Commencement Advice: A Letter for What Comes Next

Four years ago, many of you arrived on campuses I described as flashpoints in our national culture war. The shouting on cable news, the protests, the litmus tests, the algorithmic outrage machines—all of it followed you into the dorms, seminar rooms, and dining halls. Some of you handled it with grace. Some got swept up in it. Most, I suspect, did a bit of both. That’s honest. That’s human. That’s how growth happens. But the world you’re walking into is not a continuation of campus life; it is something different, and in some ways far more demanding. Off campus, no one is paid to mentor you. No professor will hold office hours for your existential crises. No residential advisor will mediate disputes with roommates who have become coworkers, neighbors, in-laws. The scaffolding is gone. What remains is you: your character, your habits, your judgment, your capacity for sustained relationship with people who do not share your worldview. That last point matters most. Tocqueville understood that American democracy did not survive on the strength of its laws or constitution alone. It survived because Americans showed up—to town meetings, church socials, volunteer fire departments, mutual aid societies, neighborhood associations, bowling leagues. He called these the habits of the heart. The everyday practice of associating with people unlike yourself, on terms of rough equality, in pursuit of something larger than private interest. That practice is what produces citizens. Without it, you get atomized consumers shouting past one another from inside their preferred information silos. The data are not encouraging. Americans belong to fewer civic organizations than at any point in modern memory. We attend religious services less often, we barely volunteer, we no longer know our neighbors, we marry later, have fewer children, and spend more hours alone with our screens than any generation before. This is not a partisan observation; it is a measured collapse of the social infrastructure that made self-governance possible in the first place. But here is the good news: You can reverse this. Not all of it, not by yourself, but in your corner of the world. After you leave campus and enter the real world, please join something that involves the real world. A house of worship, a volunteer fire department, a Rotary club, a softball league, a book group, a community board, a weekly game group. The institution matters less than the practice. What you are training is the muscle of showing up for people who did not select you and whom you did not select—the muscle that makes neighbors out of strangers and citizens out of consumers. Get married, if you find the right person. Have children, if you can. These are not merely private preferences but civic acts. Families anchor neighborhoods. Children force you into PTA meetings and Little League and birthday parties for kids whose parents you would never otherwise have met. The Founders understood that a republic depends on households; on stable, formative, responsibility-bearing units that produce and shape the next generation of citizens. We have grown squeamish about saying so. We should stop being squeamish. Read seriously. Not headlines, not threads, not the curated outrage of the algorithm but books, essays, arguments long enough to require sustained attention. The Jewish tradition holds that study is itself a form of worship, that wrestling with a difficult text alongside a partner is sacred work. You do not need to be Jewish to take that seriously. The discipline of slow reading, of sitting with an idea you do not immediately understand, of letting a book change your mind; this is increasingly countercultural, and increasingly necessary. Disagree well. You will work alongside, live next to, and eventually depend upon people whose politics will horrify you. They will feel the same way about yours. The question is not whether you can avoid them—you cannot, sorry—but whether you can build something durable with them anyway. The framers of the Constitution disagreed bitterly about almost everything and still produced a republic. Frederick Douglass debated slaveholders without conceding an inch of moral ground and still recognized them as fellow human beings susceptible to argument. Jane Addams brought together immigrants and natives, rich and poor, in a single Chicago settlement house. The American tradition is not consensus. It is structured, civilized, productive disagreement. Recover it. Be patient with institutions, including the imperfect ones that educated you. Reform them where you can, criticize them honestly, but do not give in to the lazy nihilism that says everything is broken and nothing is worth saving. Most of what works in American life works because someone, somewhere, kept showing up and doing the quiet work. You are not finished. You are barely beginning. Welcome to the rest of your life. Make it count. The post Commencement Advice: A Letter for What Comes Next appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .