Kornberg is lead author of the Global Parliamentary Report, scheduled for publication in early 2022, and is writing a book on the U.S. Congress.
In September, American public trust in government stood at 24 percent, a near all-time low. One potential cause for our lack of trust in government is a feeling among citizens that they are not heard. A new study found that only 28 percent of Americans think their representatives pay attention to the general public's views on issues. Another research initiative found that most constituents do not feel heard by their representatives. In order to remedy ailing trust, Congress should institute more systematic and more direct ways of hearing from average Americans.
The crisis facing American democracy is not unique. According to a recent study, over half of citizens living in democracies think their voices are "rarely" or "never" heard and believe they do not have an impact on political decisions.
Congress can learn from how countries around the world are developing solutions.
A forthcoming study of 80 countries around the world, jointly commissioned by the United Nations Development Program and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, points to straightforward solutions. The Global Parliamentary Report draws on a rich dataset of interviews with 140 parliamentarians and staff around the world, focus groups, surveys of 70 parliaments, and input from civil society actors. Among many other lessons, the research reveals the importance of consistent codified methods for engaging citizens outside the halls of the legislature in order to regain public trust.
Moving democracy outside the halls of parliament can increase the reach of parliamentary engagement with citizens. The U.S. Congress normally hears from the American people in congressional hearings. Committees in this large country do not cover the cost of travel, and structural inequities influence who has the financial, physical and other resources necessary to travel to Washington, D.C. Moreover, the personal and professional networks of congressional staff and members of Congress create bias and congressional witnesses may not represent the full spectrum of American perspectives.
The Global Parliamentary Report presents examples of parliaments institutionalizing engagement outside of parliament in order to increase how many and which citizens legislators hear. In the United Kingdom, the select committee engagement team helps parliamentary committees put together engagement events beyond formal evidence sessions. There are about 40 events a year, reaching about 52,500 people. Sixty percent of events are held outside of Parliament. Tara-Jane Kerpens-Lee, manager of the select committee engagement team, explained, "We support committees to hear from the people that they want to hear from but can't always do that through the formal evidence channels."
In Serbia, regular "mobile committee hearings" bring parliamentarians to remote regions of the country. In one example, committee MPs and staff traveled to a remote region following extensive floods in 2014. They heard from about 30 citizens about the need for agricultural insurance. As a result of the hearing the committee voted unanimously against budget cuts. A member of the Serbian Agricultural Procedures Association explained that before these mobile hearings "the main problem was the lack of communication with the committee. ... In earlier years they were virtually impossible to reach ... so how would a peasant be able to enter the Assembly? It's a major relief for farmers when they were able to present their problems." His words illustrate the way in which taking parliament to the people increases the range of voices that legislators can hear.
In the wake of Covid-19, many parliaments are moving engagement online. In Brazil, interactive events allow for public participation in public hearings through toll-free calls and online questions and comments. As of November 2020, over 10 million users had registered more than 24 million opinions on 9,727 propositions. Sen. Zenaide Maia explained that digital tools are "really important because people can participate all the time ... not only voting during the campaigns." Regular online engagement presents another channel for engaging those outside of the capital.
If Congress were to hear from more and more diverse groups of people, Americans might begin feeling that policymakers are listening. Evaluations of events put on by the U.K. select committee engagement team show that 65 percent of participants feel heard by committees, and 60 percent feel positive that their views will go on to inform policy. Personal interactions with politicians also increase their relatability. The chairwoman of Subotica City Association for People with Autism Disabilities, an organization visited by the Serbian mobile committee, reflected "only then [after the hearing] I realized that[MPs] are people just like us. We just need to present them the problems we are coping with."
Congress has already experimented with digital hearings in the wake of Covid-19 and on occasion different committees hold field hearings and listening tours. In addition, individual members of Congress hold town halls in their districts. However, what is missing is a systematic and consistent method of engaging citizens across the country. By institutionalizing field hearings as standard practice for committees, creating a dedicated office within Congress to support engagement work, and incorporating digital methods that enable long distance participation in all hearings, Congress can regain trust by showing its citizens that it hears all Americans.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.