The Unmaking of American Citizenship: How Americans Learned Not to Love Their Country and What Can Be Done About It?

Poll after poll demonstrate that GenZers feel alienated from America’s political Institutions and are unfamiliar—if not outright hostile—to the unifying principles at the core of America’s national identity. Young Americans today have less trust in the country’s institutions and less knowledge about how they work than earlier generations. We are often told that the remedy is civic education. Yet the problem isn’t a lack of civic education but, instead, the wrong kind of civic education. Today, American students, starting from a young age, are constantly exposed to ideological constructs that erode civic ties and trust among citizens. This is especially alarming because America’s institutions are not self-perpetuating. Will the American republic endure if its citizens no longer understand and, yes, uphold the core principles upon which it rests? In their talk, Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg and Dr. Dorothea Israel Wolfson will discuss the ideas behind the cultural and educational trends that have led to the unmaking of American citizenship and what might be done to return to a more inclusive and inspiring sense of national identity and citizenship.

Benjamin Ginsberg is the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author, co-author, or editor of some forty books including The Fall of the Faculty; Presidential Government; Downsizing Democracy; How the Jews Defeated Hitler; The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State; Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag During Radical Reconstruction; What Washington Gets Wrong, Warping Time and the recently published, Unmaking of American Citizenship, coauthored with Dorothea Israel Wolfson. Ginsberg's college text, We the People, now in its 15th edition, has been the nation’s most frequently used American government text for the past three decades. Ginsberg received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1973 and was Professor of Government at Cornell until 1992 when he joined the Hopkins faculty.

Dorothea Israel Wolfson is the managing director of the Hertog Foundation. Prior to Hertog, Wolfson was Director of and Senior Lecturer in the Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Government Program in Washington, DC. She is co-author with Benjamin Ginsberg of The Unmaking of American Citizenship: How Americans Learned Not to Love Their Country and What Can Be Done About It. She has published articles on Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail Adams, John Locke, and children’s literature. She collaborated on a book, Our Sacred Honor, with William J. Bennett, and her essays and reviews have appeared in The Claremont Review of Books, The American Interest, and Perspectives on Political Science. She earned her AB at the University of Chicago and her PhD in Government from Cornell University.