The Fulcrum Repairing America's Broken Democracy
Rachel Kaganoff Stern is CEO of Junior State of America. Rachel shares her thoughts on the mission and impact of Junior State of America in engaging young people in government and improving their communities.
The interview is part of a collaboration between Bridge Alliance and CityBiz entitled Repairing America's Broken Democracy.
During a recent civics class a student asked me why protests were happening around the country. This student wasn’t being partisan or argumentative. They were just trying to understand what is happening in our democracy right now.
When it comes to teaching civics through current events, the hardest part doesn’t involve breaking up disagreements. Rather, the hardest and incidentally most valuable component is helping students develop meaning from situations as change unfolds on their social media feeds in real time.
As a civics teacher, I am in a unique position to help them make sense of what’s happening in their community and in our nation. And in this current situation, as a teacher who specializes in Homeland Security and as a former immigration lawyer, I’m in an especially unique position.
But my role is the same as any and every teacher in this country - to present current events without advocacy. My legal background provides opportunities to develop civic lessons grounded in sound law, even as current events seem to press legal limits. My lessons are designed to help students develop their own opinions based on reliable evidence and factual information. And because I teach high school, it’s my ongoing responsibility to help students become responsible citizens through developing civic empowerment.
We need meaningful civics education that motivates the next generation to engage leadership roles and public service. Students today, however, won’t simply accept opinions first. They expect clarity. And providing clarity in contemporary civic learning is complex, because there are so many potential distractions. Social media especially holds an increasingly tight grip on students. Moreover, students enter the classroom with a wide range of backgrounds, beliefs and challenges.
My role is to identify where students are and then provide lessons that further the growth of reasonable civic thought, reflection and connection.
As partisanship divides us and adults seem to yell even louder, purposefully teaching civics in the classroom is about developing skills as opposed to pressing an agenda.
My role as a responsible civics teacher today is similar to being both the prosecution and defense attorney in the same first impression case with closing arguments that favor neither side. I focus on being a resource for students driven to develop their own reasoning abilities rather than to accept personal educator bias. My students are motivated to know what Constitutional rights exist, what limits exist, and how legal authorities make decisions. They need to be able to separate truth from fiction, develop arguments based on evidence and documents, and learn how to become responsible citizens. Valuable civic education is not about what to think – it’s about how to think.
A commitment to strong civic education is really the only sustainable solution to ensuring the US will always remain the greatest democracy in the world. Purposeful civic education teaches students how to problem solve within that democracy – and how to work together. Students need civic-focused reasoning to separate systems from sound-bytes. They must realize social media swipes in the present are not nearly as important as civic understanding over the long-term.
In my own classroom, civic learning extends beyond discussion and into meaningful action. This year, which is both the 250th Anniversary of the nation’s independence and the 25th Anniversary of 9/11, my students are organizing an inaugural 9/11 Flags of Remembrance Project for our community. We hope to have 2,977 US Flags sponsored and displayed at our school, one for each innocent victim of 9/11 - a dynamic symbol of the impact of that horrific day. The Project is about remembering and understanding why certain moments must continue to shape our civic life.
Our nation depends on civic-focused projects, engagements as well as lessons that resonate with students. Civic Learning Week (March 9-14) is an annual recommitment to civic-focused education, providing an ideal opportunity to remember democracy depends on informed participation. Civic Learning Week helps signal to students that their questions matter, supports teachers doing this difficult work, and encourages schools to prioritize civic literacy.
A student several months from graduating asked me how to register to vote, a simple question tied to arguably our most important civic responsibility. Such a question brought a smile to my face.
We need the next generation to appreciate that democracy isn’t taught once – it must be engaged with throughout entire lives. If we want informed citizens, we must be committed to valuable civic education. After all, while teaching the present may be challenging, a commitment to civic learning guarantees we teach it responsibly and prepare the next generation of citizens.
Adam Edward Rothwell is a tenured public high school Homeland Security teacher in Baltimore County, Maryland, and a licensed attorney. The views expressed are his own.
What can the success of SEMATECH teach us about winning the AI race? Explore how a bold U.S. public-private partnership revived the semiconductor industry—and why a similar model could be key to advancing AI innovation today.
Imagine waking up to this paragraph in your favorite newspaper:
The willingness of the U.S. government to eschew partisanship and undertake a bold experiment -- an experiment based on cooperation as opposed to traditional procurement, and with accountability standards rooted in trust instead of elaborate regulations -- has led the U.S. to a position of preeminence in an industry which is vital to our nation's security and economic well-being.
You'd likely be incredulous, right? Private-public collaboration, as if! Bipartisan investment in a long-term project, sure! Redesigning out-of-date systems and ditching unnecessary regulations, in our dreams!
That is not a quote from a utopian novel.
