You might think that the USA must change deeply over the next decade, which will unfold 250 years after the decade in which our republic originally took shape and will include the first eight years after the Trump Administration.
You might also think that this change should be “civic.” Perhaps we need reforms to make our republic and society more civic, or we should change our economy, environment, and other aspects of our world in civic ways–or both.
To advance this conversation, we need sharper definitions of the word “civic” and concrete ideas about what civic reforms should look like in the late 2020s and 2030s.
One of the best places to look is the new special issue of Daedalus entitled “How Do We Renovate American Democracy at the 250th?” It grew out of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship and is edited by Danielle Allen, Stephen B. Heintz, and Eric P. Liu. It is entirely open-access. I have not yet read every article, but all the contributors are excellent, and the topics are compelling, ranging from congressional reform to high school civic education, from local journalism to tech. platforms.
I offer the concluding contribution, entitled “Building Institutions to Improve Civic Culture.” The abstract says:
Americans must disagree better to sustain a healthier civic culture. This is not only a matter of individual behavior and values but also a question of institutional design. An example of an institution that generally supported disagreement, conversation, and collaboration in the twentieth century was the metropolitan daily newspaper, but its business model has collapsed. To recover civic culture, we need business models (defined broadly) for new institutions that can enable discussion and self-governance.
In the article, I actually argue that disagreeing well is insufficient. We must also produce and protect common-pool resources. For me, that combination comes close to defining the word “civic.”
To quote a bit more from my piece:
I think the main challenge of our moment is to develop civic organizations that can flourish and grow, teach civic skills and values, and serve as venues for constructive disagreement. The “upswing” that furnishes the title of the book by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, … was an impressive period of innovation and expansion in U.S. civil society from 1900 to 1960.6 If we saw a similar civic renaissance today, not only would more people participate in familiar groups that discuss issues and manage common-pool resources (such as congregations and other traditional associations) but new forms would emerge to meet the needs of our time.
For example, during the period that Putnam and Romney Garrett label “the upswing,” reliable daily newspapers became prevalent in the United States. By 1972, 69 percent of Americans told the General Social Survey (GSS) that they read a newspaper “every day.”7 It is easy enough to envision a daily publication about serious matters, written by professionals to inform a whole community. The hard part is the business model. Why would many people pay for such a product? The recipe that sustained metropolitan daily newspapers during the 1900s included hard news plus human-interest stories, comics, sports, gossip, and other features aimed at various members of each household, all funded by a combination of revenue from subscribers and occasional readers and advertisers. Once the internet captured advertising revenue, this model disintegrated. By 2014, just one-quarter of respondents told the GSS that they read a newspaper daily; the GSS subsequently retired the question, as it ceased to be a useful measure of news consumption.
Also during the upswing, many colleges and universities offered some measure of civic education while contributing knowledge and culture to their communities and serving as significant venues for public debate. Universities collected state subsidies, tuition, philanthropy, and clinical fees, and they offered economic mobility, access to licensed professions, ambitious research prized by industry and the military, vigorous social life, and quasi-professional sports, along with civic benefits. This model is now under considerable stress, though it has not fully collapsed, as with the daily newspaper.8
Similarly, Putnam and Romney Garrett show that after 1910, high schools rapidly spread across the United States and became another pillar of civic culture, not only preparing students to be more capable citizens but also serving as foci for adult community life.9 No national policy made this happen. Instead, most communities found that they needed at least one high school to be economically competitive, and they taxed themselves to build and maintain their own schools. This model worked in many localities, although spending was never adequate in poor communities or for students of color. This model survives, notwithstanding consolidations that have removed high schools from some smaller towns and growing state subsidies for private schools.
Today, it is not hard to envision a social media platform that serves as an excellent venue for disagreeing well. Any platform must use an algorithm to decide what material each user sees, and a good algorithm would favor substantiative content from a deliberately diverse range of views. The question is how to capitalize such a platform so it can expand to rival the huge for-profit social media outlets of the present, which do the opposite for billions of users, favoring material that induces outrage and reinforces users’ prior assumptions. In other words, the problem is the same as the one that confronted proponents of professional journalism circa 1900, but we haven’t yet found a workable business model for our time.
Source: Peter Levine, “Building Institutions to Improve Civic Culture,” Daedalus 155(3) Summer 2026, pp. 203-207. See also: Putnam and Garrett, The Upswing (a video discussion with me).