The one thing that Americans do agree on is that it’s getting worse: nearly 8 in 10 Americans polled in a 2018 election day survey said that, “Americans are becoming more politically divided.”

We’ve heard a lot lately about issues of civility and free speech. These issues are headline grabbing, but they aren’t central to what is broken in our public sphere. Rather, issues of civility and free speech are symptoms of larger, systemic problems.

America’s public sphere is broken because we communicate as propagandists and we don’t know the rules of productive discussion and debate. Focusing on free speech or civility to solve these problems is, in fact, a red herring, a distraction from the real issues that need to be addressed.

It’s plain that our current way of speaking to each other doesn’t work. A recent Pew survey found that 53 percent of Americans thought that talking about politics with people on the other side of the political divide is “stressful and frustrating.” And, it seems, having those stressful and frustrating conversations makes things worse, not better. Sixty-three percent in the Pew poll said that talking to those across the political divide left them feeling like they have even less in common than they had previously believed. That could be because only 4 percent of Americans describe their political opposition as “fair.”

Partisanship and distrust have infected all aspects of our civic life. We only have confidence and trust in the government when our side controls it and we fear the worst when our side does not. There is currently no credible, neutral “umpire” of American politics—there is no media organization that we all trust to tell us what we need to know to make good decisions, and there is no government institution that we all trust to uphold the rule of law.

We treat one another as partisans first and as citizens second. And, what’s worse, our media, government institutions, and elected officials seem to prefer us to be partisans.

Without hyperbole, we might describe our moment as another “age of catastrophe,” similar to the one that saw the collapse of many economies and democracies between the two world wars.

Our current age of catastrophe is characterized by a fundamental breakdown of the nation’s public sphere—as evidenced by widespread distrust, political polarization, and frustration.

On October 25, 1931—during the previous age of catastrophe—philosopher John Dewey gave a radio lecture on the relationship between education and democracy. “Democracy will be a farce,” explained Dewey, “unless individuals are trained to think for themselves, to judge independently, to be critical, to be able to detect subtle propaganda and the motives which inspire it.”

Does Dewey’s edict still apply? Can we educate ourselves out of this disaster? Maybe. There are two important differences between then and now. First, in the 1930s, government propaganda contributed to the age of catastrophe. Today, we citizens are the propagandists behind the catastrophe.

Everything about our current media ecosystem is designed for us to communicate as propagandists. Ubiquitous notifications are designed to addict us so we continually engage with messages. Likes, favorites, and retweets reward us by pinging the dopamine receptors in our brains. Apps withhold notifications to keep us cycling back for positive feedback, and algorithms reward and amplify only the most polarizing messages—so that we are constantly urged to voice our most outrageous takes on political events.

Every single one of us has more propaganda power in our pockets than any government had at its disposal between the world wars. Instead of being independent thinkers who are overwhelmed by and succumb to government “newspeak,” we willingly create, consume, and spread propaganda ourselves. We create memes to attack our political opponents. We watch and share conspiracy theories and other “news” riddled with half-truths. We communicate cynically and gullibly—we believe nothing the other side says and everything our side says.

Communicating cynically and gullibly has broken our public sphere. Our addiction to propaganda has left us vulnerable. Look again at the 2016 Russian propaganda efforts and you’ll see that their strategy was to take advantage of our already hyper-polarized public sphere to get us all to spread their messages of distrust and resentment. And we did.

Like Dewey said in 1931, we need to be educated to think, judge, and be critical about the news that we post and consume. Unfortunately, most of us don’t know how to do this. We might consider encouraging social media users to take a training course in journalism skills so that when they produce media content they know how to do so responsibly.

