Why they’re doing so poorly:

Last month, another report came out extending the low scores of Millennials to precisely the anti-civic, pro-social syndrome predicted in The Dumbest Generation. It reports the findings of a survey of young adults on a variety of dispositions and beliefs, conducted by Pew Research and bearing the title “Millennials in Adulthood”. The conclusion is neatly summed up in the subtitle: “Detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends.” Overall, it found, 18-33-year-olds in America are less connected to political parties, churches, local associations, and their own country than are older Americans. They are solidly liberal, but their values seem more derived from social attitudes than from political policies, supporting same-sex marriage and “lead[ing] all generations in the share of out-of-wedlock births.” They favor an “activist government,” understood as maintaining entitlements and benefits, not as a political or economic outlook.

In other words, they judge politics by how it affects them, and we see that personal-only perspective in their social focus. They are much more connected to friends and peers than their elders are, with fully 81 percent of Millennials having Facebook accounts, and the “median friend count is 250”! They “are also distinctive in how they place themselves at the center of self-created digital networks,” for example, posting “selfies” at higher rates.

There you have the equation. More peer stuff means less civic sense. While 75 percent of Baby Boomers and 81 percent of the Silent Generation believe the phrase “A patriotic person” fits them “very well,” only 49 percent of Millennials do. Half of them, that is, have little appreciation of their country and fidelity to its traditions. They don’t much care about civics and politics and history, and they don’t know much about it, either. On the 2010 civics exam of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Nation’s Report Card), scores for 12th-graders fell three points from 2006 and one-third of test-takers stated that they hadn’t studied the U.S. Constitution at all during the year.

It’s not their fault. It’s ours.