The Case for National Service with Scott Reich

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.