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As the United States acclimates to the “flood the zone” governing style, reasoned discourse around civics has crumbled.
There are many causes. Polarizing media, bombastic claims, and systematized gas-lighting on both sides have created one of the most toxic political environments since the Vietnam War.
However, the absence of civics and good citizenship concepts have laid the groundwork for the hysterics of today.
LINDSEY CORMACK has a way forward. She is the author of the book “How to Raise a Citizen “
Outline:
- Why are Civics Important?
- Recent stats on the absence of civics
- Understanding structures
- Understanding the “why” of structures and civics
- Knowing what the Constitution says
- Knowing that the Constitution evolves too
- Understanding federalism
- Government funding mechanisms
- Communication- how to broach inflamed subjects
How to raise the next generation
- What makes a good citizen?
- Going beyond jury duty and voting
- Civics and Active participation
- Intersection with wealthy multi-generational families
- Joint decision-maling
- Believing in something greater than self
- Guardrails of ideals melded with open-mindedness and curiosity
- Right holder vs Duty bearer (Rights come with obligations)
- Justice vs compliance
- Control vs grace
- Right and wrong in civics
Contacting Lindsey
Links: www.howtoraiseacitizen.com
Lindsay discussing civics on Errol Louis’ YOU DECIDE Podcast
The Intersection of Civics, Money and Presidents
Rights and Obligations with David Haass (Civics)
Background
LINDSEY is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stevens Institute of Technology. She is the former Director of the Diplomacy Lab. She is the secretary of community board 8 in Manhattan and the co-chair of the Street Life Committee. Lindsey is the creator of DCInbox, a comprehensive digital archive of Congress-to-constituent e-newsletters. Finally, she is also the author of Congress and U.S. Veterans: From the GI Bill to the VA Crisis.
Frazer’s interest in citizenship and civics:
You may be wondering why a show about wealth management (and beyond) would be interested in citizenship and civics.
In a nutshell, I get asked three times a day what can be done to raise responsible kids. Because families (and the answers to those questions) are different. The answers should come from within, I ask what they (the parents or grandparents what think it takes to be a “good citizen.”
The answer to that question can then lead into the discussions I need to have about stewardship and a variety of other concepts.
Additionally, good civics is good business. Businesses ignore the politics around them at their own peril. Board dynamics are also the intersection of civics, joint decision-making and constituent accountability for businesses.
Executives have to be good at this. The values that make people successful are also the ones that people want to pass down to their kids
Personally, politics and civics are ingrained in me. I majored inhHistory and political science major in college. I worked in many NYS campaigns, the NYS Department of Economic Development, and ran the Republican Party in Bedford, NY for a year. More recently, I was on the board of my co-op for 7 years and president of the NYC Estate Planning Council. Civics and participation are a big part of my worldview.
Transcript
Frazer Rice (00:32.447)
As we get acclimated to the new flood the zone component of politics, reason discourse has crumbled. And I think absence of civics in public life is the cause. Lindsay Cormack has a way forward and she’s the author of How to Raise a Citizen. Welcome aboard, Lindsay.
Lindsey Cormack (00:46.978)
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to talk with you today.
Frazer Rice (00:50.025)
This will be a lot of fun. It harkens back to my background before wealth management and lawyering and all that stuff. Tell us a little bit about what you do and the impetus for the book.
Lindsey Cormack (01:02.574): Background
Sure, so for the last 10 years, I’ve been a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology. This is primarily in an engineering school in Hoboken, New Jersey. It is one of the reasons that I ended up writing this book. I have some of the brightest students that I’ve ever been around. They have really high test scores. They know how to do school.
When I teach them intro to American government, I realize most of them have been failed by our school systems. They do not understand the landscape of the government. They don’t understand their own routes of power. They’re not practiced and having hard conversations. I’ve got wonderful students who are going to go on to successful careers in everything. We should make sure that they have this positive look at government and this better understanding than they’re getting. And it’s true that it’s not just happening in New Jersey. It’s kind of everywhere.
