Longing For America’s Participatory Past
Whatever happened to its civic associations?
If I could make every American read one book, it would be Diminished Democracy by Theda Skocpol. Diminished Democracy tells the story of an American way of life that was once characterized by a profoundly participatory civic culture—and how that way of life has disappeared.
Skocpol opens the book by relating a pilgrimage she made to the grave of a struggling dirt farmer who died in obscurity nearly 80 years before. William Warren Durgin lived almost his whole life in the quiet woodlands of North Lovell, Maine. Despite his humble occupation, Durgin was a prominent man in his community. His service during the Civil War — he was one of Abraham Lincoln’s pallbearers — afforded him access to numerous social and civic networks. He was a commander of a Civil War veterans’ association, affiliated with the local Grange association, and a fraternal member of the local Odd Fellows lodge.
This is all noted on his gravestone, which, at least from a 21st-century perspective, is a bit strange. “Much as I value my own memberships,” writes Skocpol, “I could not quite imagine asking for ‘APSA’ or ‘SSHA’ to be chiseled into my gravestone. Warren Durgin was part of a civic world no longer intuitive to me, in which associational membership was, in and of itself, honorable and intensely significant.”
To a degree scarcely imaginable today, America was once an exceptionally participatory and civically engaged society. Importantly, Durgin’s associational memberships, and the dozens of other civic associations Americans belonged to, cut across class lines. In an era of little economic mobility, such civic organizations gave Americans an opportunity to find social prominence, respectability, and purpose in their communities.
The organizations also facilitated participation in electoral politics. Each association tended, like the U.S. governmental system itself, to have federated structures linking national, state, and local levels of membership. This mirrored structure enabled everyday citizens to lobby politicians and policy makers.
Further, these groups played an important, albeit informal role, in governing communities. Traditionally, much governance work had been performed not only by elected officials, but by these volunteer civic organizations.
Tragically, the loss of our participatory ethos has led, more or less directly, to our currently polarized gridlock and paralysis—and most Americans are oblivious to what they’ve lost. According to Skocpol, since the 1960s Americans have increasingly declined to be participatory members of the local and state community organizations. Communities that once comprised an effectual and engaged citizenry are now home to mostly passive voting blocs, moldable by politicians, consultants, and nonprofit advocacy groups.
As American civic participation has declined, political discussion has become an endless litigation of deep cultural conflicts. National government is saddled with tasks it is too unwieldy to handle promptly and with sensitivity. Government is now viewed as incompetent and illegitimate by dispirited voters—voters who need never have become so dependent on national government in the first place.
During the 1950s and 1960s, a renewed ideal of participatory democracy came into vogue in the intellectual world — just as civic associations began their decline. This was the emergence of the New Left, a post-communist movement in Western liberal democracies that sought to reformulate left-wing ideology after the embarrassment of Soviet totalitarianism.
While the New Left did not abandon the traditional socialist emphasis on economic justice, it began to incorporate deeper cultural themes surrounding identity, historical injustice, and existentialism—along with a renewed commitment to democratic political action. This was the time of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Its political theory was espoused in the writings of thinkers such as Gandhi, King, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, as well as SDS’s Port Huron Statement.
Today, participatory democracy seems naïve, as modern politics has largely grown impervious to individual agency. In liberal democracies with massive populations and nationalized party systems, few opportunities for substantial political action exist for most citizens, other than donating money and voting every few years. Most citizens now tend to find meaning and fulfillment in their careers, private lives, and personal consumption—in non-political pursuits.
This is exactly the state of affairs the participatory democrats of the New Left feared. They saw the rise of consumer culture, with its increasingly sophisticated marketing and oppressive careerism, as an attempt to incapacitate human agency. The modern economic system was, to them, a gigantic, domineering, ravenous machine that required the diminishment of individual idiosyncrasies to facilitate its smooth functioning.
The participatory democrats understood human agency to involve a capacity to change the world in a way that brings it closer in line with what they value and find meaningful. They would thus consider the current state of political affairs to be nothing short of a disaster.
In ensuing years, even the New Left increasingly emphasized identity politics and the integration of marginalized groups into the bourgeois economy. Its original emphasis on participation and individual agency became a political path not taken.
In retrospect, it is striking how many in the New Left failed to recognize that they were trying to reinvent the wheel. Arguably, the primary reason their aspirations toward participatory democracy failed was because they could not figure out how to make it work in practice. Yet there was a rich tradition of civic participation in America that, though in decline, was still being practiced by their parents and grandparents. Rather than focusing on short-lived social movements, identity politics, and calls for revolution, they could have turned to that tradition for inspiration and direction.
The civic associations Skocpol studied were remarkable in several ways. They are now perhaps most remarkable for their virtual disappearance from American public consciousness.
Professional associations such as the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, or the American Political Science Association are among the last remaining voluntary associations with any relevance to public life. Such associations, to the extent they are involved in the broader public discourse, tend to focus on issues of concern to their particular community of professionals. There are virtually no associations that cut across class lines, as the members of these professional organizations have similar economic interests.
