Civil Society and the Liberal Democratic Project

Defending civil society against attacks is not enough. We also need to cultivate the attributes that will make civil society more defensible – and worth defending.

Carved Three Legged Stool, Wharton Esherick,1931. Image by Eoin O’Neill.

Last month I participated in a meeting of a dozen or so foundation leaders and think tankers. We spent two days grappling with, as the invitation put it, the “functions and dysfunctions of the present state of the American liberal democratic ‘project’” and how it might evolve. The organizers asked each participant to speak to a different element of this project, e.g., science, higher education, journalism, and administrative agencies. My assignment was civil society.

Especially now, this is the kind of meeting that leads some people to roll their eyes. The liberal democratic project is on fire; obviously, the immediate task is to join with others to put the fire out. This gut reaction presumes we actually know how to douse the flames. The past decade, however, suggests that the conventional wisdom for how to do this is not working. Indeed, many well-intentioned and amply funded fire-fighting efforts are fanning the flames.

All to say, now is actually a very good time to “don’t just do something, stand there!” – and to think more clearly than we have been about our pressing problems and how to solve them. Below, I flesh out the first part of my remarks at the meeting on the nature of civil society and how and why it has served as an essential buttress for the liberal democratic project in the U.S.

For civil society to provide this support though, it must exhibit qualities it increasingly lacks. In the second Trump Administration, the prevailing rallying cry calls upon Americans to defend civil society against those attacking it. That is necessary but not nearly enough. We must also cultivate the attributes that will make civil society more defensible – and worth defending.

Liberal democracy is a three-legged stool

To grasp the role that civil society plays in liberal democracy, we first need to understand the latter as a type of regime that rests on three essential, distinct, and interdependent components. If any of the three legs is weakened or cracks, it puts the stability of liberal democracy at risk.

The leg we are most familiar with is that of democratic government and politics. This leg can take different institutional forms blending the following elements: free and fair elections, majority rule with protections for civil liberties, institutional checks and balances, the rule of law, the legitimacy of political opposition, and a free press.

This leg of the stool is marked by the logic of partisanship, electoral politics, and voting, on the one hand, and the hierarchical and authoritative command of the law, on the other. Ultimately, the democratic state’s authority rests on the monopoly it holds on the legitimate use of violence.

Another leg of liberal democracy, one we may not immediately recognize as an integral part of this kind of regime, is a free market economy. Here, too, there are many permutations, from Scandinavian economies that have the state playing a stronger role in social provision and regulating the economy to Anglo-Saxon models that take more of a laissez-faire approach.

The logic of the economic leg is different from that of the state. It is driven by impersonal transactions, contracts, and incentives resulting from prices, supply, and demand in more or less free markets.

Civil society is the third leg of the stool of liberal democracy and is no less critical than the others. Civil society is the realm of voluntary associations and activities in which people enter into reciprocal relationships with each other to develop and express shared values and take collective action to achieve goals they have in common.

This leg of liberal democracy is grounded in the logic of “self-interest rightly understood,” to use Tocqueville’s phrase. In it, people are drawn out of their private concerns by the recognition that they stand a better chance of realizing their higher purposes by joining forces with others.

The resulting horizontal relationships between free and equal citizens distinguish civil society from both the partisan thirst for power and the vertical commands of the state, on the one hand, and the fleeting and impersonal transactions of the marketplace, on the other.

To be sure, there is a degree of overlap between and among the three components. For example, professional associations and private sector trade unions operate in both the civil society and market economy spheres. Likewise, many political and nonprofit advocacy organizations intentionally reside in the overlapping margins of the democratic state and civil society. But in a liberal democracy, these three domains are in the main readily distinguishable by the different logics that animate them.

What liberal democracy needs from civil society

We must not assume as we often do that civil society is merely a residual “Third Sector” stuck with the less important issues left over after the government and market have done their part. Rather, civil society plays a fundamentally important role in the effective functioning of these other spheres. Civil society forms citizens (or not) who are capable of tackling the challenge of self-government in a pluralistic democracy. Civil society also seeds and helps cultivate the social capital (or not) that is necessary for a market-based economy to prosper.

The metaphor of a three-legged stool helps us recognize that a healthy civil society is no less critical for a liberal democracy to flourish than its other two legs. If civil society weakens or twists too far in one direction or another, a liberal democracy is as much at risk of toppling as it would be if its government and politics or economy go haywire.

There is no shortage of critical commentary on the problems and pathologies in these other spheres. Witness the obsessive coverage and engagement with what the Trump Administration is doing or not doing to our form of government. Likewise with the ongoing inequalities borne of the neoliberal economy.

Much of this critical commentary comes from actors in civil society. We are thus used to judging what is happening in politics, government, and markets – as well as the threats these developments pose for liberal democracy. We need to bring the same unstinting critical eye and judgment to our own sphere of activity in civil society.

What does good look like in civil society? How far are we away from meeting these standards? Let me offer three criteria we can use to judge whether civil society is doing its part to sustain liberal democracy. A healthy civil society is…

1. Autonomous vis-a-vis politics and government, on the one hand, and market forces, on the other. Autonomy does not mean complete independence. The state makes the laws that govern nonprofits and philanthropies. Many of these entities depend at least in part on wealth generated in the market. But autonomy does presume actors in civil society are not subsumed by or subordinated to the countervailing logics of either the state or the economy.

2. Pluralistic such that it broadly reflects and represents (a) the diverse array of convictions, creeds, races, regions, classes, viewpoints, and factions that comprise the nation and (b) the values needed to hold it together in the face of these often incommensurate differences. The values of pluralism enable citizens in a liberal democracy to live alongside each other peaceably if not flourish together. They include toleration, forbearance, persuasion, and reciprocity.

3. Formative in the sense that it helps citizens develop the knowledge, skills, virtues, habits, and social capital to participate effectively in a pluralistic democracy and a market economy. If citizens’ associations and relationships in civil society are not helping to prepare them for these challenges, then sooner or later we can expect the resulting problems to ripple through and confound activity in these other spheres.

What kind of job is civil society doing?

Unfortunately, with respect to autonomy, the demarcation between civil society and the state has been transgressed without apology from each sphere. Civil society leaders and defenders are alarmed, as they should be, by President Trump and MAGA Republicans’ attacks on civil society. These same critics, however, have been much less attentive to and concerned about the ways in which many of the institutions they lead or admire have become nakedly partisan actors subsumed by political goals.

The line separating the market from civil society has also blurred. Historically, critics have condemned how “philanthrocapitalists” who have generated or inherited great wealth from the economy have parlayed that into a distorting and undue influence in civil society. The downward trend in everyday giving across American households, leaving wealthy individuals and institutions contributing a growing share of U.S. philanthropy, worsens this disparate sway.

Meanwhile, relentlessly profit-seeking social media and technology companies have also encroached on the civic sphere. By enticing people onto the disembodied isolation of their platforms and stirring their strongest and darkest passions, these companies have enriched themselves at the expense of liberal democracy. The speed at which artificial intelligence is seeping into our civic life threatens to compound this problem exponentially.

For their part, rather than serving as a host and nurturer of a broadly representative pluralism, many civil society groups have become engines of polarization. The individual and institutional philanthropists funding high-octane policy advocacy that seeks to shove the public debate toward one extreme or the other are particularly problematic. These funders have come to take democracy for granted and rejected their obligation to practice what I have elsewhere termed responsible pluralism. They may soon find that the considerable degrees of freedom American democracy has afforded them are starkly reduced. It is a tragedy of the commons in our civic life to which funders on the left and right alike have contributed.

We have already anticipated the judgment on the formative aspects of civic life. The hyper-partisanship, fear, suspicion, and contempt that mar our politics are just as likely to have been amplified rather than modulated by our civic associations. So many churches, universities, professional associations, think tanks, and civic groups have lost their way. As a result, so have the congregants, students, faculty, professionals, staff, and members that participate in and through them.

Meanwhile, prominent tech and financial titans whose luck and business acumen have made them the wealthiest citizens in our liberal democracy have come to regard the venerable regime in which they have made their vast fortunes with nihilistic disdain. And they are attracting younger acolytes in droves. If there is such a thing as civic malformation, we are now at risk of reaping that whirlwind.

These judgments may strike you as harsh. If you think they are unfair, I am open to feedback about where and why they are. I proffer this high-level assessment not to write off civil society – quite the opposite. I am convinced that if we are going to revitalize the liberal democratic project in the U.S., associations and leaders in civil society must lead the way. The first step is recognizing that defending civil society is not enough. We need to remake civil society so that it is worth defending.