Mandatory National Service
One of the main problems with American politics today is not only that we disagree, but that our partisan divide is increasingly defined by race, religion and other cultural identities. How can we bridge such a powerful rift? In 1954, Gordon Allport wrote The Nature of Prejudice, establishing “contact theory.” Much more work has been done to refine this theory, but the basic idea still holds today: When members of two groups come into contact with each other—without competition or an established status hierarchy—that contact can reduce intolerance.
The military is a classic example. Around the same time that Allport’s book came out, as the armed forces were gradually being desegregated during the Korean War, sociologists were asked to study racial attitudes among soldiers. Sure enough, the researchers found that white soldiers in desegregated battalions expressed lower levels of racial intolerance than those in the white segregated battalions. Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has mentioned his own military service as a memorable opportunity for intergroup contact. But, as he has also said, this type of contact can occur in any situation in which two groups are working together toward a common goal.
Retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal has proposed a year of paid national service for young Americans. Research from social psychology and political behavior supports the effectiveness of this type of program. In my view, it should include a universal (or quasi-mandatory) paid gap year for all high school graduates, sending them away from home to work together on projects to improve communities or the nation as a whole—rebuilding infrastructure, for instance, or working at a food bank or clinic. Importantly, all of these young people would travel to an unfamiliar location so that their status as strangers was equalized. A voluntary program would be less effective; it would allow those who prefer to sit in partisan isolation to continue to do so. In order to make the program universal, however, it would be essential for these young people to be paid a living wage and be provided college credit or tuition. Ideally, colleges and universities would be incentivized to provide “debriefing” courses for all incoming freshmen, allowing them to put their lessons learned into context, while receiving introductory civics and media literacy lessons.
The American electorate is losing a common sense of what it means to be American. That won’t be solved by finding the most popular policy or more civil language. We need to be reintroduced to each other in a place where we are all on the same team. And we need to do so at an age when political identities are most powerfully shaped. College-age Americans are both the most politically flexible, and the ones who have the greatest stake in bridging a divide that has brought democratic progress to a standstill.
The unraveling of our social fabric and political institutions didn’t happen overnight. It took decades, during presidencies of both parties and amid the hostile takeover of everyday life by markets and hyperindividualism. We are a self-absorbed, self-centered, self-seeking society whose civic muscles are atrophying rapidly and whose sense of common purpose is disappearing. We are easily divided by foreign adversaries. We are tweeting and texting our way to disunion.
Fortunately, there’s a single fix that can reverse this atrophy and generate an inclusive sense of shared destiny: mandatory national service.
Let’s require that every young person, upon reaching age 18, serve community and country by spending at least a year in civilian or military service. Whether they join the Marine Corps or AmeriCorps, the state National Guard or a regional conservation corps, the members of America’s most diverse generation will learn habits of mutual aid. They will build bonds of trust and affection across lines of race, class, region and ideology—not by talking about themselves but by doing stuff together: building, training, repairing, healing, rescuing, solving. They will celebrate not just their diversity but what they do with it.
Give tens of millions of young Americans that kind of cross-pollinating, solutions-oriented, stereotype-busting, face-to-face experience year after year. In a single generation our political climate will be detoxified and the body politic rejuvenated. We can serve our way out of this mess by remembering the message of the World War II bond drive posters: “Now. All Together.”