I’m trying to meet a deadline on a big project, but meanwhile experiencing various subcultures. The Supreme Court, which I visited on Monday, was one. It offers a striking combination of grand and lush architecture, palpable power and respect, and a professorial style epitomized by Justice Breyer, who acted as if he were teaching smart law students.

That same afternoon, I taught a three-hour class on leadership for young Naval, Marine, and Coast Guard officers. They are different in superficial ways from their civilian counterparts. (For instance, they call professors “Sir”). But they are also different in more important respects. Almost all of them thought that voting was a duty, a moral obligation created by sacrifices in previous wars. In contrast, when we surveyed a national sample of youth in 2002, 34 percent said that voting was a choice; 20 percent called it a responsibility; and only 9 percent said it was a duty. For better and worse, the broad US society has moved from citizenship-as-duty to citizenship-as-choice. The military remains different in that respect.

Finally, I had an intense conversation yesterday with an Egyptian, a proponent of liberal democracy and civic education. He was passionately pro-Western and hostile to political Islam. He had come to get my advice, but I kept resisting, doubting that I have ideas relevant to Mubarak’s Egypt. As I told him, there’s nothing worse than advice that begins “In my country ….” But he insisted that the US has models and ideals that Egypt should adopt.

I happened to be in the Supreme Court chamber yesterday when the campaign finance decision was announced. Campaign finance law has been an interest of mine since I worked for Common Cause in the early 1990s; it’s the topic of chapter four of my New Progressive Era. But it was a coincidence that I was present for yesterday’s announcement. My friends Diana Hess and Lee Arbetmen, who teach Streetlaw’s Supreme Court Summer Institute for Teachers, had invited me to sit with the teachers for yesterday morning’s session in the Court.

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Joe Goldman has launched a new blog called The Democracy Movement. It’s a group effort, devoted to deliberative democracy and related themes. I’ve signed up to contribute regularly, along with fellow academics Archon Fung and Abby Williamson from Harvard, John Gastil from the University of Washington, and Francesca Polletta from UC Irvine/Columbia University; Lars Hasselblad Torres, Evan Paul, and Joe Goldman from AmericaSpeaks; Martha McCoy, Pat Scully, Matt Leighninger, and Amy Malick from Study Circles; Taylor Willingham from the National Issues Forums; Bill Potapchuk from the Community Building Institute; Michael Weiksner from e-thePeople; and Jed Miller, now at the ACLU and formerly at Web Lab.

There’s also a new service-learning blog with regular news from the field and some excellent contributors.

Canvassing is a common experience, especially for young activists on the left. In a 2002 survey available from CIRCLE, people were asked, “Have you worked as a canvasser–having gone door to door for a political or social group or candidate?” Seven percent of young people (and 11 percent of the young people who were involved in politics) said that they had.

Dana Fisher wrote a Working Paper, funded by CIRCLE, that examined the canvassing experience. She has now expanded her paper into a book entitled Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America. I blurbed it (along with Senator Bradley, Ralph Nader, Harry Boyte, Bill Schambra of the Bradley Center, and Doug McAdam). I said:

For idealistic young progressives today, there is basically only one paid entry-level job left in politics: canvassing. Dana R. Fisher is the first to study this crucial formative experience. Essentially, she finds that the canvass is an alienating and undemocratic experience. As a result, we are squandering the energy and ideas of a whole generation. What’s more, a progressive movement that relies on regimented canvassing is doomed to defeat because it lacks an authentic connection with citizens. Unless we take seriously the rigorous evidence and acute arguments of Activism, Inc., the future looks grim

Never having been on a canvass, I can’t guarantee that Fisher’s very critical portrait is comprehensive or fair. But I am sure that her account should trigger a robust debate about the effects of canvassing on young progressives. Indeed, Greg Bloom has kicked off that debate by writing a thoughtful series on DailyKos that makes similar points to Fisher’s. The comments that veterans of canvassing have made in response to Bloom have been very interesting and, in the main, support his critique. See also this response by a canvass organizer.

The Economist has a useful article on inequality in America, but even more useful is the collection of academic papers on that topic that the magazine has provided online. I picked a paper by Miles Corak entitled “Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults? Lessons from a Cross Country Comparison of Generational Earnings Mobility” (pdf).

Corak’s Table 2 tells a striking story. In the United States and the UK, half of a father’s economic advantage is transmitted (on average) to his son. (The data are limited to males for technical reasons.) There is a very high monetary return from investing in college education: 18.9 percent in the US. And there is a high correlation between fathers’ educational attainment and sons’ performance on a standardized test. In Scandinavia, by contrast, less than one fifth of a father’s economic advantage is transmitted to his son; there is a low rate of return to college (7.9% in Denmark) and not much of a correlation between fathers’ educational attainment and sons’ test scores. The other countries in the sample fall in between the US/UK and Scandinavia on all these measures.

Corak’s data are consistent with a picture of America as a highly competitive society in which those who perform well in school win great rewards. The best performers are the hardest working and smartest young people; thus the system feels like a meritocracy. However, high-performers usually have well educated and wealthy parents.

There cannot be law of nature that academic performance is heriditary, since the father/son correlations are much weaker in Canada and Europe. Instead, I suspect that American parents are able to effect their kids’ chances of success in the meritocracy by how they raise them.

For example, the size of a kid’s vocabulary is a valuable resource in school, yet Betty Hart and Todd Risley have found that three-year-old children of professionals have larger vocabularies than the parents of three-year-olds on welfare. There are profound differences in the way language is used, by social class. These differences are attenuated in European societies where the state is more likely to provide good daycare and where schools aim at equality.

I also wonder whether middle-class American parents work especially hard to give their children competitive advantages, because they realize the high stakes. Annette Lareau has found that suburban adults (without regard to race) try to use every second of the day in a “strategy of concerted cultivation,” to give their kids work- and school-related skills. Whereas working-class urban parents try to let their kids be kids–a strategy that would work much better in Sweden than in the USA.