The Crisis, No. 3

On the institution of the Citizen

When we take power—and we will take power—we are going to have to do some uncomfortable things.

I say this plainly because I am tired of pretending otherwise. The republic is in crisis. The people who brought us to this crisis must be held accountable. And the conditions that allowed this crisis to occur must be changed, fundamentally and permanently, so that it never happens again.

This will not be comfortable. It will not be polite. It will not satisfy those who believe that politics is a matter of splitting differences and finding common ground with people who have demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, that they do not share our commitment to constitutional democracy.

Some will call what I am about to describe authoritarian. They will call it indoctrination. They will say we have become what we opposed.

They will be wrong. And I will explain why.

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The institution of the Citizen is the largest institution in the Republic.

I want you to sit with that sentence. I want you to understand what it means.

We speak of institutions constantly. The presidency. The Congress. The courts. The military. The press. We analyze their health, their dysfunction, their capture by hostile forces. We write articles about institutional decay and institutional reform. We understand, at least in the abstract, that a republic is only as strong as its institutions.

But we have forgotten the largest institution of all. The one that encompasses all the others. The one without which none of the others can function.

The Citizen.

Citizenship is not a status. It is not a passport. It is not a set of rights you passively enjoy while going about your private business. Citizenship is an institution—the foundational institution of republican government—and like all institutions, it must be built, maintained, renewed, and defended.

An institution has structure. It has norms. It has practices. It has privileges, and it has responsibilities. The institution of the Citizen is no different. To be a citizen is to occupy a role in the political order, a role that carries obligations as well as rights, duties as well as freedoms.

We have forgotten this. We have allowed citizenship to decay into a consumer identity, a tribal marker, a thing you perform on social media rather than practice in your community. We have produced generations of Americans who do not understand what the Constitution requires, what self-governance demands, what they owe to each other and to the republic that protects them all.

And now we are paying the price.

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This is not an accident. This is the result of deliberate neglect.

Thomas Jefferson understood that republics do not sustain themselves. That is why, in Virginia, he established public education as a civic necessity. Not as a path to employment. Not as a mechanism for economic mobility. As the means by which a self-governing people would learn to govern themselves.

The Founders knew that democracy was fragile. They knew that it required an informed and engaged citizenry. They knew that the alternative—a population ignorant of its rights and indifferent to its duties—was a population ripe for tyranny.

For most of American history, we took this seriously. After World War II, we understood that the defeat of fascism abroad meant nothing if we did not fortify democracy at home. We built civic education into the bones of our public schools. We taught children, explicitly and unapologetically, that they were citizens of a self-governing republic. That fascism and totalitarianism were threats to human dignity. That democracy required their participation. That the Constitution was not just a historical document but a living compact that they were responsible for upholding.

This was not neutral. This was not “both sides.” This was aggressively, intentionally, proudly pro-democratic. We were forming citizens. We were building the institution. And it worked.

Then we stopped.

We let civic education decay into an afterthought. We let citizenship become a brand. We convinced ourselves that democracy was self-sustaining, that the institutions would hold on their own, that we did not need to do the hard work of forming each generation in the practices and responsibilities of self-governance.

The enemies of democracy did not make the same mistake. They built their own educational infrastructure—their think tanks, their media networks, their podcasts and YouTube channels and bootcamps. They taught their children that government was the enemy, that taxation was theft, that the collective good was a fiction, that the only loyalty was to oneself and one’s capital.

And now their children are in power, and our children do not know how to stop them.

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When we take power, we are going to fix this.

We are going to rebuild civic education from the ground up. We are going to teach citizenship—real citizenship, with privileges and responsibilities—to every child in America. We are going to make the institution of the Citizen strong again, so that what is happening now can never happen again.

I will tell you exactly what this means, because I am tired of speaking in abstractions.

It means teaching children what the Constitution says and what it requires. Not as a historical curiosity, but as the operating system of their political life. The separation of powers. The Bill of Rights. The amendments that expanded the franchise and why they were necessary. The ways the document has been interpreted, contested, and defended over two and a half centuries.

It means teaching children what citizenship demands of them. Not just their rights—their duties. The duty to be informed. The duty to participate. The duty to vote, to serve on juries, to engage in the life of their communities. The duty to hold their representatives accountable. The duty to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

It means teaching children to recognize the enemies of democracy. To understand how authoritarianism works, how it seduces, how it comes wrapped in flags and promising to make things great again. To recognize propaganda, to identify manipulation, to resist the siren song of strongmen who promise simple solutions to complex problems.

It means teaching children that they are part of something larger than themselves. That the republic is a collective project, a covenant across generations, a thing that was built by people who came before and must be preserved for people who come after. That their individual freedom depends on collective institutions, and that those institutions depend on them.

