Philanthropy Today

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News and other noteworthy items:

• In National Affairs, Hans Zeiger, president of the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles & History, traces the history of training for civic leadership and warns it has been neglected at every level of education for decades. “If we wonder why Americans give such poor ratings to political leaders and the candidate selection pool,” Zeiger writes, “we need only look at our societal failure to teach political leadership as an explanation.”
• In his Substack Connective Tissue, Sam Pressler — a writer and former executive director of theArmed Services Arts Partnership — writes about “three of the most pernicious lies I think we tell ourselves about democracy, civic life, and community in America.” Lie No. 2, he says: “We can have civic renewal without economic renewal. ... So much of the discourse and the practice around civic renewal in the U.S. implies that we can regenerate communities without shifting our underlying economic structures. It’s as if new civic opportunities can just be sprinkled on top of existing infrastructure.”
• In the New York Times, Lee Drutman of the New America think tank and Jesse Wegman of the Times editorial board build a data-driven argument for proportional representation in Congress to break Washington’s legislative stalemate. Under their proposal, congressional districts would send multiple representatives to Washington based on each party’s share of the vote. “It allows several candidates to win seats without a majority of the votes,” they write. “When the winning threshold goes down, the number of viable parties goes up.” That would end today’s winner-take-all system, they say, and make room for parties that represent a broader spectrum of what Americans want.