Frazer Rice (01:47.737)
What does the absence of civics look like in the education system? I seem to recall a stat that you put forward that it’s almost like less than 1%. It’s actually focused on in a curriculum in public schools.
Lindsey Cormack (02:00.652) on Civics
Yeah, so it’s really hard to say here’s how civics instruction happens. Every state has its own approach. Within every state, the independent schools have different approaches than the public schools. The charter schools or the mini schools have different approaches. The modal form of delivery across the United States is usually in your seventh or eighth grade of school. At that grade, you have some social studies class.
That’s where students are going to learn a little bit about the founding. They’ll learn about some like westward expansion. They’re taught a history lesson about like how we got to where we are. The actual lessons that they hear vary. But that’s like the basics. We usually wait until the second semester of 12th grade to give students a class called government. The amount of instruction time that we’ve had on civics and government has only gone down from the 1940s. It is the subject that has the least amount of focus and time allocated to it.
And it also has the lowest amount of federal dollars spent on it. For every $50 that gets spent on STEM, the science, technology, engineering, math disciplines, only five cents go to civics. We don’t give it enough attention in schools and we haven’t been doing that for a very long time.
Frazer Rice (03:07.564)
I mean, I’m never going to be one to say take money away from STEM. At the same time, to not have that background is crazy. With the polarization of information that’s out there, the ability to deal with information is vital. The news that you get, the values you have and the understanding of our structures are vital. How do you think about that in terms of structuring your curriculum?
Lindsey Cormack (03:34.734)
So for me, in my intro to American government class, it moves very, very slowly. Like we’re coming up on midterms. We’ve been in school for about eight weeks and we still are not done with the Constitution. We’re still in the amendments. That’s because I know that if our students know the rules of the game, they can figure out everything else with a clearer brain.
And so we go really line by line figuring out what did this mean? What were they trying to say? What are they not saying? I think that’s animportant starting piece that we don’t have in most K through 12 educational systems. It doesn’t surprise me that we don’t have this. The end result is for most kids in high school, it’s a score on an SAT or an ACT. Neither one of those exams has any components of social studies.
And if it’s not tested, it’s not taught. So I understand why it’s not in the curriculum, because we don’t think we need to evaluate students on this.
Frazer Rice (04:25.531)
You dive into the Constitution, which is a great underpinning of how the United States works. I’m sure you go into the history of it and where many of the concepts and values came from. What else surrounds what you’re teaching on that front?
Lindsey Cormack (04:41.336): Learning to Communicate
Usually I start with:, “what have they heard so far?” I like to start any conversation that might be controversial with this. It’s helpful with students who have difference of opinions.
I just like to set the table and say like, well, what have you heard? Here’s something that I heard a few years ago that really stuck. The constitution doesn’t say anything about slavery.
And I was like, that is such an interesting take. Let’s go read it with a keen eye for that. Like if you just do a control F and try to find slavery, you’re right. It doesn’t say slavery.
There’s three to four oblique references to the practice that are in there that takes a little bit more observation. You just have to have a keener eye to it. And that’s something where I like to go with like, what are they starting with? Then how can we get to something that lets them appreciate something in a bigger? Or fuller or more robust manner?
Frazer Rice (05:24.169)
The history of the Constitution is important too, For example, you can get things like three-fifths voting for slavery, There may be previous incarnations of slavery, but it’s been changed to reflect different values and cultural norms.
Lindsey Cormack (05:40.962): The Evolving Constitution
Yeah, that’s right. That’s something that I think our schools do an OK job at. We teach them this is a historical form of theater.
You know, we say to our kids 250 years ago, some really smart guys got together and wrote this document. Isn’t it great? But I like my students to think of themselves as the caretakers of this document and the entire enterprise what we’re doing.
And in order for that to be true, they can’t see it as a history lesson. They have to see it as an active lesson where they’re a participant in moving this forward. Truthfully, they are.
One of the best things about being in the United States is that we have the agency to shape our outcomes. This document sets out a lot of guarantees. However, we have to make sure that we understand how it works to move it forward.
Frazer Rice (06:19.002)
One of the things that I really enjoyed about your book was the concept of reminding people that civics and our government is not just the three branches in the federal government, Federalism and the interaction between the states and local government are just as important in many ways.
