Citizenship

The massive opportunity in renewing and investing in citizenship.

Democracies collapse when citizenship is neglected, and just like friendship or a relationship, citizenship requires tending to. These days citizenship feels like a forgotten labor of our parents’ generations. Basically, we’re flaking on citizenship.

The word itself has lost meaning — rather than a civic duty to engage in the structures that hold a country together (“what have you done lately as citizenship?”), citizenship today is a passport booklet (“where do you have citizenship?”).

Voting, long the most visible act of citizenship, unfortunately masks its more durable forms: serving the public, strengthening institutions, criticizing authority, and raising a resilient society.

It’s time for citizenship to mean something again, beyond exercising it once every few years during a vote.

In its best form, citizenship is preventative medicine for society. Today in democracies around the world, we’re trying to stem an arterial bleed with a bandaid, an obvious failure of neglecting citizenship for too long.

I think restoration is possible. A few ideas:

1. Serve your country. Below I outline Regular Service, a proper national service program.
2. Be just a little less online. This one is tough for me because I love the internet. More on this below.
3. Think as a generation. Think of your generation as a graduating class, and make your mark together.

Regular Service

More countries should require public service of all citizens. Just two years, in any capacity.

Public service is the very best way to understand how government really works. You’re up close and personal with the problems, you struggle through bureaucracy, and you learn the extent of the work needed to maintain a democracy.

Here’s what a service program, which I’m calling Regular Service, would look like:

1. Pre-career. Immediately after high school, or immediately after college, every person is required to serve the public for two years.
2. Regular jobs. Make highways safer, build voting infrastructure, staff a help center for senior citizens, defend against cyber attacks, etc.
3. Go anywhere. Any jurisdiction counts: state, local, tribal, federal, military, whatever.
4. Stay put. Same job for the whole period, no moving around. Know the work inside and out and become an expert.
5. Sacrifice. Same mid-range pay for everyone. Part of understanding service is understanding (a tiny bit of) sacrifice.
6. Truly mandatory. No exemptions whatsoever from the program. There are so many jobs that any medical or geographical accommodation is workable.

Most people would come out of Regular Service in one of two camps:

• Shocked by the slowness, waste, and ineffectiveness of government, and never want to touch it again.
• Shocked by the slowness, waste, and ineffectiveness of government, and want to find a way to fix it.

This is a great outcome. Even if only 1 in 10 people is in the second camp, that’s far more people excited to improve their government (and country) than without a service program.

Less Online

I love the internet and I am very online. I understand the power of a good meme.

The shock of Covid accelerated the idea that our digital lives have replaced our physical ones, but on day-to-day basis that’s not true for most of us.

An important prerequisite of citizenship is some form of physical closeness to the people whose problems you are working to solve. Citizenship is improved by getting offline just a little bit more.

This proximity is a crucial element of citizenship. I’m convinced that the more calloused your hands the less cynical you become, and if citizenship is good for anything, it’s reducing cynicism in society.

Think as a Generation

It’s tempting to always follow wisdom from generations that came before. It feels safe: they made it out of the maze, so they must know the way.

Better for citizenship, however, would be to act as a graduating class of your country that is leaving a collective mark on the nation, free from the shadows of others.

This is impossible in practice, of course, but it gets your generation going the right direction, and it forces awareness of cultural shifts happening beneath your feet.

If you have a current sense of levels of trust in institutions, the borders of completing political agendas, which parts of government function and which don’t, etc, then you can just think on your own to solve the types of big problems for which we might otherwise simply ask for wisdom, which by now is out of date.

Good citizenship should encourage younger generations to question older ones, ask why certain things worked for them, and detect when culture has shifted.

Considering your citizenship is a very personal task. Almost like faith, everyone’s is slightly different and you may have difficulty explaining it. Your country will be better of when you start defining citizenship not as which passport you hold, but instead as what you’ve done lately in service of the country.