Podcast: The Case for National Service with Scott Reich
Historian Scott Reich makes the case that the idea of national service may be one way to repair our fractured democracy.
Every day brings fresh evidence that American democracy is fraying — not only at the level of institutions, but in the connective tissue between citizens. On the newest episode of Dave Troy Presents, presidential historian Scott Reich makes a case that is at once old-fashioned and urgent: that a renewed ethos of national service may be one of the few real antidotes to that unraveling.
Reich — a board member of the JFK Library Foundation and author of The Power of Citizenship — recently took the stage at TED Democracy in Philadelphia to propose a modern “GI Bill for civic service”: a year of service for young Americans, not necessarily military, rewarded with real benefits and phased in over a decade so no single generation feels singled out. But the mechanics matter less than the premise beneath them. Citizenship, Reich argues, is not only a bundle of rights; it carries obligations we have largely stopped naming — let alone teaching.
The conversation ranges from the citizen-training of ancient Athens to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone; from the commoditization of youth sports to a half-forgotten 1917 baseball benefit game that Reich resurrects in his forthcoming book. Running through all of it is a single idea — that social mixing across background, region, and class is how a democracy rebuilds trust, and that we have spent fifty years disinvesting in it.
For readers of America 2.0, the throughline will be familiar. Dave frames national service not as feel-good civics but as information-resilience infrastructure: an atomized, mutually suspicious society is a soft target for exactly the kind of information warfare we have documented here for years. Rebuilding the habit of gathering in person — of encountering people unlike ourselves — is a national-security question as much as a moral one, and it will matter enormously heading into the 2026 midterms.
It is an erudite, hopeful, and stubbornly non-partisan hour. Listen to the episode here.
Scott Reich’s work is at scott-reich.com. Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0.
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