Are We Up to the Job?

A Gallup survey last year found that a paltry 9 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress, compared with 55 percent who had “only a little” or “none.” The presidency fared better, but was hardly a standout—36 percent expressed much confidence in it and the same number had little or none. Even the Supreme Court, which has carefully cultivated an above-the-fray reputation, only drew 36 percent of Americans saying they had strong faith in it.

These numbers confirm the general lack of confidence that people have in their leaders. It is not a healthy quality in what is supposed to be a republic—in which all authority derives from the people and is delegated only temporarily to the occupants of these institutions.

But what about the flip side: How much faith should we have in the American people?

This question is rarely asked in our public discourse. Politicians, always looking ahead to their next electoral contest, never dare to doubt the virtue and wisdom of the American people. They know all, see all, understand all—and thank you very much for your vote! Still, it is hard to deny that Americans are not doing a good job discharging their civic duties.

Take, for instance, the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which asked Americans what they think of Neil Gorsuch serving as a Supreme Court justice: 32 percent supported the idea, 20 percent opposed it, and 47 percent had no opinion. Considering the power of the Supreme Court in determining public policy, as well as the rarity of a vacancy, this is a mind-boggling number of people who do not seem to care.

Another example: Professor Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin has recently tracked a noticeable change in views of Obamacare. At the beginning of 2016, support hovered around 40 percent. Now it is up to 48 percent, while disapproval has sunk to 43 percent. These are the best numbers the law has ever seen—and they come right as it is falling to pieces. Premiums are rising, insurers are dropping out of the program. But the people as a whole seem blissfully ignorant of these and other problems.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. In 2012, the National Exit Poll found that 51 percent of voters thought “government should do less,” while 43 percent thought it should “do more.” And yet President Barack Obama won reelection comfortably. The reason: Nearly a quarter of those who thought government should do less voted for him. How disengaged must one be to think the government is too big, and Obama is the right person to fix that problem? Even further back, in 1960, the “Michigan School” of public opinion research published The American Voter, which found an electorate ignorant of the issues and generally disengaged from the process.

It may run contrary to the spirit of the age—in which nobody is to judge anybody and we are all to celebrate our unique, irreducible wonderfulness—but it still needs to be said: Americans have become bad citizens.

If this were an absolute monarchy, citizenship would be easy. The king would say jump, and all we would have to do is ask how high. But this is a republic, where we are tasked with ruling ourselves. Citizenship, in this sort of system, is the exercise of our personal governing authority. This is why the Constitution guarantees the right to vote, the right to petition our elected officials, the right to speak freely, to argue and debate with each other, and ultimately the right to think for ourselves. These are the essential ingredients of citizenship, of our own personal slice of sovereignty.

This means that republican government is hard. It takes extra work. James Madison wrote in Federalist 55 that “republican government presupposes the existence” of civic virtue “in a higher degree than any other form.” Without it, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain [people] from destroying and devouring one another.”

It is dubious that we are living up to that ideal, or even matching the efforts of past generations. It is difficult to gauge, as public opinion polling is a relatively recent invention, but looking through old newspapers, political speeches, and petitions from past eras, one gets the distinct impression that policy debates were more detailed and people had greater fluency in the norms of republican government.

Civic engagement was most certainly greater in the past. Voter turnout in the 1896 presidential election, for instance, was around 80 percent and in some states, like Ohio, topped 90 percent. The combatants in that election—William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley—were locked in a heated dispute over how to regulate the currency, which spiked public interest. Many voters today probably do not have the faintest idea that the currency is regulated, let alone how it is regulated, let alone how it should be regulated.

Considering our modern conveniences, we really have no excuse for our collective indolence. It is easier to acquire information now than at any point in human history. Work is substantially less burdensome, giving us a quantum of free time that was utterly unimaginable in prior eras. Even the poorest among us have access to amenities that, just a century ago, the wealthiest of the wealthy could not possibly enjoy. And yet we have let our civic duties go unattended.

Is it any wonder that the elites in Washington, D.C., govern for their own interest? They receive no clear direction from the voters back home. We are too busy watching Flip or Flop, playing video games, or uploading pictures to our Instagram accounts. As Woody Allen once said, 80 percent of life is showing up, and a shocking number of Americans are simply not showing up to engage in the debates of our republic. It’s no surprise they are unhappy with the results.

And that is especially true of Congress. The Framers explicitly designed that institution to serve as a mirror of public opinion, which Madison wrote “is the real sovereign in every free” government. If today’s public opinion is a self-contradictory tangle of ill-considered views from a disengaged citizenry, little wonder that Congress would reflect a distorted picture of that right back at us. Little wonder as well that we would hate what we see.

The Founding Fathers bequeathed us a republic, which as Lincoln said is a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” All the institutions they built some 225 years ago are still in place, ready to be put to use. We the people are just not prepared to make the most of them. But we could—if we did the hard work of being good citizens.

Jay Cost is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.