Another difference between Dewey’s era and our own is that in 1931 we had more trust in government, media, and institutions than we do now, in large part because we participated in collective decision-making more back then than we do now. Robert Putnam explained in Bowling Alone that generations of Americans have stopped joining clubs, PTAs, and other civic organizations that once served as laboratories for democracy. Our failure to participate in these organizations meant that we failed to learn democratic practices. Our failure to participate also made us less trusting of the decisions that are being made on our behalf. Eventually, we began to distrust the democratic process itself.

Researchers know that there’s a reciprocal relationship between participating in public deliberation and trusting the outcomes of the decisions made. This means that we need to learn skills in public deliberation. But public deliberation requires neutral arbiters—referees—to regulate our public discourse. We could be our own umpires, but we don’t know the rules. Without rules, our conversations are unproductive, and those who speak the loudest, with the most anger, control our public discourse.

We can still join civic organizations and learn the rules of productive conversations. We can also participate in structured conversations in our local communities. We have institutions that know how to teach such skills. Organizations like the Kettering Foundation conduct training in how to facilitate difficult conversations and create issue guides for communities to use for problem solving. Communication centers like the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University are labs for teaching these democratic skills. Students there learn how to design fair deliberative processes, facilitate conversations with Colorado communities, and act as neutral guides for real-world community problem solving.

And it works. According to Martín Carcasson, director of the Colorado State center, “with a good process, we can significantly lower the bar on the difficulty of the conversation, and often get much better results.” He said that, in his 12 years of facilitating those conversations he has found that the situation ended up worse than it started in only a handful of cases. “I truly believe,” said Carcasson, that “we aren’t nearly as divided as we think we are, and a quality conversation can reveal that.”

A recent report from More in Common backs up such optimism: “77% of Americans believe our differences are not so great that we cannot come together.” In other words, those 63 percent of Americans who reported having even less in common after talking about politics with someone from the other side of the political divide probably weren’t doing it right.

Perhaps Dewey was overly optimistic, and democracy has always been something of a farce. Even so, learning to communicate as citizens rather than as propagandists and learning how to have productive conversations about difficult topics could prevent our democratic farce from turning into tragedy. We must avert the catastrophe of our broken public sphere.

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I’ve spent nearly the past decade traveling the United States and talking with people about the Constitutional system, and I think the answer is yes.

My work on the question started in 2008, with an experiment called the Constitution Café. These were an evolution of the Socrates Café, public gatherings around the globe (from Tokyo to Sydney to Salt Lake City) that follow Socratic principles and served as spaces for friends and foes, intimates and strangers, to explore existential problems, an exploration that itself made people feel more bound to one another.

The Constitution Cafés are offbeat, miniature Constitutional Conventions that bring together people of many ages and experiences and perspectives to hold thoughtful yet impassioned exchanges about what we think the Constitution says on an array of matters. And about what we think, if we had our druthers, it should say.

The author, Christopher Phillips (left), with participants in a Constitution Café at a public library in Mt. Shasta, California. Photo courtesy of Christopher Phillips.

This is a radical idea. Most Americans venerate the Constitution, even if many of us don’t actually seem to know what’s in it. It’s considered untouchable, beyond reproach by us mere mortals, and this intimidating ideal only serves to make us feel like the system it begets can never be changed, no matter how much it contributes to record levels of political apathy and anger.

But the document’s Framers weren’t so reluctant. I studied Jefferson (as well as Socrates) in college, and learned that he derided those who looked at constitutions “like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.” He believed that such people “ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.” To him, “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

Our Constitution Cafés have an “aspirational component,” as we put on our Framers’ hats and craft “new” Constitutional articles. They also have an “activist” component—we ask ourselves and one another what we’re willing to do to make the big Constitutional ideas we have in mind a reality. Far from a pretentious intellectual exercise, with the “experts” sitting on a stage pontificating to the masses, we all mix it up together.

When Constitution Café first got underway, we had a president who’d been a Constitutional law professor. Even so, events were already prompting Americans to fret about the state and straits of our constitutional republic, which is supposed to be of the democratic variety that respects fundamental individual rights. Under Barack Obama’s watch, Occupy protesters were rousted and ousted from one public space after another in public spaces in U.S. municipalities. The then-mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, even chillingly declared after evicting Occupy activists, that he would create a sliver of a public “First Amendment zone.”

