Monthly Archives: October 2012

dispatches from the Civic Renewal field

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Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer is Executive Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse and founder and former President of AmericaSpeaks.  I have read the manuscript of her forthcoming book entitled Bringing Citizen Voices to the Table: A Guide for Public Managers. She summarizes the book in a Nonprofit Quarterly article entitled “The Case for Citizen Engagement,” writing,

What if millions of Americans regularly came together to deliberate about a wide range of critical national issues like health care, immigration, and education?  What if the recommendations they made actually guided the actions of our national policy-makers?  … We would be a credible democracy.

Bridget Draxler reports from the annual conference of Imagining America: Artists & Scholars in Public Life. She describes exemplary college-based programs that combine real community engagement, liberal arts education, and digital technology.

Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a leading democratic theorist, argues in the Huffington Post that jobs programs can be turned into opportunities for public work. He cites Melissa Bass’s forthcoming book on the history of national service (which I have also had a chance to read in manuscript). As Boyte says,

The [Civilian Conservation Corps] also helped the nation to regain a view of government as an empowering partner — not simply “for” the people, delivering services, but “of” the people and “by” the people,” in Lincoln’s terms. … As people made a commonwealth of public goods, they became a commonwealth of citizens.

Citizens deliberating and interacting with public administrators, students making meaning in partnership with local residents, and paid workers seeing themselves as building the commonwealth–these are three compatible visions of civic renewal offered at an ugly moment. If they’re not inspiring enough, check out Democracy Prep’s fourth graders singing “vote for somebody” in this article that reports our recent study of civic education.

what does an election forecast mean?

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On Oct. 4, Nate Silver “forecast” (that is the label of his graph) that Barack Obama had an 87.1% chance of winning the November election. Ten days later, he said that Obama’s chance was 62.9%. Princeton’s Sam Wang offered somewhat higher percentages at both times, but in the same pattern.

The odds changed by 25 points, way outside any reasonable margin of error. Does that invalidate the early-October forecasts? If Obama wins in November, will that show that the forecast was more correct in early October than it is now? Or will we know with hindsight that Obama actually had a 100% chance of winning, because he did win? An election doesn’t seem random in the same way that a die-roll is random. Once the result occurs, it seems that it had to. If there is an element of sheer randomness in an election, like the effects of rain on turnout, that element is small.

One excuse for the forecasters is that they could not foresee the President’s poor debate performance and its substantial impact on public opinion. I didn’t think he performed well, but, as Kevin Drum shows, the slide in the polls began before the debate and continued smoothly through the debate–suggesting that it was not the reason for the decline. So the forecasters failed to predict a trend (not a single, random-seeming event like a flubbed debate). Does that make them bad forecasters?

A forecast can move in either direction substantially and unpredictably, because who knows what crazy events may occur before Election Day? Mitt Romney could suddenly start yelling imprecations at the 47% during tonight’s debate. But if a forecast moves for a foreseeable reason, such as reversion to the mean, then the forecasters should have predicted it, and their earlier predictions were errors.

Thus, a forecast is a falsifiable hypothesis, but we don’t test it by waiting for the ultimate election result, which will either be a 100% Obama victory or a 100% Romney victory. We rather ask whether the forecast changes in a theoretically foreseeable fashion before Election Day. The only changes that are acceptable are (1) those caused by large and truly random events, and (2) a gradual movement toward certainty, which reflects the diminishing time left for random events to occur. By that standard, the predictions made in early October have now been falsified, and we’ll see how the current ones hold up.

are we entering a post-truth era?

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When the returns are in, just about half the people, those who voted for the loser, will have to ask themselves how seriously they believe the campaign orators who told them that democracy was lost if their opponents won the election. If they believe seriously that Mr. Wilkie is the head and front of an unholy alliance of revolutionaries and revolutionists or that Mr. Roosevelt is the center of an effort to set up a dictatorship and establish national socialism, then the loser cannot accept the result … But as a matter of fact the nation will accept the result …. because the people know in their hearts that the rhetorical threats and the rhetorical promises which they have just been hearing belong to the routine of campaigning in the month of October before election, and that for every grain of truth these political words contain, there are ten grains of buncombe.

–Walter Lippmann, “On the Strength of Democracy,” Nov. 5, 1940

To understand [diplomatic] briefings one must break out of the semantic fogs of our Orwellian times. The government information officer, to speak plainly, is a misinformation officer; his job is not to inform the press, but to put across the particular version or distortion, previously decided upon by the government for which he works. The briefing is a mild but effective form of brain-washing. … Arguments which the government disapproves are made to seem silly; key technical points are given rapid treatment so hurried and obscure as to hide their significance; one’s own position is high-lighted, the adversary’s is twisted and the neutral’s is given only a quick once-over.

