Civics for the Bewildered: Chapter One
What Civics Is (And Why I Went Looking for It Instead of a Helmet)
I have come to think of civics as the study of how people agree to live together under power.
That is all. No flags required. You may bring one if it improves morale, but structurally speaking it is optional.
Civics is not a belief system. It will not diagnose your personality. It does not assign you to a team or issue you a cape. Civics is operating knowledge of a shared structure: the rules of occupancy, the limits of authority, and the obligations that come with living in a building where everyone insists they are in charge of the thermostat.
If politics is the argument, civics is the room in which the argument takes place.
Most of us were handed the argument and never shown the room. We were told to pick a side and raise our voices inside a structure whose exits had not been clearly marked.
For most of my life I thought this was normal. Then the volume went up.
What pushed me toward civics was not a classroom. It was the sound of relationships snapping like overcooked spaghetti.
Friendships went first. People who had shared meals, stages, car rides, and borrowed money began speaking to one another as if they were rival nations. Messages arrived with the emotional restraint of a marching band. People unfriended, denounced, resigned, blocked, and issued final judgments based on something half-heard, misheard, or enthusiastically imagined.
Then I saw it happen in families. Which is impressive, because families have historically survived wars, relocations, questionable haircuts, and fruitcake. Siblings stopped speaking. Parents and adult children developed separate informational ecosystems. Holiday dinners became quiet diplomatic summits where everyone passed the gravy but not the topic.
Disagreement stopped sounding like disagreement and started sounding like expulsion.
The ability to argue and then refill someone’s glass appeared to have been discontinued.
At some point I found myself asking a modest question:
How did we lose the ability to argue and still sit in the same room without issuing a formal statement?
That question led me, somewhat suspiciously, to civics.
Because underneath the shouting I sensed something missing. Not agreement. Agreement is rare and often overrated. Something more basic. A shared understanding of what we are doing when we disagree. A shared set of rules about how people with different views remain part of the same public and, ideally, the same dinner party.
I began to wonder whether civics was even being taught anymore. Not in graduate school. In K–12. Where does it live? Is it stored in a filing cabinet labeled “Important but Not Urgent”? Does it come out between standardized tests and fire drills? Who explains how a pluralistic society manages to remain plural without installing seatbelts on every conversation?
When I was a young girl in Louisiana, before my family moved to California, I remember looking forward to ninth grade because there were required courses in civics and ethics. I wanted them. Even then I was trying to reconcile the language of liberty with the historical record. I had noticed that the national motto and the national behavior were not always on speaking terms. You know the chapter. The slavery chapter. I assumed there would be a course where someone walked us through how a country says one thing and does another without the whole structure collapsing from embarrassment.
Then we moved.
In California, the civics and ethics sequence I had been anticipating dissolved into a broader category called “social studies,” which is a bit like labeling a toolbox “miscellaneous.” Civics was present, but in trace amounts. Around the same time, a teacher kindly suggested that I retire my habit of addressing adults with “yes ma’am” and “no sir.” It would make me stand out. It might invite teasing. The advice was practical and well-meant, but it left me with the sense that one set of social rules had been quietly retired without a new manual being issued.
Years later, during a particularly energetic period of public outrage, those memories returned. I began to notice how quickly disagreement now escalated into moral sentencing, and how little shared ground remained for navigating conflict without severing ties entirely.
It began to feel less like a political problem and more like a civic one.
We have always had strong opinions. That is not new. Humans have been disagreeing since the invention of language and possibly before. What feels new is the absence of a shared understanding of how disagreement is supposed to function inside a republic. How far it can go before it breaks the container holding us all together like passengers arguing over the steering wheel of a moving vehicle.
Civics, I eventually realized, is not about forcing agreement.
It is about making disagreement survivable.
Most of us were taught politics without civics. We were shown elections, leaders, debates, and dramatic music but not the underlying architecture that gives any of it meaning. We were asked to care deeply about outcomes we were never taught to interpret. We were handed a scoreboard without the rulebook.
So I began asking the questions politics prefers not to answer:
Who is actually allowed to do what, and why?
Which powers are real, and which are theatrical props with good lighting?
What happens when norms collapse but laws remain standing like furniture after a party?
What does an ordinary citizen do after the vote is cast and the yard signs have been recycled into something decorative?
Without those answers, public life starts to feel like superstition. People argue over personalities while ignoring structures. Outrage replaces agency. Participation begins to resemble performance art with a very large audience and no intermission.
In a functioning republic, civics is boring on purpose.
Procedural. Slow. Repetitive. About as glamorous as plumbing and roughly as important.
It exists to prevent excitement from becoming authority.
Which is unfortunate, because excitement has excellent public relations.
That, I suspect, is why civics fades from view. Civics does not flatter. It does not promise transformation by Tuesday. It does not provide villains simple enough to boo on cue. It insists on limits. And limits rarely trend.
The more I studied, the more I saw that civics quietly teaches things we are not always eager to hear: no office is all-powerful, no leader singular, no emergency a permanent suspension of responsibility. Power is fragmented by design. Inefficiency can be a safety feature. And the most dangerous sentence in public life may be “Someone should do something,” when no one can identify who that someone is or where they keep the tools.
This book is my attempt to go back and learn what many of us were only partially taught, or taught once and then left to misplace under a stack of headlines.
Not to tell you what to think.
To ask how we live together under power without setting the furniture on fire.
To ask how disagreement can remain disagreement rather than exile.
How argument can remain argument rather than rupture.
How a public, and even a family, can remain intact while still containing difference and the occasional eye roll.
I am learning this as I go. You are welcome to learn with me.
Because before a republic can be repaired, it has to be understood.
And understanding, inconvenient though it may be, is the first civic act I know how to take.
