What Do We “Owe” to Our Country? Part 1: The Bill of Obligations
For the past couple of years I’ve been part of a study group with some former college classmates slowly working our way through a set of readings suggested by the long-time Supreme Court “swing” Justice Anthony Kennedy called “Understanding Freedom’s Heritage: How to Keep and Defend Liberty.” The list, which he put out about a decade ago, is pretty obviously one man’s opinion on what freedom “means.” But it’s put me in touch with a lot of thinking I hadn’t read before and it’s not quite as nerdy as it sounds. The reading/watching list includes long Supreme Court opinions, but also Reese Witherspoon’s closing argument in “Legally Blonde”; Pericles’s funeral oration, but also Don McLean’s “American Pie.” And the group tries to supplement whatever our topic of the day is with some additional readings that seem relevant.
Last week’s topic was the tension between individual freedom and democracy. I was especially interested in one of the readings, a new book that suggests we have both practical and moral “obligations” to actively work to protect our democracy. And I’m interested in your take on it. This is the first of three posts: Part 2 will focus on the idea of creating a national civics curriculum; Part 3 on how we can “act locally” to strengthen democracy.
About a year ago, NBC asked Americans what they believed was the most important issue facing the country. Number one on the list was not the economy or the rising cost of living or immigration or climate change, it was “threats to democracy.”
Some of those polled were surely thinking about the rioters in the Capitol on January 6, 2021 or the politicians who supported them. In Mitt Romney’s new biography, he frets that among his Senate colleagues, “a very large part of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” Others might have been thinking about the current wave of voter suppression laws or the virulent spread of online disinformation or the external threats to democracy posed by autocracies and rogue actors.
In his new book, The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens, Richard Haass, president of the Council for Foreign Relations, says it is his belief that democracy is “imperiled” that keeps him up at night, and that “it can be saved only if Americans across the political spectrum come to accept that citizenship involves more than their asserting – or the government’s protecting – what they understand to be their rights.”
In Haass’ mind, you can’t truly protect your rights as a citizen if you aren’t willing to embrace your responsibilities as a citizen. “Obligations,” he says, “are the other cornerstone of a successful democracy – obligations between individual citizens as well as between citizens and their government.” From the beginning of the republic, he notes, Americans built on to their Constitution a Bill of Rights. He doesn’t propose that his parallel “bill of obligations” would be mandatory (these are things “that should happen but that the law cannot require”). But he is also convinced that “American democracy will endure only if obligations join rights at the core of a widely shared understanding of citizenship.”
What sort of obligations is he talking about?
Here’s a quick summary of what he believes every citizen should do. As you read through it, give yourself a mental checkmark for each one of these you believe you are doing well:
1. Be informed – about what’s going on by reading and trying to understand how what happens affects us
2. Get involved – vote, join organizations, teach, preach
3. Be willing to compromise – accept that you are not always going to get 100% of what you want, and sometimes that getting something is better than nothing
4. Stay civil – critique people’s ideas or reasoning, but don’t go after them personally. And if you try to listen to what they are saying, occasionally you might learn something and change your mind
5. Reject violence – don’t do nothing if you are outraged, but look for nonviolent ways to do something -- civil disobedience is working within the system
6. Value norms – norms aren’t written down, but we know what they are: we remain civil, we help our neighbors, we give to charity. We also accept election results, accept the role of the media, tell the truth
7. Promote the common good – we accept some limits on our freedom to help out others: we don’t smoke in each other’s face, we wear seat belts, we don’t drive recklessly, we cover our faces when we’re sick
8. Respect government service – we try to be supportive of those in government who are trying their best, and should consider finding ways to give more people opportunities to participate in government work
9. Increase teaching of civics – we don’t teach it anymore in high schools or colleges; an informed citizenry should know more about how government works
10. Put country first – in the faceoff between personal convenience and the good of the whole, we should find ways to do what John F. Kennedy urged in Profiles in Courage: to act in “the national interest, rather than private or public gain.”
Some questions for you:
· Do you accept Haass’ premise that democracy is sliding?
· How are you doing in fulfilling the ideas he labels as “obligations”?
· How do you see others doing in meeting these obligations?
· Are these the right obligations?
· What needs to be added? Subtracted?
· What’s one of these obligations you could work on or get better at in the next two months?
As for me, I think it is a good list. There’s more that I could do on most of these obligations, but the one I really want to put some time into is the question of how to reintroduce civics into the curriculum in a way that doesn’t treat that teaching as an excuse for propaganda for one party or another (I’ll take that up in Part 2; Part 3 will look at the promising work being done to reanimate democracy on a local level).
In the meantime, I hope the Haass book will get an important conversation started. We’ve made very slow progress in ensuring that we live into the guarantees expressed in the original Constitution’s Bill of Rights, and there is more work to do in expanding and protecting those rights. But there is not nearly the energy being devoted toward living in to our responsibilities. We need to find a way back to the challenge Kennedy gave in his 1961 inaugural address, and “ask not what (our) country can do for us, but what (we) can do for (our) country.” That doesn’t mean blindly accepting laws we disagree with; it means improving them. It doesn’t mean ignoring the rest of the world; it means engaging with it and learning from it. It means taking some responsibility, making some sacrifice, to make this place that we live one that is ever-better.
References:
NBC News Poll on biggest issues: https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read/nbc-news-poll-57-voters-say-investigations-trump-continue-rcna43989
Romney on Senate colleagues: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/14/us/politics/mitt-romney-mckay-coppins-takeaways.html
The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens, by Richard Haass.
Kennedy Inaugural Address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEC1C4p0k3E