In our cafés, we saw a growing and pervasive preoccupation, in communities rural and urban, liberal and progressive, conservative and libertarian, with the philosophical basis of democracy, and whether that basis had been undermined in our country. Many participants were of the opinion that our republic would be unrecognizable to our Founding Fathers and Mothers.

In these conversations, there has been widespread interest in privacy rights, and dismay over their dissipation. This is due in large part to revelations about widespread government collection of phone call data—followed by broader claims about data collection involving the omnipresent internet and social media. This has prompted rich and anxious exchanges about the Fourth Amendment and how we should go about defining and delineating a constitutional right for privacy in the 21st century.

I have also been in the midst of explorations throughout the country about whether corporations should enjoy the same First Amendment rights to free speech as individuals, spurred in considerable measure by the Supreme Court decision on Citizens United v. FEC. In a similar vein, the Supreme Court’s 2014 “Hobby Lobby” decision that expanded religious rights at the expense of constraining Obamacare strictures has been a platform for deep probing of whether we’ve lost our way when it comes to our Founders’ original intent of keeping corporations at arm’s length in influencing the interlocking concepts of citizenship and personhood.

Lately, debates on subjects like immigration and the constitutionality of sanctuary cities, on whether the Electoral College should be done away with, and on how the Constitution can drive (or serve as an obstacle to) campaign finance reform have been hot Constitution Café topics. And one issue that has been of perennial interest—namely, our Second Amendment rights (or lack thereof) for citizens not serving in militias to bear arms—has become even more divisive.

Over the last six months, I’ve met Americans of quite varied political stripes who declaim that our system has become “rigged.” This is not in the puny, self-aggrandizing way that Donald Trump uses it. For many Americans, “rigged” expresses the pervasive fear that Trump and his ilk will do away with all remaining vestiges of our system of checks and balances.

Students and community members discussing the Constitution at East Central High School in San Antonio, Texas. Photo courtesy of Christopher Phillips.

Of late, I’ve been making these inquiries broader, as part of an initiative I call Democracy Café (also the name of our nonprofit, which can be accessed either via DemocracyCafe.org or SocratesCafe.com). We’re now asking ourselves what we can do to reverse anti-democratic trends and to “unrig” our system, so that the promise of our civic and political sphere becomes more aligned with actual practice and can once again serve as a space dedicated to the Jeffersonian idea of freedom.

While the Constitution remains our frame for discourse, we inquire into specific pressing matters. These include the continuing lack of adequate funding for a world-class education for our youngest citizens, the dearth of affordable and high-quality health care for one and all, the ever more forceful attempts to round up and deport even undocumented immigrants who make clear-cut contributions to our nation and economy, and orchestrated efforts by elected officials to spread misinformation and disinformation in order to demonize, polarize, intimidate, and malign efforts to hold them accountable.

We’ve become more proactive, not just discussing what our society has become, but designing ways to get us out of this morass. And it has led to a complementary initiative, the Declaration Project, that seeks to resurrect our rabble-rousing Spirit of ’76 by issuing mini-Declarations inspired by our original July 4, 1776 document.