And in some ways, the real sort of rubber meets the road impact component of where policy affects people. How do you think about that in terms of sort of conveying that, that lesson? To your students and beyond?
Lindsey Cormack (06:49.848): Getting Kids Interested In Civics
So usually, my pedagogical approach is to let them go figure something out. So I’ll let them say any policy space that they care about. I don’t care if it’s like I care about fashion or I care about sports. And then I’ll ask them to go see if different states have different orientations to this.
And then they really get a clearer picture of like, my gosh, you’re right. The states get to decide so much. And when we think about what students care about generally, things like access to guns or access to reproductive care.or access to drugs.
All of those things right now are state level decisions. Most of them don’t really understand how their state systems work because the little instruction that they get in K through 12 is nearly all focused at the federal level. It’s just sort of this task of saying like, hey, why don’t you go figure this out?
Then they learn in that figuring like, ooh, this is important or, my gosh, she’s right. There might be something that’s different here than it is in the state where my parents happen to be right now. And I really like that approach.
Something else that’s important to me is we all get excited about federal elections, but in this upcoming year where we don’t have federal elections slated, we have over 100,000 state and local election coming.
So like we have all these different places to learn and they just need to be nudged and reminded to go look for that sort of information.
Frazer Rice (08:00.638) : Good Citizenship
The idea of being a good citizen, of being part of the civics discourse is something that I think your book does a really good job of really approaching and understanding and that it really gets back down to communication.
And the lesson that I took from it in my day job in many ways is the concept of really understanding communication and building in some structure and values in communicating to families that have multi-generational wealth.
When I get the question “hey you know how do I raise productive kids?” or
“how do I raise people who respect norms that are around there and are active and participate in civics and society?”
My answer to that oftentimes is what makes a good citizen when you’re sort of thinking about this and getting the the students excited not only about the structures and the underpinnings of government and so on. How do you take the communication lessons forward for that?
Lindsey Cormack (09:04.142)
So in all of my classes, if it’s happening during a non-federal election year, we have a project at the end that’s going to be a debate. And so it’s like it’s a research and a debate.
And I don’t let them pick what side they’re going to be on. But I do let all of us decide what are the topics that we most care about. And then some of them are going to have to argue for sides that they believe in.
Some of them are going to have to argue for sides that they don’t. And in an engineering discipline or in an engineering school, they don’t get a lot of opportunities to do this. That’s not their normal mode of classroom time.
It really is this practice and like, how is it to inhabit someone else’s perspective and then say those things? And at first they’re a little bit like frustrated by it. They’re like, but if I don’t believe it, I don’t want to say it.
Then I slowly sort of like keep telling them the more that you understand about the way that the other side or another side sees this issue, the better you will be able to understand your own personal position. Let’s say that you encounter some information that sort of changes the way you see something. That’s not bad.
That’s not like a marker of failure in civics. That shows that you’re a human with a working brain who can like add in new information. That’s all we’re doing here. And so by giving them like the experiential piece of like, no, you’re going to have to chat this out against another team in front of all your classmates.
I think that’s one of the best things because it is the practice that they’re lacking because so much of our instruction is I tell you, you listen, you regurgitate it to me.
But if I give them that sort of like opportunity to do this with each other, it starts to open up their minds like, ooh, maybe I could do this. It’s not so daunting. I don’t just have to listen. I can do a back and forth.
Frazer Rice (10:34.012)
Well, it also underscores the idea that the sign of true intelligence is being able to house two differing thoughts in your head at the same time and to be able to work through them, which is sort of an unfortunate byproduct of law school for me and, you know, an expensive liberal arts education. But I imagine in the engineering world where things may be a little bit more black and white, it can be a new experience for them.
Lindsey Cormack (10:56.962)
Yeah, that’s mostly what my feedback is, is that, you know, in every other place there’s right and wrong answers, and here there’s just a bunch of different right answers depending on who you’re asking and what the perspective is.
