Mike my son teaches 8th grade civics in Massachusetts. I have sent this to him. Help us pass this on those in public schools who do believe in this mission but are up against forces that would destroy public education! Thank you
I've always felt that we spend too much time talking about individual rights, and not nearly enough time talking about collective responsibility. In the framework I grew up in, the Republicans pursued the first model, and the Democrats (New Deal style) pursued the second. Reagan clawed back the first model as the ideal, and from there it went downhill. Individual rights were firmly wedded to the right to build one's own wealth, damn the consequences for others. The Clinton centrist-left model basically said: "We're ok with this too." And so here we are.
Citizenship IS collective responsibility. Let's bring it back.
"And the conditions that allowed this crisis to occur must be changed, fundamentally and permanently, so that it never happens again."
I am speaking from an international perspective here, the perspective that tells a room of Americans and non-Americans, to the general agreement of the latter and complete shock of the former, that "we will never fucking trust you again".
I do not think this will be enough.
I think that the United States (the polity, as a whole, as currently represented on the international stage by Donald's administration) has so utterly eroded its alliances and friendships that it now faces a stark choice: international trust or democratic governance. I do not believe it is possible at this time for it to have both.
Perhaps I am wrong--to be honest, I hope I am. But as of now I do not see any package of reforms which the United States could implement which would give reason for its international partners to show that same sort of trust, the sort of trust which persisted for three-quarters of a century, again, while preserving the essence of democratic governance.
Let us say that after this moment passes the United States returns to true democratic governance--whether under its current Constitutional structure, or some other.
What has been lost among its international partners, in NATO, in Five Eyes, in the Pacific, is the trust that this state of affairs will persist, that the United States will not again put into power a leader who will immediately insult and belittle and threaten them.
We now know that MAGA is a force in US politics. We do not trust that it can be made to go away. I do not see any reforms that could be instituted which would maintain a democratic system while ensuring to the satisfaction of international partners who have for decades seen the US as a reliable ally on trade and security that MAGA, or whatever else you wish to call it, whatever form it might take in future, will never again take power in the United States.
Obviously, countries under authoritarian rule do not enjoy international trust. One treads lightly, and with as little trust as possible, when reaching agreements with China, for instance. (As The Beaverton put it about our recently announced deal with China, https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/01/16/prime-minister-carney-forges-new-strategic-partnership-peoples, that agreement, lowering tariff walls which we'd put in place to support North American auto manufacturing in conjunction with US tariffs, was like choosing lawful evil over chaotic evil.) My point is that this past year has placed the United States firmly within that camp of countries that cannot be trusted, and it will remain there even if it restores democratic governance and even if that state of affairs again persists for decades, because we now do not trust that it will not backslide.
Then what did you mean by "a stark choice: international trust or democratic governance"? (I think you understand the meaning of "or"?)
Look, the world trusts Germany and Japan. I'm named for an uncle killed fighting Japan, whose father before the war had been business partners with a Japanese man in promoting real estate investment in New Jersey to Japanese nobles (stripped from them during the war, of course). The world trusts Japan now (well, maybe the Chinese still don't). The world even trusts Germany, despite the proportion of AfD fascists there, which is about the same as the proportion of hard-core Trumpist fascists in the US.
First we recommit to democratic governance. Then we work to regain trust. Give it a decade or two, and we can.
Because there's another option, one which should (in theory) ensure international trust, at least from the United States' partners, but would not be actual democratic governance: a Dayton Agreement-style arrangement.
(The observation about the AfD is worth noting, but Germany's constitutional structure, using their own version of responsible government along with a system of proportional representation among political factions, allows them to be cordoned off into one such faction, rather than being a controlling force within one major coalition.)
We thought the US was committed to democratic governance. Then it elected Donald, and then elected him again even after he showed his utter contempt for it. A decade or two doesn't repair the breach that has come about due to recent events.
EDIT: How are we to trust as a security partner a country which has proven it will elect a man who lies shamelessly about the time when we came to its aid when its security was breached?
EDIT #2: Related to this is that I'm seeing US veterans (at least one: https://substack.com/@wesodonnell/note/c-204510374) saying "I would commit treason against my country to avoid committing treason against my values".
