(Washington, DC) Let’s say you’re a nonprofit or an individual with a meritorious claim and you are in conflict with a big company. You should look for a law firm to take your case pro bono. But the firm will need a waiver (and a lot of persuasion) to take you on if they also work for the big company that is giving you trouble. That means that you’re out of luck if all the law firms in town work for that company. I’m told that this is the case with major banks and other corporations of their size: they have current or recent business arrangements with all the large law firms.  I could not find a way to tell how many outside counsel are employed by a corporation like Bank of America or Microsoft, but I did find this article from The Wall Street Journal in 2010:

Law firms usually can’t sue or investigate banks that they have represented, unless the clients take the unusual step of waiving the conflict. … [But] consolidation in the banking business has made it only harder for law firms to handle lawsuits against banks. It is increasingly difficult, lawyers said, for firms to find a major bank they haven’t represented at some point.

This piece doesn’t address the question of pro bono representation. It is mainly about the rise of small, specialty firms that gain market advantage by deliberately avoiding all banks as clients–so that they can sue banks. But that doesn’t solve the problem for pro bono clients.  I wonder whether consolidation in the legal profession is the root of the issue. Could companies be intentionally hiring every law firm in town so that nobody can sue them?

Patriotism is much in the news, with the IRS allegedly investigating groups that have the word “patriot” in their name, and various people accusing others of being unpatriotic. In reality, patriotism is rarely just a matter of loving a particular country. It is almost always a particular story of a country that emphasizes some people’s core values and excludes some of their compatriots.

Sen. Ren Paul’s recent fundraising letter says, “President Obama and his anti-gun pals believe the timing has never been better to ram through the U.N.’s global gun control crown jewel. I don’t know about you, but watching anti-American globalists plot against our Constitution makes me sick.”

Paul is not the only one who feels that way. As part of an experiment that we recently conducted, representative Americans told us about any political videos they had shared. This response was far from typical of the whole sample, but also hardly unique:

Mostly of the Obamas….Michelle Obama whispering to B.O., “all this over a flag!” I come from a military family and I am extremely offended by the both of them. I have never seen a more unamerican couple in the White House! This done at a 9/11 ceremony.and now the lack of concern for our flag and our diplomats…Obama should never have been elected…The media has a lot to do with what we are going thru as a Country…Clower and Pivens, Olinsky.. [sic] they are destroying the American way from within and those are the subject matter of most videos I share.

But the Obama administration also adopts a very strong–if different–patriotic narrative. For example, the president’s second Inauguration wove a story in which the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement were central to the great drama of American Freedom. A multiracial Brooklyn choir sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a song about crushing the serpent of rebellion beneath the heel of the Union Army. The president had been reelected by states that fought on the Northern side, and the only Southern voice at the whole event was Sen. Lamar Alexander’s. Implicitly if not deliberately, the message was the glory of the national government that has triumphed over its enemies, domestic as well as foreign. Obama’s strongest critics fear that same government and admire armed resistance against it, at least in the form of the lost confederate cause.

My point is not that one position is more authentically patriotic than the other, although I certainly prefer the substantive values of the administration. The debate is not between patriots and anti-patriots, but among Americans whose reading of their country is strictly at odds.

I must admit that I have neglected gender as an issue in youth civic engagement. My organization (CIRCLE) generally focuses on common behaviors, like voting and community service, and on political knowledge and attitudes as assessed by surveys and tests. On all those measures, young women are somewhat ahead of young men, much as one might expect since young women do somewhat better in school and college. I have obviously been aware that Congress and other powerful institutions are dominated by men, but I chalked that up to campaign finance and other flaws in the political system. Our work is concerned with young people rather than systems, so I thought we could contribute little to the problem of gender inequality in politics.

But CIRCLE’s led researcher, Dr. Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, recently presented at a White House Conference on Girls’ Leadership and Civic Education. In preparing to present, she analyzed survey data and revealed troubling patterns. Basically, young women are more “civically engaged” than young men but much less confident in their own ability to hold leadership positions and less likely to pursue leadership roles. Below is just one example of a troubling result. By the time men leave college, almost one third place themselves in the top 10% for leadership, and that rate has risen since freshman year. Less than one in five women rate themselves that high, and that rate falls from freshman to senior year.

See this page for Kei’s fact sheet and links to other CIRCLE materials. We also propose some strategies for addressing the problem. If you are interested in discussing the issue with a very well-informed group, please consider attending this year’s Frontiers of Democracy conference, which will include a learning exchange on gender.

1. “Then, my first gut reaction seeing the horror of that person that has their legs blown off. You know, the bone sticking out? He was not in shock. I looked and I thought there’s something… I don’t know what’s wrong, but it seems surreal to me. I talked to my sister, who’s not into politics at all, and she said, yes, I saw the same thing. He was not in shock. He was not in pain. If I had had those type of injuries, I’d be screaming in agony.”

— New Hampshire state Rep. Stella Tremblay (R), in an interview with Pete Santilli (via Taegan Goddard, who previously reported that Rep. Tremblay believes the federal government planned the Boston bombings.)