Frazer Rice (11:06.326)
So David Haass has a great book out on the rights and obligations of citizens. And something I saw in a website, sort of a curriculum based website was the idea that people were right holders and that duties were borne by somebody else. And it really agitated me.
How do you think about that in terms of good citizenship and participation and things that people should feel not only entitled to, but obligated to participate in? with regard to being a part of American society and beyond.
Lindsey Cormack (11:39.874) Rights and Obligations
Yeah, I appreciate this question very much. I also like that book. If it’s not in my bookcase behind me, I know it is in my house because a mom at my daughter’s school was like, ooh, you should read this book. And she said that to me while I was writing my book. But in terms of rights and duties, I’ll tell you sort of like how I come to this.
When I was on sabbatical two years ago, I spent some time going around to different parts of New York City and setting up two chairs, a table, and a sign that said, you chat with me about politics for three minutes? I bought a three-minute sand timer, and I’d just sit with different people and let them tell me about politics.
And a lot of times the takeaways that they would have is like, well, I don’t really like where it’s going. They’d sort of conceptualize themselves as passengers on the ship of democracy or passengers on some ship of politics.
Then towards the end, I’d be like, okay, that’s really interesting. And then if they were willing to have me talk to them about it, I’d say like, but don’t we kind of think that we’re the crew? Like we’re not passengers on a ship. We are the crew that is powering where the ship goes. And so if we don’t like where things go, we do have an obligation.
We do have a duty to figure out things a little bit more and find out how we can turn our own sort of agency on to change those things. An example in my life is right where I am in New York City, we have had undergone an enormous policy transformation on marijuana policy.
Like we can now sell legalized marijuana in our stores. But there was a lot of gray zones. And we had so many unlicensed, illicit stores who just like popped up and were like, well, there’s no enforcement. Someone’s going to make money. Might as well be me.
At that same time, I took a position at our community board chairing our street life committee, which was talking about liquor licenses and cannabis licenses. And that meant that I was going to have to go to a bunch of illicit stores and try to figure out what’s happening here.
Who are these people? Why are they running this business? Why is it happening? And that was like annoying. That’s not my day job. I don’t get paid for it, but it’s an obligation. If I want my society to be better, to be a part of that solution, to figure out what this is, what’s happening.
I was really happy and proud to do it, but I know that we need to do a little bit more because so many of us just want to be not inconvenienced, but the price we pay for living in a society instead of just as 340 million individuals that happen to be together is that we’re going to be inconvenienced sometimes.
Things are going to be annoying, but if we want to get better, we have to get into it instead of putting our heads down and thinking that someone else is going to do it for us.
Frazer Rice (13:51.546)
How do you think we broach that subject to get people to think about participating beyond jury duty and voting, which we have to force people to do that anyway, to get more engaged with their surroundings?
Lindsey Cormack (14:04.898): Why Are People Afraid of Civics?
I mean, I think part of it is that there’s a narrative that politics is either bad for egomaniacs, for people who are like really into themselves or they’re out to like steal from other people, or there’s this narrative that like politics is for nerds. And so it’s like, I’ll let these other people take care of it.
But it’s actually a true blessing or something that I see as like one of the greatest things about America is that politics is for everyone. It’s going to happen to us, whether we like it or not. We need to change the narrative that it is a force for good and that there are things that can come to better ends if we have more people who care about them.
So the idea that voting is a hassle, or I hate when people are like, I’m trying to get out of jury duty. I’m like, what are you talking about? This is one of your only entry points to influence the judicial system. You really know other ways to do this. And so I think we need to tell our children the positive stories of this.
If you have clean water to drink, government has a hand in that or if you have nice roads to be on, government has a hand in it. If you have schools that you can go to, places that you can recreate, usually government had a hand in that.
All too often we focus on the negative stuff when we talk about the bad actors in this system. But a lot of the people, especially at state and local government, are essentially volunteers who just think they have something to offer who can make the world a little bit better. And those are the stories that I wish we would champion.
Those are the people that I wish we’d introduce our kids to instead of letting them have a narrative that’s characterized by media that focuses sort of on bad outrageous activities or even child’s entertainment, which really has archetypes of people in government as either bumbling, like bumbling idiots, or like slick characters out to defraud the people they’re meant to protect. And so we have to do the work, collectively, of showing them when government does good things.