The voters who put Trump over the top the second time were the folks who were paying no attention to the candidates at all until the day they voted, who still believed Trump was some business genius based on their viewing of The Apprentice. That we have too many that ignorant is largely a result of forcing most people to work more hours and days in a year than any other Western nation. He was not elected because "Hey, we want a lying dictator."
That we have too many ignorant suckers, sure. Look at how Reform is doing in Britain, and National Rally in France. Idiots plague all our democracies. The spread of that disease is far broader than just the US. Better educating people to tell reality from lies is an international task.
I agree that Americans did not want a lying dictator, but they elected one regardless. That broke trust.
And I further agree that the likes of Farage, Le Pen and Bardella, and Poilievre, among others, pose similar threats in their own way. (But I would also observe that one can share that far-right nationalist ideology and not necessarily break international trust; see, for instance, Giorgia Meloni.) But as yet they have not been elected to exercise executive power in their countries; Donald has.
(I have further thoughts on how the Progressive Era democratic reforms in the US propagated outward over time and poisoned representative democracy elsewhere but they are beyond the scope of this comment.)
Perhaps the sad day will come when international partners have to reevaluate their alliances with the UK, with France, or even with my own country. I have remarked elsewhere about the danger of tech oligarchs building a "parallel power" through social media acquisitions; breaking that will require an international effort and will be part of rebuilding educated, civic-minded populaces. But right now it is the United States which has broken trust, by its electorate having selected Donald, and it is that electorate which we can no longer trust.
It gives me no joy to say that, nor to behold what else is going on south of me, except perhaps for a sense of schadenfreude at the economic downturn in the United States given what Donald has attempted to do to my country to make us beg for annexation.
Another piece of the puzzle will be to wrest our politics away from the PR consultants, the Madison Avenue rejects who dominate the parties and feed us fallacies to keep the money flowing, who calibrate the misinformation to keep elections always on a razor’s edge to maximize revenue.
Mike, another excellent piece. I think we may need to think at an even more fundamental level about civics education.
The nation’s founders had the benefit of being part of the Age of Enlightenment and understood something that I haven’t fully grasped until the past decade: how power works and why government, any government, is needed to avoid tyranny over people, any people. What is the power that the architects of the exit are actually aiming for and why. IMO, it’s avoidance of their own mortality and fear of their own death, the only real exit for all of us. They fear being mortal - they come from Greek mythology.
If we don’t share a common understanding of power and that some amongst us seek to gain and will create extraordinary ruses to get it, we and our children and their children will repeat today’s nightmare.
My nephew in Minneapolis sent this little stick figure animation that provides one of the best explanation of power and the game people wanting to gain and keep power play.
"And the conditions that allowed this crisis to occur must be changed, fundamentally and permanently, so that it never happens again."
Amen.
And I think the only practical way to do this is some kind of secession or national divorce, so that states can be free rethink their own constitution, with the necessary changes in key institutions such as for example who can and cannot qualify to get elected, and new institutions to disincentivize lying for financial and political profit. Among other things. My opinion.
The idea that citizenship is an institution that has to be actively formed and maintained is exactly right. Democracies don’t run on vibes. They run on people who actually know what they’re doing and feel responsible for it.
I do get a little nervous anytime an essay starts with “when we take power,” even if I agree with 90% of what follows. The real test of a healthy civic culture is whether it can rebuild itself without needing a savior narrative. Still, the call to take citizenship seriously again is overdue and necessary.
"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".
And we are living out the results of an ignorant population right now.
You need to start by teaching kids how to read and write. Today, the students whose pencils, paper, chalkboards and books were replaced by phones, screens, “Smartboards,” and Zoom, are, by every empirical measure, failing catastrophically. Many American students graduate from high school unable to read, write, or do basic math. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), better known as “America’s Report Card,” tests 450,000 students annually in reading and math. In 2024, the scores were the lowest in the survey’s fifty-year history. After the NAEP determined only 35% of high school seniors could read “proficiently” and 22% could do grade level math, they concluded that the U.S. faces “a signif- icant educational crisis.” Rather than admit failure and address it by focusing on low-tech remedial education in reading, writing, and math for underachieving students, schools continue to lower standards in the name of “student success.” Last year at UC San Diego, a seemingly competitive school, 20% of their in- coming freshmen failed the writing placement exam and only one in eight could do middle school math. In the past five years, the number of UCSD freshmen in remedial math has jumped from 32 (2020) to 921 (2025). I chose to end my academic career in 2016. In one decade, I had gone from serious professor who taught a difficult, but highly regarded, seminar on the law and theory of war to a pandering entertainer/stand-up comic who taught the history of surfing to big audiences in an auditorium. The books and weekly essays I once assigned were replaced by short articles, movies, and multiple-choice exams so easy that my grade school sons could pass them. These students were reading and writing 15% of what I had assigned in 1996 and I was giving A-/B+ grades to work that I once gave Bs and Cs. Grades today are so inflated that they are meaningless. The failure to teach American students The Three Rs, much less history and civics, has left the nation with an ever-growing body of semi-literate, sub-literate, and illiterate voters. As we are witnessing, this easily-spooked herd is a dangerously unstable foundation for a democracy.
Australian here. I know this does not rest easy with Americans, but the biggest protection of our democracy is arguably compulsory voting, together with an independent government funded electoral commission that sets electoral boundaries preventing gerrymandering. Of course we still have problems, there’s still too much money on politics ( which we’re working to reduce) , and too much regional influence on outcomes imo, but everyone votes, we don’t have to spend a fortune getting out the vote like you do. Our voting is on the weekend, it’s a social occasion with a sausage sizzle, and postal voting is made easy
Honestly, I think you should consider it, it’s much more representative.
I also don’t get why your states know how people voted with voter information/registration. A vote is meant to be secret, that would never be tolerated here.
Another excellent piece. Indigenous people have a more organic way of thinking about humans on Planet Earth, which is why they persist successfully (except where exterminated by "civilization"). In Hawaii, we use the word kuleana, meaning responsibility, but it also carries that charge you explore: the necessity -- not the option -- of being responsible. Those who have particular expertise are expected to cultivate it in the next generation. The rule of law requires that people carry their responsibility seriously. Society doesn't survive without everyone choosing a responsibility and living up to it, regardless. We all depend on you. We are all "kings" in our own strengths and service to our community.
I am skeptical that the civic education after WWII did diddly squat. The product of that education was a generation that refused to serve in the military when drafted. My uncles and father in law were all drafted in the early 1950's when the US was doing their containment thing in Korea. Nobody wanted to serve, but they all went. There were no mass demonstrations, no burning of draft cards, no escaping to Canada. The men who were educated in this golden age you cite were the ones that said "nope."
You can argue that well informed citizens will refuse to participate in government actions that they believe are immoral. I'm willing to listen. But those very same citizens who made it impossible for us to have a citizen army led to this mess where poor people enlist to better themselves, and then the government has a compliant military who "volunteered."
It seems to me that the high point of citizenship in this country was both the men who were either drafted and served, or the ones who volunteered, to put down the Confederacy. The second one was the men who responded to both the draft and who volunteered after Pearl Harbor. And the women who mobilized to do the work of keeping things going during both wars. Both of those wars relied heavily on the sons and daughters of immigrants. Their parents came here to escape violence and poverty, and their kids grew up here and attended overcrowded and underfunded public schools. Those kids grew into adults with a fierce determination to serve the country that had taken their families in. Public schools at the time were the place where the children of immigrants learned to be "American." It wasn't about anti-communism, it was educating kids about what it meant to be an American. It was social and cultural as much as it was about civics.
We cut off immigration at our peril. We are cruel to immigrants and our nation is weaker. Our strength and resilience is in the people who lived in violence and fear, and came here and found security and raised their kids to defend this.
I've always liked Jim Wright's (Stonekettle Station) approach on this - and he's not the first to state this, but his recent post on being a better citizen (which he's written before but reposted a few days ago):
"Democracy is fragile
A democratic republic is ALWAYS just an election away from tyranny or collapse.
The Citizen is the Republic's greatest strength, but also its most dangerous weakness.
Liberty lasts only so long as the people have the will to maintain it, only so long as the population sees citizenship not only as a duty but THE duty and are willing to exercise that power for the greater good.
When informed citizenship falls into disrepair, democracy soon follows.
If you want a better nation, be a better citizen."
Mike my son teaches 8th grade civics in Massachusetts. I have sent this to him. Help us pass this on those in public schools who do believe in this mission but are up against forces that would destroy public education! Thank you
I've always felt that we spend too much time talking about individual rights, and not nearly enough time talking about collective responsibility. In the framework I grew up in, the Republicans pursued the first model, and the Democrats (New Deal style) pursued the second. Reagan clawed back the first model as the ideal, and from there it went downhill. Individual rights were firmly wedded to the right to build one's own wealth, damn the consequences for others. The Clinton centrist-left model basically said: "We're ok with this too." And so here we are.
Citizenship IS collective responsibility. Let's bring it back.
"And the conditions that allowed this crisis to occur must be changed, fundamentally and permanently, so that it never happens again."
I am speaking from an international perspective here, the perspective that tells a room of Americans and non-Americans, to the general agreement of the latter and complete shock of the former, that "we will never fucking trust you again".
I do not think this will be enough.
I think that the United States (the polity, as a whole, as currently represented on the international stage by Donald's administration) has so utterly eroded its alliances and friendships that it now faces a stark choice: international trust or democratic governance. I do not believe it is possible at this time for it to have both.
Perhaps I am wrong--to be honest, I hope I am. But as of now I do not see any package of reforms which the United States could implement which would give reason for its international partners to show that same sort of trust, the sort of trust which persisted for three-quarters of a century, again, while preserving the essence of democratic governance.
WTF? Can you name any nation under dictatorship which has international trust?
That is not my point.
Let us say that after this moment passes the United States returns to true democratic governance--whether under its current Constitutional structure, or some other.
What has been lost among its international partners, in NATO, in Five Eyes, in the Pacific, is the trust that this state of affairs will persist, that the United States will not again put into power a leader who will immediately insult and belittle and threaten them.
We now know that MAGA is a force in US politics. We do not trust that it can be made to go away. I do not see any reforms that could be instituted which would maintain a democratic system while ensuring to the satisfaction of international partners who have for decades seen the US as a reliable ally on trade and security that MAGA, or whatever else you wish to call it, whatever form it might take in future, will never again take power in the United States.
Obviously, countries under authoritarian rule do not enjoy international trust. One treads lightly, and with as little trust as possible, when reaching agreements with China, for instance. (As The Beaverton put it about our recently announced deal with China, https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/01/16/prime-minister-carney-forges-new-strategic-partnership-peoples, that agreement, lowering tariff walls which we'd put in place to support North American auto manufacturing in conjunction with US tariffs, was like choosing lawful evil over chaotic evil.) My point is that this past year has placed the United States firmly within that camp of countries that cannot be trusted, and it will remain there even if it restores democratic governance and even if that state of affairs again persists for decades, because we now do not trust that it will not backslide.
Then what did you mean by "a stark choice: international trust or democratic governance"? (I think you understand the meaning of "or"?)
Look, the world trusts Germany and Japan. I'm named for an uncle killed fighting Japan, whose father before the war had been business partners with a Japanese man in promoting real estate investment in New Jersey to Japanese nobles (stripped from them during the war, of course). The world trusts Japan now (well, maybe the Chinese still don't). The world even trusts Germany, despite the proportion of AfD fascists there, which is about the same as the proportion of hard-core Trumpist fascists in the US.
First we recommit to democratic governance. Then we work to regain trust. Give it a decade or two, and we can.
Because there's another option, one which should (in theory) ensure international trust, at least from the United States' partners, but would not be actual democratic governance: a Dayton Agreement-style arrangement.
(The observation about the AfD is worth noting, but Germany's constitutional structure, using their own version of responsible government along with a system of proportional representation among political factions, allows them to be cordoned off into one such faction, rather than being a controlling force within one major coalition.)
We thought the US was committed to democratic governance. Then it elected Donald, and then elected him again even after he showed his utter contempt for it. A decade or two doesn't repair the breach that has come about due to recent events.
https://www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurney-we-will-never-fucking
EDIT: How are we to trust as a security partner a country which has proven it will elect a man who lies shamelessly about the time when we came to its aid when its security was breached?
https://keithbumgarner.substack.com/p/trumps-lies-dishonor-natos-fallen
"We will never fucking trust you again."
EDIT #2: Related to this is that I'm seeing US veterans (at least one: https://substack.com/@wesodonnell/note/c-204510374) saying "I would commit treason against my country to avoid committing treason against my values".
