolled in political parties, down from a high of about 70 percent in the 1990s. And as those numbers decline and fewer voters participate in primaries, elected officials have ever more to fear from being “primaried” if they seek compromises or cross-partisan solutions once in office. Their ability to govern declines because of a set of perverse incentives.
To restore functional institutions — and healthy incentives for elected officials — we should adopt a single primary in which candidates from all parties run on the same ballot. The top four or five vote-getters would then move on to a general election with an instant runoff, ensuring that the winner will represent the majority of voters.
The renovations described above aren’t easy for people to get their heads around. Yet popular support is necessary to get the reforms off the ground. I recommend significant and sustained philanthropic investment in voter education and engagement around democracy renovation.
My organization, Partners in Democracy, runs democracy-renovation learning communities in Massachusetts, and we’re about to start in Ohio. We find it takes up to a dozen deliberative sessions for even highly informed civic participants to think through the pros and cons of potential reforms and come to firm and stable conclusions. You can’t get democracy renovation on the cheap, in the same way you can’t build your dream house with cut-rate materials. For decades, we have underinvested in the innovations that could help us newly realize democracy’s promise in rapidly changing conditions.
We have a long way to go on educating adults about what is possible in our democracy if we are going to be able to deliver to the kids a set of institutions worthy of their hearts, hands, and minds.
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