Renewing America’s Civic Compact

Carol McNamara, Trevor Shelley

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781666923469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Renewing America's Civic Compact addresses the chief challenges and principal tensions in the operation of our civil society in order to consider possible paths forward. The meritocracy, multiculturalism, issues of race, technology, and populist nationalism in American democracy today are some of the issues that have created more tensions to American public life. Chapters address the condition of civil conversation within the university and across American society. This collection then engages debates over the continued relevance and durability of liberal ideas and institutions; whether we have accessible means and resources to channel digital technology more fruitfully for the sake of human achievement and well-being; and how some have endeavored to revitalize the American civic vocation through both scholarly and practical education. Finally, the volume closes with a call to restore civic friendship, properly understood, as the foundation for renewing America's civic compact.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Diagnosis of the American Malady
• Chapter 1: We All Live on Campus Now
• Chapter 2: The Constitution of Knowledge
• Chapter 3: Renewing Civic Education: How to Restore Strategic Competence and Confidence
• Part II: Meritocracy, Racial Challenges, and the Populist Response
• Chapter 4: Meritocracy, Populism, and Worker Power
• Chapter 5: The Inescapable Meritocracy
• Chapter 6: Systemic Racism: Defining Terms and Evaluating Evidence
• Chapter 7: On the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America
• Part III: The Case for Liberal Ideas and Institutions
• Chapter 8: The Three Pillars of Liberalism
• Chapter 9: Truth and Virtue in the Founders’ Liberalism
• Chapter 10: Conservative Democracy Rightly and Wrongly Understood
• Part IV: A Civic Compact for Our Digital Age
• Chapter 11: Beyond Information Idolatry: A Civic Compact for a Technoscientific Age
• Chapter 12: Social Media and the Prestige Economy Trap: Buying Allies, Losing Friends, and the Audience Effect
• Chapter 13: Steamboat or Showboat?: Space, Wealth, and the American Way
• Part V: Cultivating Our Civic Vocation and Contributing to the Common Good
• Chapter 14: Empowering the Rising Generation to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative
• Chapter 15: Civics Is a National Security Imperative
• Part VI: Civic Friendship
• Chapter 16: Civic Friendship: Lessons from Aristotle
• Chapter 17: Frederick Douglass on Civic Friendship
• Chapter 18: Civic Friendship Not as Ideal But as Fact: How It Explains Liberal Democracy's Present
• About the Contributors