One ongoing group within the project is composed of junior high students from a public charter school in downtown Philadelphia with ethnically diverse students. One, Jazmarie Vega, penned a “Declaration of Independence from Silence.” It goes:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a community of people to speak out against the crimes and injustices that have been done to them by other people, and to demand mutual respect and equality, it is their duty to do so. Some hold these truths to be self-evident, that we are and ought to be equal, no matter gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnic background, etc., and that this is one of our many unalienable rights. And to secure such rights, we, as a people, must use the power in our freedom of speech to uplift ourselves from the wrongdoings of society based upon their biased actions and words. Too many lives are lost and spirits broken by the harsh actions and ways of people with certain prejudices. We as a people are stuck in this cycle of an ancient battle for the upper hand, for privilege, and upliftment of our own community even if it means the pitfall of another. While victims, we are still very much so to blame for this ongoing fight for power and glory. We, unknowingly, contribute to the fueling of this hate fire in our admittance to silence. And, so, I declare my independence from this silence. The silence that has kept too many in oppression. The silence that is heard in classrooms and business places when others are harassed. I, as an individual, dissolve the bonds and ties that I have to this perpetual ignorance and vow to use my newly declared independence to encourage others to do so as well.

As I carry on with the cafés, the questions recur. Has our Constitution—as Barack Obama, former professor of constitutional law, maintains—“proved a sufficient defense against tyranny? Do we need to use our Declaration as a touchstone and to heed Jefferson’s advice to engage in a revolution every two or three generations?”

All of us need to take a hard look in the mirror. We need to ask ourselves whether we are doing all we can, and must, to wrest our republic from those who aim to make a mockery of the sublime sacrifices of our Founding Fathers and Mothers, for the most self-serving and democracy-busting ends.

It’s time to quit asking ourselves what our country can do for us—the stock-in-trade of our President and his family and closest associates—and ask ourselves instead, more than ever, what we can do for our country. Before it’s too late.

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The evening’s discussion, which took up the question, “Do We Still Know How to Be Good Citizens?” unfolded before a large audience at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

“We are at our best as citizens when we are being critical,” said one panelist, Jennifer Mercieca, a Texas A&M University historian of American political rhetoric. And that’s an old idea, she added, citing the early American thinker John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which were published in the late 1760s.

Mercieca drew particular attention to a point Dickinson raised about the necessity for citizens to be vigilant in defense of their own freedom: “Ought not the people therefore to watch? To observe facts? To search into causes? To investigate designs? And have they not a right of judging from the evidence on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness?”

But maintaining that steadfast watchfulness toward government in a democracy requires a difficult balancing act. The panelists discussed these dual imperatives of citizenship for Americans, who are supposed to forcefully challenge their leaders and public officials, while also cooperating with them; to engage tightly with issues while yet remaining dispassionate enough to be objective and rational.

“We have an obligation to be very forceful in speaking out when we think things are wrong,” said former Congressman Mickey Edwards, who now works on political reform and teaching political leadership.

But Edwards emphasized that it’s also vital, particularly among elected representatives, “to sit down and respectfully work out where you can work together and find the common ground.”

Turning to another theme, the panelists expressed varying degrees of concern about whether some of the necessary balances in exercising American citizenship have been breaking down, particularly in light of the bitter 2016 presidential election. Johann Neem, a Western Washington University historian of civil society and author of Creating a Nation of Joiners, noting that he was an immigrant, said that some of the abrasive language on both sides of the political divide made it “harder to have a home politically” in contemporary American society.

Edwards, the former congressman, said one reason for today’s mounting anxiety about the nation’s social cohesiveness is that the United States has become less stable and predictable. The event’s moderator, Nancy Barnes, editor and executive vice president for news at the Houston Chronicle, said she worried about growing political polarization within journalism, and asked what the deepening political split—with “media organizations that represent the right and represent the left”—might mean not only for media but for the country.

But the panelists also took heart in historical examples of how the United States met past challenges of citizenship, rising above periods of intense discord and partisan acrimony. Neem said that the country previously has managed to disagree over fundamental questions, while still retaining sufficient solidarity needed to solve its problems and reach compromise.

“The kind of trust that bridges partisan divides, that bridges ethnic divides—our whole history is figuring out how to build that trust,” Neem said.