I lifted that language from the Final Report to the Department of Defense on an initiative known as Sematech. In the late 1980s, the US recognized that it was in danger of missing a pivotal technological moment. Japan had seized a substantial advantage in semiconductor research and development. As of 1989, the US share of semiconductor equipment sales plunged from 69 percent in 1983 to just 51 percent in 1988. Over that same five-year span, Japan surged ahead--increasing its share from 25 percent to 40 percent. Rather than pursue a patchwork of state-driven approaches and in place of relying solely on private US firms to magically catch their Japanese rivals, a diverse set of stakeholders coordinated a national response.
Congress acknowledged that the status quo marked an "unacceptable situation" and formed SEMATECH--a private-public consortium of 14 private companies committed to putting the US back on the vanguard of this critical industry. In practice, this involved “developing, demonstrating and advancing the technology base for efficient, high yield manufacturing of advanced semiconductor devices.” The consortium embarked on research covering everything from lithography to plasma etch and deposition equipment. The idea was that this kind of basic research would lead to the US reclaiming its status as the market leader.
Such an intensive, ambitious, and cooperative research agenda would not have happened without a willingness for public and private participants to invest—literally and figuratively—in a more competitive, productive America rather than attempt to regulate our way back to the top. The deal required all stakeholders to put significant skin in the game. More specifically, each company pledged to pay one percent of their semiconductor sales revenue per year, albeit with a floor of $1 million and a ceiling at $15 million. The federal government threw in a cool $100 million of matching funds to help things along.
But the buy-in from the private side was far more than financial--as Chris Hughes explains in his book, “Marketcrafters.” Companies sent some of their top talent to Austin, home to Sematech’s state-of-the-art fab facility (which was built in just 32 weeks). Many of those brilliant engineers stayed for two years--demonstrating the importance of the cause as well as the esprit de corps that SEMATECH’s leaders managed to cultivate.
SEMATECH firms also agreed that the resulting research would be shared and commercialized, which meant that even non-members could experience downstream benefits from the project’s advances. Intel later reported that its cumulative $17 million in SEMATECH saved the firm $300 million via production efficiencies. On the whole, economists suspect that the return on investment was somewhere between $1.40 and $2.80.
We’re in dire need of a SEMATECH for AI. More than three years into the current generative AI revolution, there’s a shortage of basic AI research -- studying new AI paradigms beyond large language models, developing evaluations to test model capabilities, and generally advancing the AI frontier so that we can keep pace with geopolitical rivals and realize the technology’s potential to increase human flourishing.
It’s no secret that some of America’s greatest scientific and technological advances have come about through getting a bunch of really smart folks together in one place and charging them with an ambitious mission that’s personally meaningful, politically important, and, yes, lucrative. A SEMATECH for AI would reduce duplicative work that’s going on at the labs, across universities, and within nonprofits.
Two key lessons should be gleaned from the SEMATECH example: first, government should not pick winners or micromanage innovation; and, second, the state can sometimes do the most good by clearing space for voluntary coordination, aligning incentives, and then getting out of the way. A modern AI consortium should be narrow in scope, time-limited, and disciplined by real private capital—not a new regulatory superstructure, not a permanent bureaucracy, and not a vehicle for industrial policy. Its charge would be simple: fund pre-competitive research that the market undersupplies, share results widely, and sunset once its mission is complete. That approach respects what folks such as Nobel Laureate Joel Mokyr have long argued—that durable technological leadership comes from trust, experimentation, and decentralized problem-solving, not compliance checklists or precautionary bans.
Kevin Frazier is a Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute, directs the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law, and is an Affiliated Research Fellow at the Cato Institute.
Attendees hold signs advocating for voting rights and against the SAVE America Act at a rally to outside the U.S. Capitol on March 18, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Both chambers of Congress are in session this week and next. The House will probably function about like it has been - lots of votes (often by voice) on uncontroversial bills; many fewer votes on Republican priority bills. Lots of hearings this week and a few legislator updates.
Both chambers have a busy week with 64 total committee meetings scheduled.
One of those hearings is of particular interest because it'll be the committee hearing for current Sen. Mullin (R-OK) who has been nominated to be the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. We will be watching that Wednesday morning hearing as we put together a separate post on the nomination process for this nominee. For expectations management purposes: Mullin will almost certainly be confirmed. No Republican has voiced concerns about him and Sen. Fetterman (D-PA) has already said he'll vote for Mullin.
There were supposed to be a bunch of votes today on uncontroversial bills today, but weather has once again intervened. Presumably these votes will be moved to tomorrow, but it's not clear right now.
Of these bills, two will, should they pass the House without amendment, become law:
We almost called this section "The @#$@#$ Filibuster" for reasons that will become clear below. We have mentioned many times that Senate procedure is usually either complex and intentionally slow or very simple and fast.
