Democrats and the need to rebuild civil society

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Being part of a political party used to actually mean something other than being hounded for money over text and being disappointed by your choice of candidates at the polls every few years. Here’s how the death of mass-membership organizations tanked the American political system—and left everyone feeling more disconnected and dissatisfied.

A lot of the postmortems regarding the 2024 presidential election have focused on the degraded state of America’s information environment: the reality that voters’ perceptions of the world are increasingly shaped by the chaotic blend of demagoguery, active disinformation, and AI slop beaming from their phones to their eyeballs.

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[...] important but informal channels for receiving political information have atrophied. Social media, infotainment, and charismatic authority are all powerful weapons, but they would be less powerful if they weren’t filling a vacuum.

I’m referring to the vacuum left by the collapse of civil society; the slow death of the community bonds and daily rituals that used to provide weight and substance to democratic life. Newspapers and the radio once shaped voters’ perception of reality, but so did their church, their labor union, their trade association, and their fraternal order. Through these community institutions, citizens received information from neighbors and trusted civic leaders about the world; just as important, these institutions aggregated the preferences of their members and broadcasted this intelligence upward to political elites.

These institutions have largely receded from public life. In Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, the political scientist Theda Skocpol writes:


That was written in 2003. Alongside the “memberless voluntary organizations” that have supplanted older modes of social organization, we can now add social media activism and parasocial relationships with various podcasters and influencers.

The relationships that people develop with social media are real, but they are also thin. They are certainly thinner than the face-to-face social bonds that they have largely replaced, especially among the low-social-trust voters who have rallied to Trump.

These sort of thin, unstable attachments are a defining feature of 21st century politics, not just in the United States but across the developed West. Social democratic parties in much of Europe have lost contact with their traditional labor base, and the parties of the center-right are being overtaken by media-savvy right-wing populists; political power swings shifts from one internally incoherent faction to another as voters opt for radical alternatives (Trump, Brexit), and then immediately experience buyer’s remorse. And phenomena that once seem to mark the beginning of a new political era, such as the 2008 ascension of the Obama coalition, fall apart as soon as their charismatic leader departs the stage.

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[...] I propose that Democrats dedicate time and money to building an alternative coalitional model that doesn’t rely exclusively on charismatic authority—one that has a firmer foundation in the sort of thick, person-to-person social attachments that used to define American civic life.

To the Democratic Party, person-to-person outreach almost always means “ground game” or get-out-the-vote efforts. But GOTV isn’t intended to reconstruct or strengthen social attachments; it’s a form of direct sales, relying on brief, goal-oriented interactions with voters. This sort of work is important, but as we saw in the 2024 election, when Harris’s GOTV effort lapped Trump’s moribund, Musk-led ground game, it can only do so much.

There is another model for direct outreach that is more intensive and open-ended than GOTV. The goal of this model is not solely getting people to vote, but converting them into active political agents. Call this the organizing model. Organized individuals become members of a team: they vote, but they also march, advocate, engage in direct action, and participate in collective decision-making. They also usually do more organizing, so as to keep growing the team.

In my previous career as a journalist, I sat on the organizing committees for two separate unionization efforts in two separate (now extinct) newsrooms; these experiences gave me both a healthy respect for the power of organizing and for the sweat, intelligence and sensitivity required to do it correctly. Today, organizing is critical—perhaps more critical than at any point since the Civil Rights movement, now that we need grassroots strength to prevent the overthrow of American democracy.

But we should not fetishize organizing, as sometimes happens on the left. Not everyone in a shared community of interest can be converted into an activist; some potentially reliable votes in a unionized workplace come from people who have neither the time nor the desire to attend after-hours meetings. The majority of voters, including most reliably partisan voters, are people who just want to earn a living, spend time with their family, and fill their leisure hours with non-political pursuits. A strategy that depends on mobilizing all of them into a vast cadre of politicized subjects isn’t going to work.

What I propose is that liberals and the left organize those who can be organized, and then direct those grassroots foot soldiers toward the goal of establishing a larger social formation: one that has a low barrier to entry but that is also connected by longer-lasting bonds than GOTV.