Another panelist, The Washington Post “Civilities” columnist Steven Petrow, who is an expert on etiquette, pointed to Emily Post, who wrote about proper etiquette in the post-World War I era, a time of tremendous social dislocation and economic upheaval; and to Miss Manners, who during the turbulent post-Vietnam War years offered Americans witty but sensible advice for coping with their anxieties and stresses, while also exhorting her readers to taking responsibility for their actions and words.

Petrow said that Americans need similar help during this difficult moment. One key requirement of civil citizenship, he said, is to avoid using words as weapons to shut down conversation; better to engage respectfully with people, even when they savage you on social media.

“I love the people who agree with me, but I love my haters just as much,” he said. When he writes back to people who fire off vicious emails, about two-thirds of his correspondents write him back, apologize for the language they used, and engage in productive conversation, he said.

Mercieca, the rhetorician, said that people in politics and media prosper by dividing Americans against themselves. But what Americans really hunger for is the “language of transcendence”—making a broad appeal to everyone. Petrow jumped in to ask the audience, “Who would like to see more transcendence?” Hundreds of hands went up, and Petrow nodded. “We’re all suffering with this level of incivility. And people want to find ways to come together because there are so many ways that we’re disconnected.”

Mercieca said that citizens can withdraw consent from political systems that don’t serve them. Edwards argued that political reforms that move people away from partisanship and parties—he mentioned nonpartisan legislative redistricting efforts in several states, as well as the top-two-vote-getter primary system in California—can create more spaces for citizens to engage in politics. “Washington, Adams, and Jefferson all said, ‘Don’t create political parties.’ And we did it. And we’re paying the price, and if we don’t fix it, they’re going to drag us down.”

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, panelists fielded queries on topics ranging from the case for mandatory voting; to how white privilege has compromised citizenship and representation; to how the panelists themselves would attempt to engage more young voters.

All of the panelists expressed pride in their American citizenship, and stories. Mercieca said that she’s a child of an immigrant—her father grew up in Malta during World War II, when it was the target of bombing—and America represents opportunity and safety to her.

Edwards echoed that, noting that his father grew up in an orphanage. Petrow reiterated the American credo of e pluribus unum—a Latin phrase meaning, “out of many, one,” which expresses an ideal of how the citizen relates to the larger society and nation.

Neem said that even the disagreements we have among ourselves, and over ideas about citizenship, reveal something essential about the national character. “Those disagreements remind us that being American is not genetic,” he said. “It’s something that can be argued over. It’s something that people can become.”

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In the democratic upheaval of the 21st century, citizens still want the protection of laws and the ability to choose representatives, but those powers may no longer be enough to make government legitimate in the eyes of the people. In the future, governments may rise or fall depending on whether they give citizens meaningful roles in decision-making, problem-solving, and community-building.

Changes in democracy are occurring now because of tectonic shifts in the relationship between citizens and government. As a population, we are better educated than ever before. We are not as deferential to expertise and authority as we once were. And we are networked through the internet to an almost infinite number of potential connections and sources of information. In other words, the people have more capacity. The question of whether governments, civil society, and other institutions can develop the ability to unleash that capacity underlies most of the public problems we face.

This new reality of rising citizen capacity makes some public servants uncomfortable. Trapped in systems designed to protect their expertise, besieged by people who no longer believe their data or respect their authority, and faced with hostile constituents at public events, public officials are understandably skeptical about the virtues, capabilities, and good sense of their fellow men and women.

In turn, citizens are skeptical about the virtues, capabilities, and good sense of their public officials. People are used to having choices in every other aspect of their lives—what to buy, where to live, how to earn a living—but there are few choices they can make in the public sector, other than which of two candidates to pick in each election. In the U.S., the level of trust in government has reached the lowest point on record.

The official, conventional processes for public engagement consist mostly of boring meetings in which citizens are given only a few minutes at a microphone to complain to their public officials. These meetings are almost completely useless for overcoming the divide between citizens and government; in fact, they seem to be making matters worse. The mismatch between what citizens expect and how governments operate is wide. For the most part, our political systems are still republics, not functioning democracies.