— I.F. Stone, “How the Press is Brain-Washed and the Neutrals Gulled,” I.F. Stone’s Weekly, April 16, 1962

Last week, I heard my old friend Jason Stanley defend a thesis that he has also advanced very ably in series of pieces in The New York Times. He warns that we are entering a post-truth era.

The philosopher David Lewis proposed that in “a serious communication situation,” people generally say what they believe and expect listeners to accept statements that are true. Lying occurs, but it is like breaking the rules of a game that is still functioning as a game; lying is exceptional and risks a penalty. But people can also talk in situations that do not involve serious communication. Making up stories, exaggerating, or scoring points can be the normal and expected behavior.

In a reasonably deliberative democracy, politics is a serious communication situation, and lying or BS-ing are exceptional and risky behaviors. But once lying becomes widespread and incurs no political penalty, truth-telling becomes virtually pointless. Listeners don’t even expect it. They interpret speech as exaggeration, entertainment, counter-balancing of rivals’ exaggerations, motivational rhetoric, or other things that are not assertions of truth. Then, if you happen to say something true, listeners just discount it, divide your claims by the expected degree of exaggeration, and you lose the game that is being played in a post-truth era. Even fact-checkers, reporters, and other ostensible third-parties are quickly dismissed as partisan players.

I fully share Jason’s values and concerns, but I am open to two theses. Which one is right is an empirical question, and I am not quite sure how to investigate it.

1. Politics as serious communication was a fragile convention that we recently lost. We once had it because mainstream political leaders did not routinely and blatantly lie, and when they did, they paid some kind of price. Perhaps they paid a penalty for lying or being badly misinformed because the media system was controlled by a limited number of professional organizations, such as the TV news networks and the metropolitan daily newspapers. For all its ideological biases and blinkers, the media fact-checked. So if you said that Barack Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya who wants to establish death panels, you either could not get into the news at all or you would be debunked therein. Once prominent candidates and broadcasters started saying such things routinely and paid no price, the convention of politics as serious communication quickly died. Jay Rosen has been arguing this thesis effectively. He has blamed “movement” conservatives and the right-wing media even though his original framework is quite nonpartisan.

… or …

2. Politics has never been very much about truth. Politicians have always gotten away with massive lies or with mistruths they did not know to be false, such as blatant racism or exaggerations of the Communist threat during the second half of the last century. It is a standard trope of intellectual criticism to say that nobody even cares about truth any more. That is because neither politicians nor voters have ever cared about it all that much. They have always used and interpreted political speech as a mix of things, such as truth-claims, ideological commitments, signalling to the troops, and slams at the opponent. The relative importance of truth shifts from decade to decade as different institutional structures wax and wane. For instance, the demise of the monopoly press and the rise of the Internet has changed the rules of the game, both for better and for worse. The relative role of truth also changes from month to month according to the political cycle. Just as truth is the first casualty of war, so it is the first virtue thrown overboard in a competitive presidential campaign.

I began with two quotes to show that intellectuals have been worried about the demise of truth for at least a century. Many more examples could be cited, but I like these two because of some interesting contrasts.

First, Lippman and and Stone were opposites in many respects, ideological, professional, stylistic. “Everything about them was a study in contrast,” writes Myra McPherson. Yet they both wrote extensively about the dangers of propaganda, the public’s low esteem for truth, and the consequent dangers to America. That suggests that this is not a wholly new problem.

These short quotes only hint at their complex views, but they illustrate two different levels of concern. Lippmann describes the 194o campaign in words that eerily presage 2012. But he is not deeply worried, assuming that when Americans hear all the “buncombe” about socialist Democrats and plutocratic Republicans, they will discount it at an appropriate rate and expect sanity to return after the inauguration. In other words, they know what game is being played at any given moment and expect truth to reemerge during the legislative session (just not in October of an even-numbered year).

Stone’s words also seem prophetic.  As if describing a 2012 campaign commercial or debate, he writes (in 1962), “key technical points are given rapid treatment so hurried and obscure as to hide their significance; one’s own position is high-lighted, the adversary’s is twisted and the neutral’s is given only a quick once-over.”  But Stone is very concerned, arguing that the mass media and mass publics of the West have been lied into a state of terror to support the Cold War at the risk of nuclear Armageddon.