Free Breakfast for Children

Any organization that seeks to replace the Democratic-leaning Elks Lodge in American public life needs to look more like an Elks Lodge than a DSA meeting. With that in mind, my proposal is that the Democratic Party, along with other liberal and left-leaning organizations, should fund the creation of community centers in priority voting precincts. These centers would be managed by a combination of local volunteers and paid staff who are hired directly from the surrounding community.

These centers would be open to the public. And while the services they offer would vary based on local demand and staff capacity, they might include the following:

- Free meals and social gatherings such as potlucks.
- Happy hours and other social outings for adults.
- Free childcare and after-school programs.
- Free meals for children, especially during the summer months.
- Volunteer opportunities, such as park beautification projects and visits to food pantries.
- Board game nights, trivia nights, and intramural sports leagues.
- Watch parties for movies and major sporting events.

While the community centers would be forthright about their general political orientation, none of these events should have explicitly political ends. Demanding that someone sign up for a fundraising list as the price of getting childcare would defeat the purpose. Volunteers and staff would, of course, be free to discuss politics if the subject comes up naturally. But they would rarely attempt to “activate” anyone who doesn’t specifically ask to be activated.

That’s not to say overtly political events would be entirely verboten at these community centers. The centers could serve as useful hubs and meeting places for some of the active organizing going on in the area. And the staff of these centers might sometimes invite local politicians or officials to do informal town halls. But staff would not try to compel participation in the more politically-oriented events.

Instead, all the work at these community centers would serve a very simple goal: establishing a cordial, mutually beneficial relationship between normie voters and America’s left-liberal political coalition. If this plan works, then it should be relatively easy to turn many patrons of the community centers into reliable Democratic voters without leaning on them too hard. At the same time, those patrons could serve as a vital source of information regarding the concerns and general mood of the electorate in key swing districts.

There are precedents for what I’m proposing, and not just the ones Skocpol cites in [/i]Diminished Democracy[/i]. Happy hours are an underrated ingredient in the YIMBY movement’s success; a lot of people who are mildly interested in pro-housing politics become more deeply involved once they realize how much fun YIMBY events can be. I also draw inspiration from pro-Trump evangelical churches, and from the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children program. Of the latter effort, Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin write the following in their [/i]Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party[/i]:


This passage hints at another important feature of my proposed program: its resilience to state interference. The second Trump administration will almost certainly weaponize the Department of Justice and Internal Revenue Service against large progressive nonprofits and foundations. These community centers, small and numerous as they are, would be less vulnerable to attack. Further, any attempt to destroy them would risk stoking the ire of normie voters in swing districts, who would be at risk of losing access to the benefits these centers provide. While the centers would do very little overt organizing, an overreaction from the Trump administration might inadvertently do some of their organizing for them.

An All-of-the-Above Strategy

What I am proposing is a complement to existing anti-Trump efforts. Even if my proposal were implemented at scale, we would still need conventional political campaigns, new sources of political media, and aggressive organizing efforts. Community centers can support all of these efforts and in turn be supported by them.

To take one example: Even as liberals and the left pursue an in-person, relationship-building strategy, they must avoid ceding the digital information environment to the right. Ryan Cooper is correct when he argues that Democrats must construct their own media ecosystem. But this ecosystem would not serve as an alternative to my community centers proposal; instead, the two could exist in symbiosis with one another. Left-leaning media outlets could drive new patrons to the community centers, and the community centers could introduce their existing patrons to left-leaning media outlets.

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Civil society can be understood as the "third sector" of society, distinct from government and business, and including the family and the private sphere. By other authors, civil society is used in the sense of 1) the aggregate of non-governmental organizations and institutions that advance the interests and will of citizens or 2) individuals and organizations in a society which are independent of the government.

civil society, dense network of groups, communities, networks, and ties that stand between the individual and the modern state.

This modern definition of civil society has become a familiar component of the main strands of contemporary liberal and democratic theorizing. In addition to its descriptive properties, the terminology of civil society carries a litany of ethical and political aspirations and implications. For some of its advocates, the achievement of an independent civil society is a necessary precondition for a healthy democracy, and its relative absence or decline is often cited as both a cause and an effect of various contemporary sociopolitical maladies.