The voters who put Trump over the top the second time were the folks who were paying no attention to the candidates at all until the day they voted, who still believed Trump was some business genius based on their viewing of The Apprentice. That we have too many that ignorant is largely a result of forcing most people to work more hours and days in a year than any other Western nation. He was not elected because "Hey, we want a lying dictator."
That we have too many ignorant suckers, sure. Look at how Reform is doing in Britain, and National Rally in France. Idiots plague all our democracies. The spread of that disease is far broader than just the US. Better educating people to tell reality from lies is an international task.
I agree that Americans did not want a lying dictator, but they elected one regardless. That broke trust.
And I further agree that the likes of Farage, Le Pen and Bardella, and Poilievre, among others, pose similar threats in their own way. (But I would also observe that one can share that far-right nationalist ideology and not necessarily break international trust; see, for instance, Giorgia Meloni.) But as yet they have not been elected to exercise executive power in their countries; Donald has.
(I have further thoughts on how the Progressive Era democratic reforms in the US propagated outward over time and poisoned representative democracy elsewhere but they are beyond the scope of this comment.)
Perhaps the sad day will come when international partners have to reevaluate their alliances with the UK, with France, or even with my own country. I have remarked elsewhere about the danger of tech oligarchs building a "parallel power" through social media acquisitions; breaking that will require an international effort and will be part of rebuilding educated, civic-minded populaces. But right now it is the United States which has broken trust, by its electorate having selected Donald, and it is that electorate which we can no longer trust.
It gives me no joy to say that, nor to behold what else is going on south of me, except perhaps for a sense of schadenfreude at the economic downturn in the United States given what Donald has attempted to do to my country to make us beg for annexation.
Singapore?
Another piece of the puzzle will be to wrest our politics away from the PR consultants, the Madison Avenue rejects who dominate the parties and feed us fallacies to keep the money flowing, who calibrate the misinformation to keep elections always on a razor’s edge to maximize revenue.
Mike, another excellent piece. I think we may need to think at an even more fundamental level about civics education.
The nation’s founders had the benefit of being part of the Age of Enlightenment and understood something that I haven’t fully grasped until the past decade: how power works and why government, any government, is needed to avoid tyranny over people, any people. What is the power that the architects of the exit are actually aiming for and why. IMO, it’s avoidance of their own mortality and fear of their own death, the only real exit for all of us. They fear being mortal - they come from Greek mythology.
If we don’t share a common understanding of power and that some amongst us seek to gain and will create extraordinary ruses to get it, we and our children and their children will repeat today’s nightmare.
My nephew in Minneapolis sent this little stick figure animation that provides one of the best explanation of power and the game people wanting to gain and keep power play.
https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs
"And the conditions that allowed this crisis to occur must be changed, fundamentally and permanently, so that it never happens again."
Amen.
And I think the only practical way to do this is some kind of secession or national divorce, so that states can be free rethink their own constitution, with the necessary changes in key institutions such as for example who can and cannot qualify to get elected, and new institutions to disincentivize lying for financial and political profit. Among other things. My opinion.
The idea that citizenship is an institution that has to be actively formed and maintained is exactly right. Democracies don’t run on vibes. They run on people who actually know what they’re doing and feel responsible for it.
I do get a little nervous anytime an essay starts with “when we take power,” even if I agree with 90% of what follows. The real test of a healthy civic culture is whether it can rebuild itself without needing a savior narrative. Still, the call to take citizenship seriously again is overdue and necessary.
"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".
And we are living out the results of an ignorant population right now.
So much wisdom in this series. I wish we could make your plan reality.
You need to start by teaching kids how to read and write. Today, the students whose pencils, paper, chalkboards and books were replaced by phones, screens, “Smartboards,” and Zoom, are, by every empirical measure, failing catastrophically. Many American students graduate from high school unable to read, write, or do basic math. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), better known as “America’s Report Card,” tests 450,000 students annually in reading and math. In 2024, the scores were the lowest in the survey’s fifty-year history. After the NAEP determined only 35% of high school seniors could read “proficiently” and 22% could do grade level math, they concluded that the U.S. faces “a signif- icant educational crisis.” Rather than admit failure and address it by focusing on low-tech remedial education in reading, writing, and math for underachieving students, schools continue to lower standards in the name of “student success.” Last year at UC San Diego, a seemingly competitive school, 20% of their in- coming freshmen failed the writing placement exam and only one in eight could do middle school math. In the past five years, the number of UCSD freshmen in remedial math has jumped from 32 (2020) to 921 (2025). I chose to end my academic career in 2016. In one decade, I had gone from serious professor who taught a difficult, but highly regarded, seminar on the law and theory of war to a pandering entertainer/stand-up comic who taught the history of surfing to big audiences in an auditorium. The books and weekly essays I once assigned were replaced by short articles, movies, and multiple-choice exams so easy that my grade school sons could pass them. These students were reading and writing 15% of what I had assigned in 1996 and I was giving A-/B+ grades to work that I once gave Bs and Cs. Grades today are so inflated that they are meaningless. The failure to teach American students The Three Rs, much less history and civics, has left the nation with an ever-growing body of semi-literate, sub-literate, and illiterate voters. As we are witnessing, this easily-spooked herd is a dangerously unstable foundation for a democracy.