Frazer Rice (15:42.873)
Where does the role of bureaucracy fit into that you’re thinking on that? I know that for me, it’s very frustrating. You go to the post office or the DMV, or you’re trying to get something through, you know, whether it’s a tax situation or something like that.
The red tape component, which is to me sort of the byproduct of what’s happening up top and how it’s implemented or seen at the ground level. How do get people patient with that?
Lindsey Cormack (16:08.12): Bureaucracy
That’s a much harder question. I will say I’ve only experienced the DMV in three states and I happen to really like the New York state approach to it, which is like you’re making, you make appointments online, you show up, you do it, it’s done. That wasn’t my experience in Kansas or in Arizona.
But for like the day to day frustrations about government, I think something that we sort of misunderstand is we think the government is maybe like some big wigs who are like just trying to make our life hard.
Frazer Rice (16:20.002)
Right.
Lindsey Cormack (16:32.536)
When in reality, it’s a lot of like legacy systems with people who are trying to do the best work that aren’t terribly well compensated to do that work. And if we can kind of extend empathy for that, that’s like part one.
Part two is let’s get to fixing it or let’s get to a way that we make this better. I do get sad when I see like the beautiful outsides of post offices and I’m like, wow, these buildings are incredible. Then you go inside and you’re like, we don’t have air conditioning in here. my, we still have like COVID things up on the wall. but.
That’s like, has to be a point of pride. can’t be just a point of annoyance and we have to get over that one way or another. I don’t know that I have all the right answers, but I do know that I share that sort of viewpoint that you’re saying.
Frazer Rice (17:10.521)
Something that sort of strikes me and I deal a lot with financial literacy and numeracy generally and that when people don’t have that, they almost don’t have the language to be able to navigate in their own self-interest. How do you think about the language of numbers as it relates to understanding one’s role within civics and society generally?
Lindsey Cormack (17:33.934) Civics as Something Bigger
So I think you’re absolutely right that if you don’t have that in civics, there’s so many decision pieces that are just harder or impossible for you to sort of get your head around. But something that I like to think about is when you’re like pivotal.
In federal elections, I oftentimes hear people be like, well, I’m only one voter. And you know, for the presidential election, it’s a winner take all system. And maybe you’re a Democrat in a red state or Republican in a blue state. You think your vote doesn’t matter, whatever. But when you say, OK, let’s like put that aside or believe that you’re true there.
Think about what the denominator is for state elections. Think about what the denominator is for local elections or for even smaller ballot initiatives.
We are all so important at the local level, yet these are the elections that are the least attended. Oftentimes there isn’t really good media around it and we think it’s just for party insiders. Soon you realize, no, if I got together with like 20 of my friends, we could have someone on the school board.
Those sorts of things are really powerful. However, you have to break down the numbers for people where they see like once the denominator changes. Once the number of people who get to make this decision changes, every individual is more powerful than they were in a bigger system. This is why we really should have more focus on local and state government because we’re all far more pivotal in those arenas than we are at the national level.
Frazer Rice (18:45.156)
I think too, when you start hearing about numbers being thrown around and the current DOGE numbers, how much is being saved or not saved and whether it’s entitlements and so on and where the actual spending takes place or the interest to pay off federal debt, etc . . . The scale around these numbers is not well conveyed,
I think, in the media and people end up focusing on more narrow situations and end up spending a lot of time, energy and emotion around things that are minor in comparison to the tougher questions that we need to be asking.
Lindsey Cormack (19:20.376): Innumeracy
I think that’s correct and I actually don’t put all the blame on the media. I actually think these are really hard concepts to teach and in a similar way to civics not being giving enough time in K through 12, we certainly don’t have more financial literacy. We need more financial literacy. We have like plenty of math, but the translation of this to dollars and cents doesn’t happen in many K through 12 settings.
