Education Quote by Phillip E. Johnson

Johnson’s warning lands less like a civics-101 platitude and more like a diagnosis: the formal machinery of a constitutional democracy can keep humming even as its legitimacy rots from the inside. The phrase “serious trouble” is deliberately non-specific, which is the point. He’s gesturing at a slow-motion emergency - not just coups or riots, but the mundane collapse that happens when citizens can’t parse arguments, don’t know what institutions do, or stop caring enough to restrain themselves when power is on their side.

“Certain degree of education” does two things at once. It elevates schooling beyond job training and quietly indicts cultures that treat knowledge as optional or elitist. It also sidesteps perfectionism: he’s not demanding philosopher-kings, just a baseline competence that makes self-government possible. The sharper edge is “civic virtue,” an older moral vocabulary smuggled into modern politics. Virtue here means habits: accepting electoral loss, tolerating opponents, resisting the dopamine hit of misinformation, paying attention even when it’s boring, valuing the rule of law over the thrill of winning.

The subtext is that constitutions don’t enforce themselves; they rely on social norms that can’t be fully codified. If citizens approach politics as consumer entertainment or tribal warfare, rights become weapons, checks and balances become obstacles, and freedom becomes a license to sabotage the system that protects it. Johnson is essentially arguing that democracy isn’t just a structure - it’s a practiced character trait, and it can atrophy.