2. “One of the things that concerns my constituents — the majority of my constituents — is the appointments that are now being made in Washington by our President and the way he is handling the illegal immigrants, nationalizing them and giving them the opportunity to vote, and wanting to keep track of our guns. They are worried that they are going to have to use these guns because of our own government. Now is there anything in Washington that says — any telltale signs that maybe we might be headed for an internal revolution given the fact that these kinds of things are going on?”

— New Hampshire State Rep. Edmond Gionet (R), quoted by Think Progress (via Taegan Goddard).

3. “New Hampshire State Rep. Peter Hansen (R) sparked a firestorm in the state house after he sent a recent email to an internal house listserv that referred to women as ‘vaginas’.” (via Aviva Shen)

I would by no means condone any of the remarks quoted above. When elected officials abuse their freedom of speech, voters and the press must hold them accountable. The Republicans should denounce these particular characters, or else the party will be associated with them. (That is not necessarily fair, but it’s how politics works today.)

But it is important to realize that the New Hampshire State House has 400 members. The average house district has 3,300 residents. In contrast, California has just 80 State Reps, each representing about 470,000 people, or 142 times more than in New Hampshire. With its town meetings and tiny legislative districts, the Granite State makes politics extraordinarily local and accessible.

I would explain these occasional rebarbative comments as the price of an interactive and accessible political system. If one percent of a state’s elected officials are nutcases, that will yield a fair number of outrageous remarks in a State House with 400 members–but the benefit is a lot more civic engagement. The argument that engagement improves government is a long and complex one, and it comes with caveats. I make the best case I can in my forthcoming book, We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America, Oxford University Press (fall 2013). For a specific analysis of grassroots democracy in New England, see the classic work by Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy.

In any case, it’s important to evaluate the whole system rather than outrageous anecdotes. One test will be whether the New Hampshire Republican Party and the state’s voters get rid of the representatives quoted above–but that is not the only criterion of good government. Overall, I would prefer the messiness and occasionally offensive amateurishness of New Hampshire politics to the smarmy professionalism of big states like California and New York. In New York, apparently, the crime rate by state legislators exceeds that of the state’s population as a whole (no thanks to pervasive political corruption). The odds that a nutcase will reach the legislature are lower in professionalized systems, but the chances that someone will speak authentically or learn from a public discussion may be higher in New Hampshire.

Yesterday, our friends at the Harvard Institute of Politics released their spring poll of 18-29-year olds. Here are some findings that especially interested me:

Conservatives will see some openings. A narrow majority of young people approve of Obama’s job performance, but majorities oppose his performance on each specific issue that was tested, especially the federal budget deficit. Some respondents may think the president is too conservative, or ineffective at achieving liberal ends. That is probably the case with gun control, which they favor although they disapprove of Obama’s performance. However, those who believe that tax cuts stimulate economic growth outnumber those who disagree by two-to-one. Those who think government spending increases growth are outnumbered by those who disagree.  Those who favor more parental choice in schools outnumber those who don’t believe that choice would help the educational system. The sample is very evenly split on climate change: 29% in favor of government action, 26% against, with the rest unsure. Asked whether “homosexual relationships are morally wrong,” 27% agree and 31% are unwilling or unable to say, for a total of 58%.

Just 16% favor affirmative action. Twenty-four percent think it has affected them negatively in their school or workplace. Twelve percent think it has benefited them. We know from a different survey that more than half of White Millennials believe discrimination against Whites “has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” I think there is an under-explored and important issue about young White people who are hostile to some of the traditional planks of the civil rights movement.

On the other hand, 42% support a government-guaranteed right to health care. Just one quarter think recent immigration has harmed the US. More respondents think the government should spend more to reduce poverty than disagree with that idea, although the plurality is unsure.

Election-Day Registration (EDR)–i.e., being allowed to register the same day you vote–has been found to boost youth turnout. In the IOP poll, 60% of young adults favor this reform if they are simply asked about it. But support plummets to 35% (with 44% not sure) if instead they are asked, “Some people say that Same-Day Registration … reduces the barriers to voting; other people say that Same-Day Registration increases voter fraud. Based on what you know now, do you support or oppose Same-Day Registration?” In other words, support for this reform is very soft; concerns about fraud can easily be activated.

Pluralities of young Americans think that politics is relevant and that political involvement does have tangible results, although a lot them are unsure. In our own focus group research, we often find respondents waver on these issues. Asked whether voting makes a difference, for example, an individual may give a short monologue that drifts between yes and no and then back again, passing by way of such ideas as “no, but you should do it anyway,” and “yes, but only if other people do it, too.” A survey forces a choice, which is helpful in some ways but obscures the deep ambivalence a lot of people feel.

Thirty-one percent say that “working in some form of public service is appealing to me,” but only 35% think that “running for office is an honorable thing to do” (with 46% unsure). Forty-seven percent think that politics is no longer able to meet our country’s challenges, and only 16% disagree with that.

One in five say that their previous experiences with politics have left them disappointed. Large majorities distrust all the major institutions tested–from the presidency to Wall Street and the UN–with the exception of the US military, which has 54% trust.

About 11% identify with the Tea Party, 5% say they would very likely participate with Organizing for Action (after it is defined for them), and 14% contributed to an online political discussion or blog. I’d emphasize that these are all rare forms of engagement.