Something that I do in my classroom is I try to think about what it is where they could sort of have a relative understanding of something. So an exercise that we were doing this last week is I had them look at Doge data. I said, ‘I want you to guys go to the Doge website. “I don’t care what sort of thing interests you, but I want you to go figure something out and tell me what you learned. Some of them were like, I looked at how many people were fired. I looked at how many contracts got taken. Or I saw like, if this state had this much Medicaid funding, do we think they’re talking about DOGE in their legislature? And so I was like really interested to see what they were doing.
However, it all spoke to this numeracy component, which is like, everyone had a different insight, but the ability to sort of assess it relative to anyone else is very limited because we really don’t have that comparative ability for most people, at least most people I interact with, which are the best of the best STEM minds that I’ve ever been around.
Frazer Rice (20:25.921)
Well, one of the, this is my plea to throw in the power of compounding, even if it’s just a sentence in your curriculum, It just- it triggers so many things.
I think the light bulb goes off for most people that if you allow things to compound interest wise, either for the positive or negative, it can create some major outcomes with not very much time.
As we go through that though, I think one thing that I’m interested in isthe concept of where the spending goes, I bristle when people forget that the federal government can print money, but the state governments and lower can’t.
That the taxation that occurs at those different levels has different ramifications. Is this something that you talk to in the federalism component in civics?
Lindsey Cormack (21:20.654): Federalims
They don’t really understand this, but they hear a lot about it. So we talk about that a little bit. When we talk about federalism, we talk about how states get to make their own sorts of tax rules, whether they’re going to have property taxes or if they’re going to have exemptions for things like clothing and food.
So we have a week towards the end of class where we talk about money and politics. And we talk about top marginal tax rates, because most of my students are 18 to 22. They haven’t really been paying income taxes.
We talk about why states might make these different decisions or if some states are going to have income tax and some states aren’t what sorts of things happen with that. So we get into that at a very high level thing, but in a 16 week curriculum, there’s only so much that you can do on every, on every subject.
That certainly gets like a part, but it’s not an enormous part. We do another exercise that I really like where I have them go use opensecrets.org to look at federal elections commissions data on like what companies or what PACs or what individuals are donating to different sorts of things. And they always come up with the cleverest stuff.
They were able to see.how people in my own university, the administration versus the faculty, were donating politically. As a result, they were able to make some sort of deductions about like where you could sort of put our politics.
I said, “I’m so proud of you all for trying to figure out things about the world that you think matter to you and that are like right in front of you.” Part of that is giving them the tools and confidence to go play with data themselves. This is something that I see as an integral opponent to teaching civics. If you want to know the civics, this is not just a history lesson.
This is a numbers and a data lesson. And so you really got to be able to get into those things if you want to have the bigger conversations.
Frazer Rice (22:51.533)
You’ve been in different parts of the country, New York, Arizona, Kansas. Any regional differences in the level or interest in civics that you’ve noticed?
Lindsey Cormack (23:01.986): Civics Across Regions
I think there’s enormous regional differences. I grew up in Kansas and I was there until I was 22. And in Kansas, as well as in parts of the South where much of my family remains, the sort of approach to talking about politics is much quieter. There’s this sort of fear that like it’s going to offend someone.
It’s sort of a taboo topic. Like it sits in the same place as like you’re going to talk about sex or drugs or how much money someone made. It would be like, Ooh, that’s an off limits one. We’re not going to do it.
Whereas in my 17 years on the coasts, I find that people do talk about politics more, but they tend to do it in like an overtly negative way where it’s like always dismissive.
One of the sort of things that happened when I was writing this book was looking about what etiquette manuals said for the longest times about like how we’re supposed to approach this. And there are regional differences.
Neither one of those approaches though is truly that functional. Not talking about something doesn’t make it better. Only talking about the negative parts of something doesn’t incentivize children to want to learn more. I think we have like cultural differences, but not one of them is like, we’re getting it more right here. We have room to work in all sorts of parts of the country.
Frazer Rice (24:09.462)
Interesting. You talk in your book a little bit about the responsibility that parents have in teaching about the political end of things. Maybe go into that a little bit.
Lindsey Cormack (24:21.762): Parents Raising Citizens
Yeah, so the book’s full title is “How to Raise a Citizen (and Why It’s Up to You to Do It.)”
