It's Time to Reimagine Civic Responsibility
Summary: Senior Advisor and Beacon Project Director Daniel Yudkin reflects on the duties of citizenship.
Few ideas hold a more vaunted position in the American imagination than that of rights. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, establishes our right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And the first ten amendments to the Constitution, which secure such things as free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of worship, are aptly named the Bill of Rights.
Today, our emphasis on rights continues unabated, imbuing virtually every aspect of our national discourse. In fact, it is so pervasive that it is often used with equal fervor on both sides of a debate.
Women have a right to privacy. No, unborn children have a right to life.
The public has a right to bear arms. No, it has a right to safety.
Homeless people have a right to housing. No, the people who stymie affordable housing efforts have a right to “quiet enjoyment.”
This “rights talk” is a pervasive aspect of our culture.
But our focus on rights, important though it may be, misses a central part of the civic equation: namely, responsibilities.
While rights involve the things we are entitled to as humans or citizens, responsibilities are the things we owe to others.
The Founding Fathers recognized the importance of citizens having a robust sense of civic responsibility: for instance, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “public virtue”—that is, a populace guided by a strong sense of moral responsibility—was a critical foundation of a healthy republic. And JFK summoned a sense of civic responsibility when enjoined us to “ask what you can do for your country.”
The problem is, as authors like Richard Haass has pointed out, these days, responsibilities are rarely featured in public discourse.
To illustrate, consider the following analysis, performed with Google’s N-Gram viewer, which detects frequencies of words in all printed English-language documents over time. Over the last 200 years, the term “rights” has appeared at about 2-3x the frequency of the word “responsibility.”1 While there was a 30-year period following World War 2 that the terms were fairly close in frequency, rights talk once again surged in the period from 1980 to 2000 and has remained high ever since.
Simply put: it seems Americans prefer to talk about the things we deserve than the things we owe.
Expanding the Definition of Civic Obligation
The good news is that, despite responsibility’s anemic presence in the national discourse, there is evidence it remains alive and well in the minds of ordinary people.
In a 2025 survey, for example, my colleagues at the Beacon Project and I asked a politically diverse sample of Americans what they considered to be “civic obligations,” defined as “behaviors that every American is ethically required to perform.”
We found that the vast majority of Americans broadly agree on certain fundamental responsibilities. These include obeying the law, paying one’s taxes, voting, and reporting for jury duty. Yet we find that a majority of Americans also consider a wide range of other behaviors to be civic obligations. These include things like fighting for other people’s rights, honoring the flag, protecting the environment, and caring for future generations.
In other words, many Americans appear to recognize a variety of responsibilities that might not appear in a “Civics 101” textbook. This suggests that everyday Americans recognize the importance of a wide range of social obligations, even those that aren’t explicitly labeled as such.
Understanding “Connective Responsibility”
The idea that ordinary Americans harbor robust ideas of civic responsibility is further supported by More in Common’s recent report, the “Connection Opportunity.”
We asked a sample of 4,522 US adults whether they agreed that: “In a complex society, we all have a shared responsibility to engage with people whose backgrounds and viewpoints are different from our own.”
We find that seven in ten Americans agree. What’s more, when asked about how they felt about connecting across difference, many cite not just the personal but also the collective benefits of connection: namely, that it builds strong communities and serves as the binding agent of our social fabric.
As Niana, a 51-year-old liberal Black woman from Texas, put it,
Surrounding yourself by people who are different than you—that's how you grow. That's how you learn from each other.
And Jill, a 36-year-old white conservative woman from Missouri, said,
“Connecting with other people helps us grow more within ourselves.”
These statements suggest that these individuals consider social connection not just as something for her own benefit, but also as a vehicle for positive social change.
We call this behavior connective responsibility. An appreciation of connective responsibility is an appreciation of the fact that breaking out of one’s bubble is a “good thing”—not just for oneself, but also for society. And indeed, we find that the more people embrace a sense of connective responsibility, the more interested they are to engage in a variety of behaviors involving connection across difference, ranging from forming a cross-group friendship to working together to accomplish a shared goal in their community.
Recentering Mutual Obligation in the National Conversation
While the concept of civic responsibilities is less frequently mentioned than that of rights, it is evidently something that ordinary Americans implicitly value.
This fact may hold a key to navigating our current fraught political climate. America is facing a wide range of challenges, from technological change to social fracturing and polarization. But these distinct issues share one thing in common: they are challenges of splintering. Splintering is what happens when a cohesive society breaks off into ever-smaller factions, becoming more divided and distrustful.
Historians have long observed that societies decay when people start to lose the sense of mutual obligation and shared fate that binds them together. When we no longer feel we owe each other anything, then we have no reason to work out our differences or find common ground. The shared project dissolves.
That’s why it is more important than ever to refocus our national attention on the bonds of obligation that connect us to each other. We are activated not just by the pursuit of our own ends, but also by a sense of community in which we are invested in each other’s fate.
As Bob Putnam, acclaimed sociologist and author of Bowling Alone, stated in a recent interview in the New York Times:
We’re not going to fix polarization, inequality, social isolation until we start feeling, first of all, an obligation to care for other people.
Finding our way out of the fraught political climate we find ourselves in today is going to require changes to the way we see each other and ourselves.
Crucial to this effort will be recentering mutual obligation in the national discourse.
For more like this, sign up for the Beacon Project newsletter or visit our website.
Webinar Alert:
Our #ConnectionOpportunity report is now out! To learn more about this research, sign up for our upcoming webinar with the Council on Foundations (April 23rd at 2pm ET) or Healthy Places by Design (May 28th, 3 PM ET).
We can’t do this without you!
MIC regularly conducts research that sheds light on both cross-group misperceptions and common ground. Consider supporting our work by making a donation.
📩 Know someone who may enjoy our newsletter? Have them sign up here.
📝 If you want to read our past newsletters, go to our homepage.
📊 Read all of our reports at www.moreincommonus.com
Note that we used the term “rights” instead of “right” because the latter has multiple usages that are not relevant to our analysis