An SOS for the Republic

Citizens under strain in Minneapolis (1,375 words / 5-minute read).

Myotus, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

My aim here at The Art of Association is to understand and assess the interplay between philanthropy, civil society, and democracy in America. I do so to illuminate better and worse ways in which these interdependent elements can evolve—and how we might encourage more of the former while avoiding the latter.

Over the past several weeks, I have spent a great deal of time trying to make sense of what is happening in Minnesota, where these elements are intersecting and colliding in a complex swirl of developments. Some of what we are seeing there bodes well for our civic future. Other aspects point to a distressing breakdown in our system of government.

Let’s start with a quick primer on the idea of a republic before turning to what has unfolded in Minneapolis and why it matters well beyond the city itself.

What Is a Republic?

By republican government, I do not mean government by the Republican Party. Nor do I mean what some pedants have in mind when they insist on reminding us that “we live in a republic, not a democracy!”—usually in an effort to rebut a policy or position advanced in the name of democracy that they do not like.

Their insistence misses the point in two respects. First, a republic is a particular form of democracy, so the claim is logically akin to arguing, “these are corduroy trousers, not pants!” Second, a republic depends on a public-spirited citizenship that we would conventionally call democratic. Its citizens insist upon using and defending their political freedoms, and they routinely scrutinize and challenge authority—especially when they perceive it to be tyrannical or corrupt.

What I mean by republican government is a form of rule that would be recognizable to Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, and Montesquieu. The American Founders understood themselves to be establishing just such a system in the Constitution. James Madison made this explicit in Federalist 10, where he emphasized that the constitutional order he was defending was republican to its core. To the extent that it departed from classical republican models, Madison argued, it did so by prescribing “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”

In a republic, sovereignty ultimately rests with the people. They exercise it not only by cultivating and practicing civic virtue amongst themselves, but also by selecting officeholders who make and administer laws on their behalf in ways that reflect the public interest and respect individual rights.

Contestation runs throughout a republic, by design: citizens are meant to assert their rights and hold their representatives to account; officeholders in separated, checked, and balanced institutions pursue their different responsibilities and interests such that ambition counteracts ambition.

The purpose of all this contestation is to guard against usurpation and secure political freedom and the rule of law as enacted by the people’s representatives.

Minneapolis Pushes Back

The good news for the republic is that we have seen this form of public-spirited citizenship on vivid display in Minneapolis. After the Trump Administration unleashed thousands of masked, heavily armed, and poorly disciplined federal agents on the city—outnumbering its police force by roughly five to one—Minneapolitans have refused to bend their knees.

Armed with dime-store whistles, their car horns, and cellphones, growing swarms of protesters and “constitutional observers”—a new term of art that seems likely to endure, and rightly so—have stood up to the paramilitary forces around them.

For a growing number of Americans, this sustained protesting and witnessing, often in freezing conditions and in the face of brutish behavior by federal agents, has exposed a yawning gap between what the Administration is doing and what most Americans actually want done on their behalf with respect to immigration enforcement.

At the same time, this in-your-face civic disobedience has been accompanied behind the scenes by quieter forms of everyday philanthropy and mutual aid for residents and neighbors at risk of being caught up in the federal dragnet. This support takes many shapes: food delivery, childcare, housing, legal aid, transportation, social support, and other forms of solidarity.

From a distance, it appears that both the confrontational and the mutual forms of action have been organized through a dense web of formal and informal associations—nonprofit advocates, community organizations, churches, schools, union locals, professional and workplace networks, neighborhood groups, WhatsApp lists, etc.

Civic, Not Civil, Disobedience

You may have noticed that I referred to civic rather than civil disobedience. Both sympathetic and hostile critics of the Minneapolis protesters have pointed out that their actions do not always conform to the disciplined nonviolence that marked iconic moments of the Civil Rights Movement, e.g., the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins, or the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. That comparative assessment may be fair, but it overlooks important aspects of the situation today.

The push for civil rights unfolded in a very different political and institutional context. It sought to expose the violence and intransigence of Southern segregationists to the broader American public. Ultimately, the Civil Rights Movement sought to push policymakers in Washington whom its leaders believed could, with sufficient public pressure, be brought around to their side. They turned out to be correct.

The situation in Minnesota is different. There is no higher governmental authority to which its citizens can appeal. The full weight of the federal government—embodied in President Trump, his most zealous advisers, and increasingly rogue agencies with coffers swollen by extraordinary appropriations from Congress—has been brought down on their heads. Minnesotans know that, for now at least, they are on their own. If their actions sometimes appear frantic or unruly, well, there is a reason for that.

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you resist tyranny with the protesters, constitutional observers, and neighbors you have, not the ones you might want or wish to have at a later time.

And for all their defiance, Minnesotans are getting their point across. Public approval of the Administration’s approach to immigration is sinking to new lows. Americans can see for themselves what is unfolding—not only in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by trigger-happy federal agents, but in the ongoing thuggishness of far too many in ICE and CBP. We do not need scrupulously Gandhian protests to recognize what unlawful and illegitimate state violence looks like.

For all his bluster, Donald Trump always keeps a finger in the air to sense which way the wind is blowing. Hence he has sent Greg Bovino and his Gauleiter’s trench coat packing. As I write, hundreds of federal agents are being withdrawn from Minnesota. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. Border Czar Tom Homan is pursuing a new emphasis on targeted operations in the state focused on illegal aliens who pose a clear threat to public safety or national security. That too is a step in the right direction.

However things turn out, for now the question of whether American citizens are ready, willing, and able to stand up for themselves and their political freedom can be answered in the affirmative—at least in Minneapolis.

Spirited Citizenship Is Necessary but Insufficient

Unfortunately, an engaged and public-spirited citizenry is only part of the equation. A healthy republic—especially one like ours, cast on a continental scale—also requires governing institutions capable of making and administering laws that reflect the broad public interest and respect constitutional rights. On that front, we are faring far worse.

The longstanding lack of a bipartisan policy settlement on immigration, which set the stage for the conflagration in Minneapolis, is just one prominent example of this failure. While there is plenty of blame to go around among elected officials and political parties, civil society actors on the right and left alike are also implicated in this faltering. They too have contributed to increasingly polarized and unsustainable policy swings from administration to administration on sharply contested issues.

I take up why and how philanthropic funders and the advocates they support have succumbed to temptations of Caesarism in the second part of this series. I will send it to you, fittingly, on Presidents’ Day.