They want to centralize the soul and sell the parish. In a new essay for National Review, Lee J. Strang argues that Sustaining an American National Identity Requires Civic Education is required to save the republic from polarization, proposing that universities build state-aligned “schools of civic thought” to teach Americans a shared civic tradition and the virtues of self-government. The diagnosis is half right. The cure is the malady in respectable clothing.
Strang sees the loss. The denominational colleges that used to form lawyers, legislators, and town clerks in the moral grammar of the Western tradition have been consolidated out of existence or absorbed into the research-university model that trains expertise and indifferently leaves the soul alone. The Grange halls are quiet. The parish school, in town after town, closed in the years after Vatican II, and the building was sold for a quarter of what three generations had put into it. The fraternal lodges that taught a young man to sit through a long meeting, defer to an elder, and bury a stranger have emptied. Civic decay is real.
But the cure is the disease repeating under a different banner. Strang’s proposal is a federally curated civic curriculum delivered through state universities, taught by credentialed faculty, and directed at forming a “shared American civic identity” in the student. This is, in its architecture, the same instrument that did the hollowing out. The research university did not become a civic-forming institution by losing its denominational commitments and adopting the Germanic research model between 1870 and 1970; it became what it is. To ask that same institution, now much larger, now much more centralized, now much more entangled with federal student-aid and state appropriations, to suddenly begin forming souls in civic virtue is to ask the consolidated grain elevator to start paying the farmer his costs of production again because we miss the country store. I worked a Chicago commodities desk and traded the corn before it was planted. I know precisely what consolidation does to the small producer. It does not bring him back. It brings a more efficient version of his absence.
You cannot separate the “civic identity” crisis from the economic crisis of place. In Adams County we do not suffer from a lack of civic seminars. We suffer because the Chicago & North Western railroad pulled up its branch tracks and shed our union jobs, because the family dairy gave way to center-pivot monoculture for the snack-food giants, because the old brick parish is being shuttered by a distant diocese, and because the VFW is emptying out. The men who write these essays want to teach the “virtues of the American system” from the safety of an endowed university center, while the actual Main Streets where those virtues are practiced are being looted by the leveraged-buyout arithmetic their political allies refuse to touch — the carried-interest model that turns a family dairy into a quarterly earnings event. You cannot preserve a political community while treating its working towns as disposable feedstock for private equity.
The virtue of self-government cannot be transmitted as technical knowledge from a syllabus. It is what Michael Oakeshott called practical knowledge — the tacit know-how of a people, learned only by doing it in the thick, messy mediating institutions that stand between the soul and the state. The town meeting, the jury, the militia muster, the volunteer fire company, the parish that buried its own dead and disciplined its own members — that was the curriculum. Consider the 1884 parish built here by Irish masons and German farmers pooling their labor for two years and forming a generation of citizens in the process. Civic formation was a byproduct of an institutional ecology, not a syllabus. Strang’s “schools of civic thought” inside state universities are not that ecology. They are the opposite: the state-funded, expert-administered, professionally credentialed residue of a civic life that has already been removed.
There is a worse problem, and it is theological before it is political. A nation cannot be Christian. Only a person can, and only with difficulty, by grace, through slow formation in a congregation that knows his name. The same is true of civic identity at the level Strang proposes. Søren Kierkegaard knew that Christendom — the fusion of the state and the church — was the death of actual Christianity. A civic identity handed down as a mandatory curriculum by a state-aligned university is not a tradition; it is a taxidermy of one. It produces the buffered self, sealed off from a living inheritance, rather than the porous soul formed in a living congregation or a working co-op.
This is the recurring temptation of the post-liberals: to diagnose the atomization of the market society and then reach for the concentrated state to enforce a moral order. The party of “local control” is, in Strang’s telling, to hand civic formation to a centrally administered university center. The party of “family values” is to outsource the formation of children to a curriculum written by strangers in Columbus. The party that claims to be the friend of the parish is to fund a secular civic orthodoxy under the heading of American identity. This is the centralizing reflex of an exhausted conservatism that has forgotten what it was conserving — the same gesture that produced the consolidated school district, the consolidated bank, the consolidated hospital chain, the consolidated newsroom. The selling of the institution generations built for the quarter, repeated one more time, in a more respectable vocabulary.
Concede the honest point: Strang is right that you cannot govern a continental plural republic on shared ethnic or religious identity alone, and he is right that the Founders knew this and built accordingly. He is right that some formation is required. He is wrong about the form. Civic formation is a parish job, a family job, a shop-floor job, a small-college job — done by persons known to one another, in institutions answerable to the people they form. It is not a federal program. It cannot be scaled. That is the point.
If you want to teach the habits of self-government, you do not build a school of civic thought. You build a cooperative. When the federal government would not run power lines to our sand plains in 1937, the farmers of this county did not wait for a university seminar on civic virtue; they formed the Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative. They pooled their credit, they stood up the poles themselves, they governed it with one member, one vote. That is where the virtue of self-government lives. It lives in the Rochdale principles, in the parish school that has survived in the diocese, in the classical academy run by parents who pay twice, in the credit union on Main Street that still knows the borrower’s name, in the small denominational college that still requires chapel, in the trade that takes a boy at sixteen and gives him a master at forty. Restore those. Fund them by removing the federal and philanthropic mechanisms that have been starving them. Leave the universities to their technical trades if they must. We have a town to run, and the institutions we need were never produced by a curriculum. They were produced by the patient work of small institutions, and they will die the moment we mistake their administration for their source.