Civics Lab stems from a conviction, drawn from a long tradition of democratic thought, that ordinary people are capable of governing themselves, and that the capacity grows only through practice.
This section is being rewritten and expanded. What follows is a short account of the argument; a fuller version will follow.
The public sphere, the space where citizens encounter one another, form collective judgment, and direct their leaders, has been progressively occupied by organized interests who speak in the name of the public while pursuing private ends. The most effective mechanism of that occupation is the framing of citizens as individual consumers, which makes shared problems harder to name as shared and the idea of a public with common concerns harder to sustain. The information environment has fragmented whatever common ground remained. The result is a civic life in which official voices are louder than ever and genuine citizen presence is thinner than it has been in a long time.
For most Americans, the practice of self-government has become rare, not because people are excluded by law, but because they have been acculturated into a particular relationship with public life. They are brought up to follow the news without demanding that it speak to their actual concerns, to vote and hope, to treat governance as something done by others, elsewhere, by people with the proper expertise. The distance between the citizen and the decisions that shape their life comes to feel natural, even correct. Over time, a public trained into that role can forget that another kind of participation was ever possible.
The tradition Civics Lab works from holds that a public can govern itself, not only choose who governs it, and that the capacity to do so is built through use. It draws on a long line of democratic thought about experimental, shared intelligence: the idea that ordinary people, reasoning together from evidence and testing their conclusions in action, can address problems that no expert hands down a solution for. It draws too on the insight that acting together, as distinct persons who speak and disagree rather than dissolve into a crowd, is what keeps collective power democratic rather than dangerous.
The full Framework will develop these ideas, name the thinkers behind them, and set out the philosophical position in detail.
The method turns these convictions into a sequence of steps a circle can actually follow.