Citizenship: Both a right and a habit

Be informed. Per Haass:

An informed citizen is someone who understands the fundamentals as to how the government and the economy and society operate, the principal challenges facing the country at home and abroad, and the contending options or policies for dealing with those challenges … Ideally, this individual would also know something of the country’s history and how it came to be what it is today, as it is impossible to understand the present without an appreciation of the past.

Get involved. Per Haass:

The democratic process might include encouraging fellow citizens to register and vote and educating them on the issues, working for a party or candidate, assisting the local board of elections in administering the voting process and the counting of votes, and contributing money to the candidate, party, or cause of your choice. There are many other ways to bolster democracy beyond voting and direct involvement in politics.

Stay open to compromise. This chapter is interestingly flawed — going after Obama and the Democrats for a lack of bipartisanship on some pretty notable achievements, yet failing to mention Mitch McConnell's no-compromise pledge even once. Still, this is a good explanation of how compromise could work:

When is it right to compromise—and when to stand firm? A basic rule of thumb is to hold fast on matters of fundamental principle …How do we discern what is fundamental and what is secondary or even peripheral? In many instances what is fundamental is to establish something, be it a program or an agreement. There is still room for compromise when it comes to accepting a deal that includes only some of what was desired.

Remain civil. This is a chapter where, to be honest, I struggle with finding a decent quote because so much of the chapter seems to be couched in the sensibility that really, things would be nicer if we didn't get mad at people who say terrible things but instead pretended they were opining in good faith and not for purely performative cable news kayfabe.

I'm going to suggest my own spirit of the law here: sometimes, the most civil thing you can do is refuse to engage. You owe no troll the legitimacy of your effort and attention.

Reject violence. To his credit, Haass points out that if the state is the sole entity sanctioned to use violence, they had better not abuse the right:

I am not suggesting that civil disobedience and nonviolence are always the best route to desirable political change. Indeed, they require a context in which authorities are prepared to act with restraint when it comes to ordering police and military units to use force against protesters.

Value norms. This one's for the pols:

As one astute observer who immigrated here from a country whose democracy was undone from within noted, “Norms are unspoken and ill defined, making them vulnerable.” This is precisely why people must hold political figures to account when they violate norms.

Promote the common good. Haass cites Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," so let's go to that source:

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider

Respect government service. This happened before the national trauma of DOGE, and is even more apt now.

The best argument for respecting government service comes from Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk, which points out:

Some of the things any incoming president should worry about are fast-moving: pandemics, hurricanes, terrorist attacks. But most are not. Most are like bombs with very long fuses that, in the distant future, when the fuse reaches the bomb, might or might not explode. It is delaying repairs to a tunnel filled with lethal waste until, one day, it collapses. It is the aging workforce of the DOE—which is no longer attracting young people as it once did —that one day loses track of a nuclear bomb. It is the ceding of technical and scientific leadership to China. It is the innovation that never occurs, and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.

Support the teaching of civics. Because, as Haass wrote:

No people should assume their history, their heritage, and what is central to it, is widely known among them much less automatically handed down. Collective identity, along with an appreciation and understanding of what lies behind it, is a matter of teaching, not biology. This is true of particular groups of people, be they defined by religion or gender or race or geography or history. It is no less true of a people who constitute a nation, in this case the American nation.

Put country first. So this is the one habit that is most weakly defended, as the argument boils down to a tautological one: Every citizen must be loyal to the United States because being a true American means always remaining loyal to your country … Take it or leave it, I say.