Neither man would be surprised by the spectacle of 2012, but their reaction would differ. Stone might say, “You are once again risking the loss of your democratic birthright by allowing powerful leaders to lie deliberately and destroy your very regard for the truth.” Lippmann might reply, “It was always thus. Politics (in the sense of national competitions over governmental power) has never relied much on truth. Just let the people make a general judgment about who’s on their side, and things will work out OK.”

Of course, there is another option, which is to build institutions and practices that favor truth. Walter Lippmann was deeply impressed by the power of propaganda in World War I and wrote in the Phantom Public (1925) that citizens could not know what is going on, lacked coherent values and interests, were easily manipulated, and never seriously affected the government. He concluded that their only role was to use the blunt force of majority rule to unseat extremely incompetent or tyrannical leaders. John Dewey responded in The Public and its Problems (1927) that citizens had indeed lost their ability to deliberate, pursue truths, and govern themselves, but this was the result of fixable flaws in the press, the university, the legislature, and other modern institutions.

Dewey saw that citizens need not only more and better information, but also relationships characterized by mutual trust and accountability. Information is easily dismissed, manipulated, and misused, but when people have good reasons to trust their metropolitan daily newspaper, it can tell them truths that they may not want to hear. When they trust religious congregations and unions, those organizations can call them to hard truths. And when they have genuine relationships with public institutions, public leaders can risk speaking the truth. Dewey’s theoretical writing was often frustratingly vague, but he played a role in building settlement houses, news magazines, social studies classes in high schools, the NAACP, and a host of other organizations that strengthened deliberative democracy for the 20th century. Our question is how to revive that in the 21st.

reforming civic education

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In lieu of a substantive blog post here today, I’d like to invite people to read my Huffington Post essay entitled “What We Need to Do About Civic Education” (and, if you are so moved, to like it or share it there, because that boosts its placement.) The HuffPost also ran a news article on our research entitled “Civics Education Testing Only Required In 9 States For High School Graduation: CIRCLE Study.”

I begin my piece:

Whether and how well we teach civics are important questions, especially in the midst of an election campaign in which millions of Americans are being asked to sort through complicated issues and navigate an increasingly difficult voting process.

We found recently that 68 percent of young people didn’t know whether their state required a photo ID to vote, and 80 percent of the young people didn’t know their state’s early registration rules. Other news reports have raised the question of whether citizens understand broader issues. In the New York Times online (Sept. 23), Thomas B. Edsall quoted a Romney supporter who explained why President Obama might win that state: “People are stupid. … [Governments] eliminated civics from our curriculum. The students don’t know about civics, they don’t know about our history, our government, our constitution.”

I note that, contrary to popular belief, states do still require some civics. But the civics course comes late–often just one semester in senior year of high school–and the content is  not aligned to worthwhile tests or assessments.

That means that a student preparing for a civics test (if there is a test) may have to memorize how many votes it takes to overcome a veto or which house of Congress must originate revenue bills. That is useful information if you want to assess a president or influence Congress, but it has no value if it is simply stored in short-term memory and the student doesn’t see how to apply it. A multiple-choice exam is a poor tool for assessing advanced knowledge or the application of knowledge to complex situations, let alone students’ abilities to work together in groups.

Many states make lofty statements about civic skills and virtues in their standards (which are official regulations), but since the standards are unaligned with assessments, they mean little.

major CIRCLE study of state policies for civics

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Yesterday, we released a study of all the states’ standards, course requirements, and tests related to civic education. The American Enterprise Institute’s Program on American Citizenship says, “New CIRCLE Research Confirms: Civic Education Lacking in Most States.” The Washington Examiner is pithier: “Civics Cuckoos: Only 9 states require high schoolers pass civics.” Nora Fleming, in Ed Week, quotes me for a summary:

“The standards in most states include some high aspirations, but typically have nothing to do with assessments. The standards are miscellaneous, the assessments are lacking, and when they are high stakes, they are trivial,” Levine said. “I think in a big, deep way, civics and preparation for citizenship has been left out by policymakers, who think in terms of preparation for college and for a difficult labor market but don’t think of civics as part of this.”

Over at “Voices for Education” (the blog of Harvard Education publishing), I make an argument for the kind of civic education we need. I will have a longer Huffington Post editorial up pretty soon with a different version of the argument. [Update; it’s here.]

Nora Fleming also uses the study as a springboard for a second piece in which she describes Mikva Challenge as an example of good programming; see “Out of School Engagement in Civic Education and the 2012 Election.”