That parenthetical, “why it’s up to you to do it”, is because in researching this book, which we thought was going to be something that said, you know, this state curriculum is the one that’s graduating the students who really understand it.
What we found is, like, no state curriculum is graduating a lot of students who really understand things. So if we got to change something, it’s probably going to have to start in the home. Changing the state policies around what you can teach in a classroom or how many hours of instruction time you have or even how many teachers are hired with the requisite expertise is incredibly hard to do.
Like something that we heard in these interviews was everyone knows who teaches government, his name is coach. At most of our high schools, there’s not enough social studies hours that are going to be taught to have a full-time employment contract. Many of the people who teach that also teach wrestling or swimming or track or football, what have you. It became a book that said parents have to take this on because there’s so many barriers to getting this done in schools. It’s not that schools couldn’t do better. It’s not that schools don’t do good work in the limited sorts of ways that they can.
But we’re not going to fix things if we’re putting this on schools. We really have to take it into the home. It’s also the case that emerging research on parent socialization to kids indicates that one of the best things that allows your kids to understand different viewpoints, be able to engage in respectful dialogue. They should participate in voting and volunteering is having their parents do that with them. They should be practicing it and showing it to them.
If we want better outcomes, if we want our politics to feel and function in a better way, where the adults in the room now, we’re the ones raising the next generation, we’ve got to show them what that is and hope that they take that up and continue that work with their kids.
Frazer Rice (26:00.853)
When I read that part, the light bulb really went off to me because I’m spending a lot of time on intergenerational money discussions and money like you just described earlier, has its own taboo associated with it.
Ultimately, if you’re trying to convey values AND value to the next generation, you have to have these discussions. Civics is an important component of it. To be politcally involved is vital in order to not only get the country aspect and the town aspect preserved, but the family aspect too.
To not have that conversation, I think would be a mistake. As we wind down here, the media, social media, traditional media, books, newspapers, TV, internet, TikTok, et cetera. Do you have any thoughts or ideas as to how to curate your media diet so that you get more signal than noise?
Lindsey Cormack (26:55.074)
Yeah, but my thoughts are not terribly popular. My thoughts are you need to be talking to people face to face. You need to be interfacing with people who are in your communities and in your day to day reality. You need less of your online algorithmically derived information, meant to keep you either attentive or disassociative.
I think a lot of our online content is going to be different than what I’m going to see is going to be different than what my daughter sees. And we’re actually, none of us.
Frazer Rice (26:57.704)
Yes.
Lindsey Cormack (27:21.686): Political Discourse and the Social Media Diet
If we exist in just online spaces or ever seeing the same slice of the world or the same slice of reality. I think if you really want to like get down to it, it’s understanding what the people around you are thinking and hearing.
That requires that you do conversation. That requires that you don’t have AirPods in, in every social setting that you might be in. This is something that I think is, is really damaging. We’ve been okay with it for the last eight years or so since AirPods came out. This idea that we can be in social settings, but everyone’s listening to their own podcast or book on tape or music.
I think we really have to be able to talk to each other more. If you want to have a rich information diet, you have to not let it just be the one that’s algorithmically designed to come to you. So you’re going to have to have that friction with other people.
Frazer Rice (28:04.477)
Lindsay, great stuff. How do we find your book?
Lindsey Cormack (28:07.042)
You can find it anywhere that you find books online. It’s sold on Amazon and on Barnes and Noble and bookshop. It’s also possible to buy it directly from me.I’ll sign it and scribe it and send it to you. I can send it to someone else as a gift. And you can do that on howtoraiseacitizen.com.
Frazer Rice (28:23.781)
That will all be in the show notes. What is your other information?
Lindsey Cormack (28:29.187)
You can find me on Instagram @howtoraiseacitizen, on Bluesky and Twitter, I still maintain DC inbox. This harkens back to the first civics project that I ever did as a political scientist.
Frazer Rice (28:40.733)
Really cool. Lindsay, thank you for being on.
Lindsey Cormack (28:42.786)
Thank you so much. I love these questions.