But over the past three decades, some governments have pioneered new processes, formats, and structures for engaging the public. The innovations that have emerged in recent years include intensive face-to-face deliberations, convenient online tools, and “high-impact volunteering” initiatives that tap the potential of citizens to solve public problems. Many of these innovations satisfy the fundamental needs and goals of citizens, illustrating the potential of public engagement for making difficult decisions and addressing formidable challenges. So far, these kinds of efforts are the exception rather than the rule. On the whole, the principles and practices they demonstrate are not deeply embedded in the ways that governments and communities operate.

If governments can move further, from temporary democratic projects to embedded democratic practices, they may achieve greater legitimacy by giving citizens more of what they want:

Transparency—not just making government information and data available to the public, but the extent to which that information is presented in ways that make it easier for people to absorb, understand, and act on it.

Public work—opportunities for people to work together, with the support and recognition of government, to solve problems or seize opportunities to improve their communities.

Choices—the extent to which governments provide people with options, including:

-Decisions that individuals and families can make about how they want their public services delivered and how they want public information provided.
-Decisions that citizens can make collectively on critical issues like education, budgets, planning and land use, public health, and public safety.

Deliberation—good processes for making those collective decisions, including opportunities for people to:

-Talk about why they care about an issue or policy question.
-Learn the facts they need to make informed decisions.
-Figure out what values they share, and how those should be reflected in policies.
-Find common ground among differences of background, ideology, and opinion.
-Decide what they want to recommend to policymakers.
-Decide whether and how they want to take action to implement their ideas.

Employing these small ‘d’ democratic practices as part of standard government operating procedures can be transformative. In countries and communities that have more participatory forms of governance, citizens are more likely to trust government, trust their neighbors, and pay their taxes. Governments are more likely to complete planned projects and manage public finances efficiently, and have fewer incidents of corruption.

Finally, there is another promising way to build government legitimacy, one that is frequently overlooked because it is a quality we tend to associate with community rather than government. When people come together regularly to socialize, form relationships, and feel like they belong to something—and if the people in those settings feel like they can interact with government in some meaningful way—then the society as a whole seems to have a greater sense of confidence, well-being, and trust in public institutions. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt once remarked, “Democracy needs a place to sit down,” and that sentiment may be even more true today, even though these gatherings may now be online networks and not just face-to-face meetings.

Whether and how people get together may seem more like a private matter than a government concern. But some of the best examples of thriving local democracy have come about because public officials helped to support, connect with, and learn from citizens meeting in community centers, schools, bars, restaurants, and online.

The city of Decatur, Georgia has found creative ways to include the community, from a Budget Expo, complete with ‘Touch the Budget’ and Budget Bingo, to hosting “Budgets and Beer” nights at a downtown bar, where city employees brought poster boards to help explain public finance issues and surveys to gather citizen input. “Meet and Eat,” a weekly lunch in Buckhannon, West Virginia, has helped citizens plan and establish a new farmer’s market and new bike trails. The residents and employees of Jun, Spain, use Twitter to communicate about everything from streetlight replacement to matters of EU policy—along with advertising social events, booking doctor’s appointments, and finding lost pets. The Brazilian cities that first began organizing Participatory Budgeting over twenty years ago made it work in part because the process has always been highly social, regular, and sustained (PB is now one of the most widespread democratic innovations, having reached over 3,000 cities worldwide).

In all of these places, engagement works because it meets a diverse array of people’s needs. These cities have succeeded because they pulled the social world and the political world closer to one another, showing how governance can become more congenial, more rational, and more fun.

For decades, we have clung to a political system that provides basic human rights, the opportunity to vote for our representatives, and little else. All over the world, this limited form of democracy is losing ground to authoritarian rulers. To establish trust and legitimacy with citizens, the next democracies must embody a better understanding not only of what citizens want, but of what citizens can contribute to government.

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