Australian here. I know this does not rest easy with Americans, but the biggest protection of our democracy is arguably compulsory voting, together with an independent government funded electoral commission that sets electoral boundaries preventing gerrymandering. Of course we still have problems, there’s still too much money on politics ( which we’re working to reduce) , and too much regional influence on outcomes imo, but everyone votes, we don’t have to spend a fortune getting out the vote like you do. Our voting is on the weekend, it’s a social occasion with a sausage sizzle, and postal voting is made easy
Honestly, I think you should consider it, it’s much more representative.
I also don’t get why your states know how people voted with voter information/registration. A vote is meant to be secret, that would never be tolerated here.
Count me in Mike!
There can be no compromise with fascists. The sooner the majority of Americans truly understand this the better.
Another excellent piece. Indigenous people have a more organic way of thinking about humans on Planet Earth, which is why they persist successfully (except where exterminated by "civilization"). In Hawaii, we use the word kuleana, meaning responsibility, but it also carries that charge you explore: the necessity -- not the option -- of being responsible. Those who have particular expertise are expected to cultivate it in the next generation. The rule of law requires that people carry their responsibility seriously. Society doesn't survive without everyone choosing a responsibility and living up to it, regardless. We all depend on you. We are all "kings" in our own strengths and service to our community.
I am skeptical that the civic education after WWII did diddly squat. The product of that education was a generation that refused to serve in the military when drafted. My uncles and father in law were all drafted in the early 1950's when the US was doing their containment thing in Korea. Nobody wanted to serve, but they all went. There were no mass demonstrations, no burning of draft cards, no escaping to Canada. The men who were educated in this golden age you cite were the ones that said "nope."
You can argue that well informed citizens will refuse to participate in government actions that they believe are immoral. I'm willing to listen. But those very same citizens who made it impossible for us to have a citizen army led to this mess where poor people enlist to better themselves, and then the government has a compliant military who "volunteered."
It seems to me that the high point of citizenship in this country was both the men who were either drafted and served, or the ones who volunteered, to put down the Confederacy. The second one was the men who responded to both the draft and who volunteered after Pearl Harbor. And the women who mobilized to do the work of keeping things going during both wars. Both of those wars relied heavily on the sons and daughters of immigrants. Their parents came here to escape violence and poverty, and their kids grew up here and attended overcrowded and underfunded public schools. Those kids grew into adults with a fierce determination to serve the country that had taken their families in. Public schools at the time were the place where the children of immigrants learned to be "American." It wasn't about anti-communism, it was educating kids about what it meant to be an American. It was social and cultural as much as it was about civics.
We cut off immigration at our peril. We are cruel to immigrants and our nation is weaker. Our strength and resilience is in the people who lived in violence and fear, and came here and found security and raised their kids to defend this.
I never said anything about cutting off immigration.
I never said you did. I was thinking about how this country periodically cuts off its own power supply.
I've always liked Jim Wright's (Stonekettle Station) approach on this - and he's not the first to state this, but his recent post on being a better citizen (which he's written before but reposted a few days ago):
"Democracy is fragile
A democratic republic is ALWAYS just an election away from tyranny or collapse.
The Citizen is the Republic's greatest strength, but also its most dangerous weakness.
Liberty lasts only so long as the people have the will to maintain it, only so long as the population sees citizenship not only as a duty but THE duty and are willing to exercise that power for the greater good.
When informed citizenship falls into disrepair, democracy soon follows.
If you want a better nation, be a better citizen."