Unopposed unanimous consent is the classic simple and fast example.
The moderately slow/complex example is cloture, aka the vote to end debate or the filibuster. Why moderately slow/complex? Why is this called the filibuster?
Cloture votes have become very common. Most of the time when someone talks about "the filibuster", this is what they have in mind.
But this week the Senate is going to do a different and more complicated and even slower version of a filibuster. The end isn't likely to change - the SAVE America Act does not have the 60 votes needed for cloture right now - but the path to get there is going to be unusual.
Recap of main elements of current SAVE America text:
So what will the Senate do?
Is this a "talking filibuster"? Not really. A talking filibuster is a tactic to prevent passage of a bill that is likely to pass as soon as the minority gives up control of the floor.
But it also sort of is, in that the majority is banking on minority party senators wanting to work on their own priorities and so as long as they don't move to cloture, minority party member priorities are held up too.
So, the theory must be that enough Democrats will agree to vote yes on cloture if their own priorities are held up long enough by the process for the SAVE America Act. This tactic doesn't seem likely to succeed, but who knows.
Nonetheless, as of Monday morning March 16, this is what the Senate majority has planned for the week with respect to the SAVE America Act. We'll see by the end of the week where things stand both the majority's and minority's appetite for staying on this bill.
SAVE America Act Debate Begins; Mullin for DHS Hearing was originally published by GovTrack and is republished with permission.
Crowd of people walking on a street.
Biologist and author Paul Ehrlich, the most influential Chicken Little of the last century, died at the age of 93 this week. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” launched decades of institutional panic in government, entertainment and journalism.
Ehrlich’s core neo-Malthusian argument was that overpopulation would exhaust the supply of food and natural resources, leading to a cascade of catastrophes around the world. “The Population Bomb” opens with a bold prediction, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
“If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000,” Ehrlich prophesized during a speech in 1971. He also said that the U.S. would be rationing water by 1974, and food by 1980. That smog in L.A. and New York would cause some 200,000 deaths per year. That Americans born after World War II wouldn’t live past 50.
It’s difficult to exaggerate the grip Ehrlich and his followers had on elite opinion and the popular imagination. A founder of Zero Population Growth (now Population Connection), Ehrlich inspired the modern population control movement.
As Charles Mann chronicled in Smithsonian magazine, Ehrlich inspired global efforts to push abortion, birth control and even sterilization by governments, the United Nations and other international organizations, and foundations. “The results were horrific,” Betsy Hartmann, author of “Reproductive Rights and Wrongs,” told Mann.
“Some population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives,” Mann writes. “In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.”
In the U.S. the Ehrlicheans talked about requiring licenses for babies and putting birth control in the (dwindling) water supply.
Earlier, I said it’s difficult to exaggerate the grip Ehrlich’s thesis “had” on elite opinion. The truth, however, is that the grip endures. The sub-headline of the New York Times’ obituary reads, “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”
Premature?
England still exists. Life expectancy in the U.S. just set a record high of 79 (in Europe it’s 81.5 ). There is no country in the world with a life expectancy under 50. Air and water quality are much better today than they were in 1968. Global food production has exploded. Famine is rare, and almost always a product of war or the backward command-and-control economic thinking Ehrlich supported. And fertility rates are worrisomely declining throughout the developed world, and far beyond. Slightly more than half the world’s nations have sub-replacement birthrates. We have not run out of any resources and America has more forests than it did a century ago.
So, which predictions were “premature,” exactly?
There’s something about Malthusian dread that is simply too seductive to shake. For instance, a few years ago, I noticed something weird. On the 50th anniversary of “Soylent Green,” a dystopian, Ehrlichean film about overpopulation and food shortages, a number of writers opined how “prescient” the movie was. No less than the normally reasonable magazine the Economist wrote, “It is impossible to watch the film today without weighing up how accurate its predictions turned out to be.” It’s an “eerie prophecy,” they declared.
Really? It’s “impossible to watch” a movie about mass state-sponsored euthanasia that turns human beings into high-protein crackers to fend off starvation — set in 2022! — without marveling at the accuracy of its predictions?
Perhaps the most remarkable thing is not that Ehrlich turned out to be so wildly wrong, but that he was so obviously wrong from the beginning. My old boss Ben Wattenberg battled Ehrlich throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His feud began with a 1970 article for the New Republic titled, “The Nonsense Explosion,” in which Wattenberg explained that even as Ehrlich was writing about soaring birthrates, birthrates were already declining.
Ehrlich’s defenders — and they are legion — argue that he was a true prophet in that prophets issue apocalyptic warnings that, if heeded, can be avoided. This is more nonsense. He said mass “die-offs” were unavoidable with even the best policies, and the anti-growth fads he supported largely made things worse.
Simply put, his pessimism was too big to fail.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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