The state of civic health and how to improve it

America’s civic health is under attack from viruses such as election deniers, demagogues and those who argue that their own values and political goals are more important than the traditions and compromises of a democratic government, says Lloyd Kramer, director of Carolina Public Humanities.

Just as we work with others to take care of our physical health, we also need to work in our communities to maintain our civic health, says Kramer, a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ history department. The Well talked with Kramer about the state of civic health, historical lessons and what the University offers to help citizens participate in civic life.

How do you define civic health and why is it important for us to pay attention to it?

Civic health is as important for human communities as physical health. In fact, civic health and physical health are often connected because a thriving public life helps individuals live better and safer lives. We often talk about the importance of taking care of our physical bodies, but the American public body also needs attention. Good civic health means a community in which people engage with each other, where they participate in the shared life of the community and where public institutions are responsive to the needs of the people in that community.

As with one’s physical health, a healthy civic life requires truthful information, an ability to listen to others and a willingness to take seriously factual information that others provide. You have to pay attention to facts, not deny them, and recognize difficult truths, even when you don’t want to hear them.

A healthy civic community enables people to solve problems. If, for example, your community has ineffective schools or an environmental crisis or a breakdown in its health care system, these are public problems that have to be addressed through community or civic action.

How do people take the steps to do the things you describe, to intentionally plug into their community’s civic life?

People must engage with those around them to solve individual problems and community problems. You don’t live in isolation. When people live in communities where they don’t feel safe or where they feel continual inattention to their needs, they are not living a healthy civic life. When the community is not healthy, it is vulnerable to the viruses of political demagogues, authoritarian leaders, virulent nationalism or scapegoating. If the community is healthy and people feel that their needs are being recognized and addressed, they’re much less receptive to the virus of anti-democratic groups and demagogues.

The University’s resources to help people participate in civic life include the Promote Democracy Initiative and Carolina Public Humanities programs such as workshops and free lesson plans for K-12 teachers; weekend seminars; conversations at community colleges; and events in partnership with museums, theaters and cultural centers.

Gather accurate information about the history of your community and about the institutions that affect your life. This search for truthful information is one of our greatest contemporary challenges because many people distrust traditional information sources and because local newspapers have been collapsing. Information comes to people through websites, social media and broadcast media, including politically slanted TV networks and radio talk shows with corrosive, polarizing political agendas. America’s founders imagined a civic culture based in part on rational debate among well-informed participants in the public sphere. We now live in a massive media echo chamber that often fosters fears and irrational responses to contrived or trivial information.

Pay attention to what others are saying and listen with a critical ear. Good civic health requires participation in public institutions, but you cannot contribute constructively or cast well-informed votes if you don’t have accurate knowledge.

The most important factor for civic health is for individuals to understand how their well-being is connected to the well-being of others in the communities where they live, work or send their children to school.

The cause of America’s declining civic health is often misdiagnosed in the claim that public institutions are our enemies, that government can’t solve community or national problems. No institution or governmental system can solve all problems. Civic engagement and institutions must be part of solving shared obstacles. If you want to use a skateboard park, but it’s not being maintained, that’s a problem. How do you deal with it? You go see somebody at your town council or a public agency and say, “Our community is not serving us.” That’s a simple issue of daily life, but it’s the kind of action that should bring results in a healthy civic life.

When teaching, do you use historical examples of what happens when civic health declines?

My research and teaching have often focused on the American and French revolutions at the end of the 18th century. In America and France there was a breakdown in the health of the political and social body. People in these societies did not believe that government officials were taking their concerns seriously. When individuals and politically engaged groups decided they could not achieve their goals within the British colonial system or under the French monarchy, they attacked the reigning political bodies. The old public systems broke down in violence and polarization. Although the political body in both places was eventually revitalized, the surgery’s cost was painful and even deadly for many of the people who struggled to live through it.

Lloyd Kramer (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

Democracies are designed to resolve problems through legal processes rather than violence. Another historical example can be seen in the United States. Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, and the slaveholding political leaders in 11 southern states refused to accept the outcome of that election. They decided that the American political body could not be healed and a political amputation was required. Those anti-democratic radicals were defeated on the battlefield, but many of their descendants spent the next hundred years trying to reconstruct or hang on to something they lost.

In another example, our state’s civic health was destroyed by the Wilmington Riot of 1898 and the overthrow of the Wilmington Town Council. The state legislature enacted legal restrictions that denied Black people the right to vote for the next 65 years. No person of color could hold office. They couldn’t go to integrated schools. These were examples of a racist, anti-democratic virus attacking and sickening a civic body.

History shows us that if people refuse to accept the legitimacy of elections and public institutions, civic health will collapse.

What are the goals of the University’s efforts to nurture our civic health?

We support colleagues around the state and in public schools and community colleges and other institutions who are trying to give young people an appreciation for the importance of democracy and public life. Carolina Public Humanities tries to advance this goal by providing historical information and humanistic perspectives that give people the tools to understand how their well-being is connected to the civic health of their communities. We want to help North Carolinians from all backgrounds and ages recognize how their position in the world grows from a long history of people who struggled to create democratic institutions in which they can exercise their equal human rights and pursue their individual goals in healthy civic communities.