When America’s vibrant civic past is recalled, it is often mistakenly portrayed as non-political. Conservative commentators like Robert Putnam, David Brooks, and Charles Murray tend to think of America’s historically civic life as a manifestation of white, small-town America in the 1950s. They recall neighborhood picnics, church potlucks, and bowling leagues. Indeed, they typically treat politics and community life as a zero-sum proposition: the more government is involved, the less room there is for community action.
This mischaracterizes how civic associations worked. Associations were at the forefront of potent political reforms and initiatives, including the temperance movement, abolitionism, expansions of voting rights, etc. Because they did not represent a particular class or profession, the associations accounted for the views of members across class divides.
Of course, many of these groups discriminated based on race or sex. These parochial structures were their greatest flaw. Nevertheless, many of the excluded groups had their own voluntary associations, structured in the same manner and with the at least some of the same capabilities and values, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the League of Women Voters.
In effect, voluntary associations were how American democracy functioned at the concrete level. Constitutional scholars tend to draw a distinction between formal constitutional principles, such as the separation of the three branches of government set forth in U.S. Constitution, and informal constitutional principles that are not explicitly articulated but nevertheless exist to operationalize the formal Constitution. The Constitution says little, for instance, about specific voting procedures, or whether there should be single-member congressional districts, or how to draw those districts.
In that sense, for much of American history voluntary associations were yet another aspect of the informal Constitution, operationalizing and realizing it by providing varied opportunities for participation in American democracy.
Unsurprisingly, then, American political life has been negatively affected as this aspect of the informal constitution has declined, with political polarization, legislative gridlock, culture wars, and toxic discourse increasingly characterizing our public life. With fewer concrete ways for citizens to impact their political communities, our politics has devolved into a kind of vicarious cold war. Citizens sit transfixed — like the occupants of Plato’s cave — on TV coverage of national political issues that often have no real impact on their live.
As the social movements of the 1960s emerged, voluntary associations declined. A new model of civic association became ascendant — the advocacy model. Skocpol describes it as a shift from a model based on political participation to one based on managerial expertise.
Political activity has been left in the hands of a small group of lobbyists and nonprofit workers. The groups that dominate our public life are now run by relatively well-funded, professional staffs. These organizations tend to be more agile, efficient, and flexible, if also quite narrow in the focus of their advocacy. Despite the fact that the number of such advocacy groups has drastically increased, the vast majority are centrally focused on politics at the national level.
Numerous forces drove these changes. More political decisions were made at the national level, which gave national political actors more influence in local and state governance. This power shift toward federal governance occurred in tandem a media environment increasingly dominated by national-level reporting.
At the same time, Skocpol notes that many of the emergent social movements viewed the old associational organizations as part of the problem, given their discriminatory history on issues of gender and race and their traditional connection to the business community. As a result, there was a reflexive skepticism toward the voluntary associational model among many social movement activists.
The new professional class of civic society leaders was increasingly drawn from the ranks of social and economic elites who no longer participated in groups like the VFW, Elks, or American Legion. In the earlier era, professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and business executives tended to be dispersed throughout the country in small towns and medium-sized cities. Joining local associations made more sense for these local elites and they tended to view themselves “trustees of the community.”
But in recent years professionals have increasingly shifted into corporations and mass bureaucracies, and generally now live in major urban areas where they socialize primarily with other professionals. As power became concentrated at the national level, national advocacy groups have drawn their staffs from this professionalized class.
This class attempts to solve social problems through technocratic policies and managerial expertise. Involving everyday citizens in any more substantive form than as small donors would only complicate things.
On the other hand, the lives of everyday citizens are increasingly focused on making ends meet. Even if they had the opportunities that were once available for volunteering and participating, they work far more than their more civically active parents and grandparents did. According to Juliet Schor, the average worker put in 180 more hours per year in 2006 than they did in 1979, while married couples with children work 413 more hours per year.
American politics cannot currently be recognized as a participatory republic. Politics is now a national spectacle where citizens sit passively and watch with little ability to impact the proceedings. Our politics is no longer about participation. It is about manipulation. Political consultants slice up segments of the electorate into identity groups, isolate wedge issues to instill fear and rage, and turn the political process into a perpetual branding campaign.
We are no longer an actively engaged polity; we are a collective of gut responses, triggered by stimuli provided by the professional consulting and advocacy class. Is it any wonder that our politics has become toxically polarized and unworkable?
Changing this won’t be easy, but, in my view, doing so is urgently necessary. The fundamental political problems our country faces — such as climate change, economic inequality, immigration reform, campaign finance, gun violence, and right-wing domestic terror — have become impossible to address. While American politics has never been perfect, formerly it was, more often than not, capable of finding compromise when urgent problems arose.
Political leaders no longer have electoral incentives to find common ground. As Donald Trump has so effectively illustrated in the past few years, when politics is practiced at the level of mass movements — as opposed to local voluntary associations — the most effective strategy for motivating masses is by appealing to the lowest common denominator. And there is no lower denominator than the visceral appeals Trump makes to feelings of rage, fear and tribal loyalty.
But can we really solve our problems by going out and joining the Elks and Rotary Club? Of course not; it’s no panacea. Our problems are far more complex than that.
But let me frame the question this way: Who would be more likely to eke out workable responses to our problems, a nation of William Warren Durgins or a nation of Donald Trumps?
