In the February 2025 edition of Inside RAI, The Center for Revitalizing American Institutions launches a new limited podcast series to foster civics education excellence. Senior Fellow Morris P. Fiorina applies the lessons learned from his Unstable Majorities essay series to the current political moment. Daniel Lipinski suggests we look to history to find ways to foster unity. And a new Alliance for Civics in the Academy will see Hoover experts assist civics educators at partner universities in developing best practices for the field.
GOVERNMENTAL INSTITUTIONS
Why America Needs RAI
In a new video, RAI explains why low public trust in most US institutions today constitutes a problem in need of robust solutions. The video is up on Hoover’s social channels and designed to be an easily digestible, shareable explainer of RAI’s mission.
Watch the video here.
Overcoming Our Modern Day ‘House Divided’
Writing in RealClearPolitics, Distinguished Visiting Fellow Daniel Lipinski says that the current moment, when the return of Donald Trump as president is raising talk of the republic itself being at risk, requires looking to the past for a response. Lipinski reflects on the efforts of Abraham Lincoln. As Lincoln urged before he became president, Lipinski says Americans must “re-adopt’ the Declaration of Independence — its ideals and intention — if we are to avoid further civic strife and polarization.
Read more here.
State Lawsuits Threaten Trump’s Executive Orders
On his Substack, The Modern Federalist, Senior Fellow Paul E. Peterson writes of the power wielded by attorneys general in blue states seeking to slow or halt President Trump’s flurry of executive actions. Peterson points out the elements of the judicial system that make this sort of action attractive for states. First, the attorneys general can pick the judges they want to hear their cases. Second, they typically always have standing to sue. “With all these advantages, plaintiffs against the Trump Administration have won nine out of ten decisions in district courts thus far, a completion rate most quarterbacks will take,” Peterson writes. “If anything close to this rate continues, it will hollow out Trump’s boast to make America great again.”
Read more here.
Free Speech, Private Power, and Private Employees
On a recent episode of Free Speech Unmuted, Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh and University of Florida law professor Jane Bambauer discuss the limits of the First Amendment as it pertains to private workplaces and other settings outside the public sphere. Roughly half of states have some law limiting restrictions on speech and political activity in private settings. Volokh and Bambauer discuss the utility of such laws and whether protections on speech in private settings should be expanded or curtailed.
Listen to the episode here.
ORGANIZATIONS AND DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE
Can Political Parties Be Rebooted?
Morris P. Fiorina is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He published a new collection of Unstable Majorities essays ahead of the 2024 presidential election that sought to explain how American voters saw their choices. Here, he describes how the lessons from those essays could be applied to the November vote, and imagines the path forward for both Republicans and Democrats.
Chris Herhalt: I want to start with your essay about the white working class. In it, you write, “Many people like Trump because they resent the people who hate him.” President Trump does appear to be an effective conduit of disdain for elites on the part of the masses. In your opinion, how does someone who appears to be such an elite himself effectively transform himself in that manner?
Morris Fiorina: You’re right. Here’s a guy who’s rich, who comes out of a rich New York environment, but if you read about him, it’s clear he was never part of the New York elite. His origins were not elite origins, exactly. He was always a little on the . . . not the dark side, necessarily, but just not the elite side. And I’ve always wondered if because of the business he was in, construction, and dealing with building trades and unions, whether he was regularly in contact with working-class-type people, unions and so forth, and understood how those people think and how they react to things. That’s a question that I think Trump biographers will have a field day with once we have some distance from this era and try to figure out how this guy came out of nowhere politically and seemed to know how to connect.
In early 2016, after Trump had announced but before he was being taken seriously, I was visiting some of my old friends at Harvard. I went down to the square and hailed a taxi, and I got in; the driver was a black guy. And he said, “Do you mind if I keep listening to this? I really like this guy.” And I said, “Sure, go ahead.” After a few blocks, I realized he was listening to Trump. And every now and then, Trump would say something and the guy would laugh a little and sort of hit the steering wheel, like, “Right on.” And by the time I got to where I was going—and all kinds of people have realized this since—I realized Trump was connecting with this guy, and he wasn’t connecting on the level of substance but on the level of attitude. That in the same way Trump was lashing out at people who had marginalized him, this guy could imagine how good it would feel to hit back in the same way. And I remember thinking at the time that there’s an aspect of Trump’s appeal that people are not getting.
Especially in the kind of circles that I live in. At a conference earlier this year, one of my visiting professor friends got up and said, “Isn’t there some issue that could peel away Trump’s support?’ And I remember thinking, it’s not issue-based. That’s the thing. It really doesn’t matter what he says. It’s how he says it is that appeals to a whole lot of people. I’m not a psychologist, but I think the biographers are going to have a good time with this one, for sure.
Read more here.
DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
Hoover Launches New Limited Podcast Series on American Civics Excellence
The Hoover Institution launched a new limited podcast series this month featuring experts grappling with how to reinvigorate civics education across America.
Renewing Civics Education: Preparing for American Citizenship is a five-part podcast series that will feature a range of experts on aspects of civics, such as civics instruction, the role of the media in fostering an understanding of civics, and how civics programs in higher education can resist any forms of indoctrination.
The first episode in the series featured Distinguished Visiting Fellow Bill Whalen and Senior Fellow Chester E. (Checker) Finn Jr., a nationally renowned scholar on education policy who leads Hoover’s Working Group on Good American Citizenship. They spoke about the efforts by Finn and his working group colleagues to reinvigorate civics education across the K–12 and college landscapes.
Listen to episodes here.
New Alliance for Civics in the Academy Working to Promote University Civics Education Nationwide
Scholars at the Hoover Institution have created a new national alliance of civics educators tasked with reinvigorating the teaching of civics at American universities to better equip graduates to participate in modern democracy.
Launched in spring 2024 at a meeting sponsored by Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, the Alliance for Civics in the Academy is a nonpartisan network of instructors in higher education involved in teaching courses and developing academic programs aimed at civic education.
It brings together teachers from all career stages, from different political leanings—liberal, conservative, and progressive—from red and blue states, teaching at public and private institutions, large and small. All share the pursuit of robust teaching practices to help pupils be better citizens and participate more fully in their communities.
Read more here.
RAI Webinar: Tested: Why Conservative Students Get the Most Out of Liberal Education
Princeton Associate Research Scholar Lauren Wright presented during the fifth Reimagining American Institutions, discussing her book project with RAI Director Brandice Canes-Wrone. In it, Wright spoke about how conservative students, who face extraordinary intellectual and social challenges inside and outside college classrooms, often benefit from those pressures. The challenges and obstacles presented by liberal professors and classroom peers force conservative students to hone and sharpen their arguments, ironically making them better scholars in the long run.
Watch the webinar here.
Upcoming Event: Join Us for the Civic Learning Week National Forum!
RAI is cohosting the Civic Learning Week National Forum with iCivics on Thursday, March 13, 2025, at the Hoover Institution. Join us, in person or via livestream, to learn how education leaders from across the country are elevating pluralistic approaches to civil learning. RSVP here.