This is what Jefferson understood. This is what we understood after the war. This is what we forgot, and what we must remember.

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They will call this indoctrination.

Let them.

All civic education is formation. All teaching of values is, in some sense, indoctrination. The question is not whether we form citizens, but what kind of citizens we form, and toward what end.

The choice is not between indoctrination and neutrality. The choice is between forming citizens who understand and value democratic self-governance, and abandoning that formation to those who would teach them to despise it.

We tried neutrality. We tried stepping back, letting the marketplace of ideas sort it out, trusting that democracy would defend itself. The result is a generation that cannot distinguish between news and propaganda, that thinks freedom means the absence of all obligation, that has been taught by algorithm to hate their neighbors and worship their exploiters.

The marketplace of ideas has been cornered by people with more money than conscience. The neutral approach has produced a citizenry that does not know what citizenship means.

We are done with neutrality. We are going to teach our children what democracy requires. We are going to form citizens who will defend the republic because they understand what it is and why it matters. We are going to be as aggressive and intentional in building democratic culture as the enemies of democracy have been in destroying it.

And when conservatives call this liberal propaganda, we will say: no. This is not liberal. This is not conservative. This is republican, with a small ‘r’. This is the inheritance of Jefferson and Madison and Lincoln and the soldiers who died at Normandy and the marchers who bled at Selma. This is the American tradition, and we are reclaiming it.

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There is more to reconstruction than education. There are institutions to reform, laws to pass, accountability to impose. The architects and enablers of this crisis must face consequences. The structures that allowed a hostile minority to capture the government must be dismantled and rebuilt.

But all of it—every reform, every law, every mechanism of accountability—depends on the institution of the Citizen. Laws mean nothing if citizens do not understand and enforce them. Reforms fail if the next generation does not know why they matter. Accountability is impossible if the people do not demand it.

The Citizen is the foundation. Everything else is built on top. If the foundation is weak, the structure collapses. If the foundation is strong, the structure can weather any storm.

We are going to make the foundation strong.

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I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: this sounds good, but how? The other side controls the courts. They control half the legislatures. They will block everything. They will call it tyranny. They will resist with every tool they have.

Yes. They will. And we will do it anyway.

Here is what I have learned in this long year of crisis: the only things that happen are the things that people make happen. The only changes that occur are the changes that citizens demand. The system does not fix itself. The institutions do not heal on their own. Someone has to do the work.

That someone is us. That someone is you.

The protesters in Minneapolis did not wait for permission. They did not wait for the courts to save them or the Congress to act. They went into the streets, in subzero cold, and they demanded that their government stop killing their neighbors. They made it happen.

That is citizenship. That is the institution in action. That is what it looks like when the foundation is strong.

We need more of that. We need it everywhere. We need citizens who understand that the republic is theirs—not the politicians’, not the billionaires’, not the theorists’ in their Singapore bootcamps—theirs. And who act accordingly.

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This pamphlet is called The Crisis, and I have been writing about crisis for three installments now. The danger. The enemies. The emergency.

But crisis is not only danger. Crisis is also opportunity. The word comes from the Greek krisis, meaning decision, turning point, the moment when things could go either way.

We are at that moment. The republic could fall. Or the republic could be reborn, stronger than before, with a citizenry that understands what it almost lost and is determined never to lose it again.

I believe in the second possibility. I believe it because I have seen what citizens can do when they decide to act. I have seen Minneapolis. I have seen the marches. I have seen ordinary people, who never thought of themselves as political, step into the street and demand their country back.

That is the seed of reconstruction. That is the beginning of renewal. That is the institution of the Citizen, remembering itself.

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The 250th anniversary of the American founding is five months away.

On July 4, 2026, we will mark a quarter millennium of this experiment in self-governance. Two hundred and fifty years since a group of colonists declared that all men are created equal, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that when a government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

What will we have to show for ourselves on that day?

I want us to arrive at that anniversary having kept the republic. But more than that: I want us to arrive having rebuilt it. Having remembered what citizenship means. Having begun the long work of forming a generation that will never let this happen again.

That is the vision. That is what we are fighting for. Not just survival. Renewal. Not just defense. Reconstruction.

The institution of the Citizen is the largest institution in the Republic. And this revolution—this peaceful, constitutional, democratic revolution—is about making that clear.

We are going to teach our children what it means to be citizens. We are going to give them the knowledge and the tools and the will to defend their republic against all enemies. We are going to build an America where the cynical and the craven can never again get close to power.

And we are going to do it together. As citizens. As the institution that holds all other institutions in place.

This is the crisis. This is the turning point. This is the decision.

Let us decide well.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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